I Thought They Needed a Dashboard. Turns Out, They Needed Clarity.

When creating a dashboard, the true value comes when spending more time understanding the business and the audience the dashboard is supposed to serve. Instead, what is a common thing is to many times not speak to the audience, the actual end users of the solution. Also, to run away with the high-level ask, spend minimal time with the business and rush into launching your favourite BI or analytics tools and start developing.

Why Dashboards Fail Without User Clarity

Here’s the thing, the most valuable dashboards I’ve helped deliver didn’t just visualise data, the work didn’t begin with the tool. Going through the process of creating a report, the early process… helped people understand how their own processes actually work. What started as “we need a dashboard” quickly turned into “we don’t fully understand our funnel” or “we have five definitions for the same metric” or “we’ve never talked about what good looks like” and even “we’ve never had these conversations before”. This is pure gold!

The Power of Engaging Actual Users

This is the moment, when all people who didn’t want to attend the workshops, notice the value and can’t wait to come to the next. Honestly, this always happens and it’s a clear sign the process is working. Spend more time with the end users, ask them the right questions, challenge their initial answers/thinking. I promise they will appreciate what you are doing as your assisting them uncover insights and offering clarity. There was only one time when a group I was working with was not happy with this approach, and to be honest they had bigger problems.

This is why it’s critical to spend more time with the actual end users, not just the people who requested the report, but the people who’ll use it every day. Support them to genuinely understand what’s needed, in fact just developing dashboards and not understanding user needs, is lazy work.

Asking Better Questions Unlocks Better Data

Ask them tailored, curious questions. As I said above and throughout other blogs, don’t start by launching Power BI, Tableau, or any other tool. Instead, sit with them. Understand their pain points, their challenges and their ambitions.

Ask questions like the below:

• What are you trying to fix?
• Where are you trying to go?
• How do you know if you’re moving in the right direction?
• What might cause your KPIs to be in the red (or green)?
• What actions can you take when things don’t go to plan?

This kind of conversation shifts the focus away from “show me this chart” to “help me understand my part of the business better.” Once you do that, the value you bring isn’t just a dashboard. It’s clarity. Alignment. Shared language. Real progress in improving decision-making.

Don't Let the Tool Lead the Conversation

But again, that doesn’t happen by accepting everything at face value. It comes from slowing down, digging deeper, asking why and not letting the room default to tech talk. Get curious! In fact, in workshops I run, I start by saying “We’re not here to talk about tools, tech, features, data availability”. I ensure everyone knows we are here to talk about our side of the business and what we really need to make better decisions. Do I get some funny looks, sure but that’s why at this point I also reassure everyone that there will be a moment to discuss all these other great things. Just not now, as we are working towards a specific outcome and this allows the users attending to understand what we are doing. One example that comes to mind is when a conversation about KPIs quickly drifted into the Power BI Metrics (Scorecards) and the actual KPI visual. When that happens, don’t be afraid to step back and steer the group back to the core focus.

One bit of pushback I’ve had before from a client was “Isn't this all a bit blue-sky thinking?” What they meant was, if we’re not talking about data or data availability upfront, aren’t we at risk of asking for things that just aren’t possible? And yes, that’s a fair point. But I still stand by the approach and process I use, because I’ve run it more times than I can remember and I’ve refined it every step of the way. Here’s the thing, the default is to lead with data and tech conversations. But that usually pulls us away from the conversations that bring genuine clarity on what’s actually needed. Let’s be honest, it’s not the end users job to tell us what is available in the data warehouse or what our platform limitations are. Your time with them is limited, so focus on what they can give you which are their goals, their challenges and how they think about success.

As mentioned earlier, you set expectations. Make it clear there will be a point where we validate feasibility and discuss data structure, but not in the first session. That’s not the moment for technical constraints. That’s the moment for clarity.

From Dashboard Request to Business Alignment

As I said, I have a specific approach which I like to use, I have been using it for years and have improved it with each data storytelling and requirements gathering engagement I carry out. So, to share more information, going to stick to a retail example. Keep in mind, this has been done for retail, healthcare, hospitality, financial services. The point is, asking the right questions to the right people to build a value driven solution is not industry specific. Yes, having industry knowledge is helpful but it’s not a deal breaker - if you disagree on this last part, let me know. Also, for a broader look at why so many BI reports fail before they even get built (and how to avoid it), I’ve written a separate blog that breaks down the biggest reasons reporting projects go wrong. You can read it: Why Many BI Reports Fail Before They're Even Built!

A Real Example: Sales Performance in Retail

For the retail organisation, the request was simple on the surface, “We need a dashboard to track sales performance”. But as we prepared for the first storytelling workshop, we faced early resistance.

Some stakeholders felt the workshops would take too much time. Honestly, I was asked “Can’t we just tell you what we want in an email?”… “send us questions upfront”…. Others were unsure what value they’d get from attending.

But after the very first session, that completely changed.

People left the room energised. They saw the value of stepping back and having a process, well structured, facilitated conversation. After the first, there were excited to attend the next. Why? Because the questions we were asking weren’t about visuals, tech, dashboards… they were about clarity.

We started by bringing a stakeholder group together. Keep in mind, this was a group with a common purpose. Before getting into workshops to gather the right information, I sometimes do a short pre-discovery where I find out if the people who are to attend do have a common purpose, set of KPIs, direction of travel… as if they don’t… you can be the best workshop facilitator, but it’s going to be an uphill battle, I promise. Getting the right information from a single group with a common purpose is hard enough, let alone multiple groups with different needs and wants. If you bring these separate groups together, you will find a huge misalignment on priorities, on terminology and even on what success looked like.

So, for this retail organisation, we held targeted sessions. Asked guided questions like:

• What is the common goal we’re working toward?
• As a department, do we have a core challenge right now?
• How do you know if you’re making progress?
• What can make things worse?
• What gets in the way of that progress?
• What actions do you take when things go wrong?

Why Metrics Alone Don’t Tell the Full Story

These questions sound basic. But the conversations they triggered were anything but. We uncovered gaps in understanding, had multiple back and fourth conversations on the purpose of the solution (their business area goals and challenges), undefined processes and metrics that sounded the same but meant very different things. Many were calculating existing metrics differently.

By the end of the process, we hadn’t just collected reporting requirements, we helped teams define their purpose, align on their processes and agree on what really matters. They got CLARITY! Having these level of conversations and information collected, really sets you up to succeed as you progress to dashboard design and eventually, to the build phase. It allows users to avoid complex data from being overloaded and allows them to make sense of their key metrics.