Five questions before you commission a health dashboard
A wall of charts will not settle an argument the organisation has not agreed to have. These are the questions we ask before we will take a commission.
Who stands in front of this on a Monday? If the answer is ‘the steering committee’, we usually decline. A health view that is only opened in a quarterly board pack will rot. The commission is worth doing when an ops lead or a product director will actually refresh it and write a note from it.
Which argument should the wall be allowed to settle? ‘Are we healthy?’ is not an argument. ‘Did last Thursday’s login SDK bump hurt more than one title?’ is. We freeze a short measure list against that argument. Extra charts are a later job.
What can your extracts actually support? We have been asked for a cross-app journey when the titles do not share an identity key. The honest wall in that case shows two columns that cannot be joined. Painting a funnel across them would be a fiction, and we will not build fictions.
Who owns refresh after we leave? Dashboards without a named keeper become screenshots in a slide. If you cannot name the keeper, book a Quarterly Health Briefing instead. A dated six-page brief is uglier and much harder to ignore.
What will you stop reporting? Every new wall should retire something: a vendor console nobody trusts, a fourteen-chart weekly deck, a spreadsheet with broken joins. If nothing is retired, you have added a sixth place to look. That is not a reading; it is clutter.
If you can answer those five in a page, send it with your current weekly pack. If you cannot, start with a Portfolio Health Review. The review is cheaper than a wall built on the wrong quarrel.