I’ve shipped glossy Power BI and Sheets packs that nobody returned to. I’ve also shipped ugly trackers that ran every Monday review. The difference wasn’t the tool. It was whether the pack answered the decisions on the agenda.
Start from the agenda, not the data warehouse
List the five questions leadership asks every cycle — pipeline health, aging receivables, open tickets, delivery slips, headcount vs plan. Build only the views that answer those. Everything else waits.
One screen per decision
Crowded dashboards force people back to Excel. Give each decision a clean surface: trend, current number, owner, and what changed since last review. If you need a second click for detail, fine. Don’t lead with noise.
Names beat job titles
A red KPI with no owner is theatre. Put a person next to each line. When the number moves, someone knows they owe an update before the call — not during it.
Freshness is a feature
Show last refresh time in plain language. Stale data trains leaders to ignore the pack. Automate the refresh where you can; document the manual steps where you can’t.
Kill charts that don’t change behaviour
After two review cycles, drop anything that never drove an action. Dashboards should shrink as trust grows. That’s a good sign, not a failure of “analytics maturity.”