Dashboard Discovery
Feb 10, 2025
By Melanie Manning, Partner and Business Solutions Lead at Allegro Analytics
Do you tell stories with data? Design dashboards? Lead analytics projects?
This is for you.
I’m a finance and management professional with a passion for impacting business through data analysis. My early career was in Finance & Operations, where I staffed and led numerous analytics projects from the business side. In 2014, I transitioned into analytics consulting full-time to lead these projects directly.
I believe great analytics isn’t just about deploying technology. It’s about positively impacting the business. The most beautiful dashboard that tells an irrelevant story is a waste of resources. Here I’ll share a framework that I use to ensure that I ask the right questions during the discovery process to design dashboards that are personally relevant and impactful to their audiences.
What Makes a Good Dashboard?
At its core, a great dashboard is impactful. It’s beautiful, yes, but more than that, it speaks directly to the questions and priorities of its users. It provides clarity, insights, and is crafted thoughtfully for the audience it serves. A good dashboard is accurate and trustworthy, aligning with reliable source system reporting. A good dashboard is well documented to help viewers interpret what they’re seeing. A good dashboard is easy to use, clear in its purpose, and actionable.
We can achieve these realistic goals by having an effective discovery process for gathering requirements.
Framework for Requirements Gathering
To deliver a dashboard that hits the mark, you need to ask the right questions. I structure my approach with the 5 W’s and H:
Who? Who is the primary audience?
What? What specific questions should this dashboard answer?
When? When and how often will the data be refreshed and viewed?
Where? Where is the data housed, and where will the dashboard live?
Why? Why is this report critical for decision-making?
How? How will users access it? (from their desktop, on their phones, via email, etc.)
Breaking down these questions helps clarify expectations, understand use cases, align resources, and build a shared understanding of success. We’ll discuss each one, in a logical order for project management, below.
Who? Design for Your Primary Audience
Understanding your primary audience is foundational. Who are we designing our messaging for?
Executives may prefer quick, high-level insights.
Management might benefit from trend analysis and comparative metrics.
Staff Employees may need more granular, operational data.
External Partners might require specific, shared views.
With targeted design for the primary audience, you can ensure the dashboard delivers the right story at the relevant grain of detail. With a thorough discovery process, this person’s perspective on the business becomes yours. Put yourself in their shoes. What’s their definition of success? What questions are they seeking to answer.
A secondary audience can be served by adding filters for their areas of interest. For example, the Chief Sales Officer would be interested to see overall sales team performance whereas a Regional Sales Lead might filter the analysis to see only their Region.
With this approach to primary and secondary audience, dashboard views can provide broader utility without compromising the primary goal.
Why? Define the Dashboard’s Purpose
With clarity of who our dashboard is speaking to, we next consider why the dashboard is being developed in the first place. A clear purpose can be understood by answering these questions:
What’s the business problem this dashboard aims to solve?
What’s the use case for when this dashboard will be needed?
Which decisions will be impacted by the report?
What questions is the dashboard meant to answer initially?
What follow-up questions might arise?
What next step actions should the reporting drive?
Consider these questions from the perspective of the primary audience. This understanding will shape not just what data you need but also how it should be displayed to empower meaningful actions.
What? Assess the Data
Once you’re clear on why the dashboard is relevant, even vital to the business, the story begins to take shape. We can now assess what we have to work with and whether it needs to be further developed to meet the requirements of our dashboard.
Key Metrics and associated definitions for Measures: Profit, Bookings, Shipments, or Hires
Dimensions to slice the results by: Region, Salesperson, Product, or Cost Center
Time periods relevant to the analysis: Yearly, Quarterly, Monthly, Weekly, or Daily
Time focus: current state, cumulative, forecasted or trending
Level of Detail ties directly to the primary audience need for summary vs. detail
Benchmarks to compare the results against: comparison to Budget or Prior Year
Build Out the Story
The final three categories of questions help us to plan for how the dashboard will be built.
Where? Consider the data’s origin and complexity. Level of effort for data refreshes. Will the data be embedded in the workbook, or will it pull from a published source? Are there security requirements to consider? Are new data models required?
When? How often do our viewers wish to check the report? The refresh schedule and timing matter. Does the warehouse support real-time data, or do we need periodic updates?
How? How will viewers access the report? Will they view it on a desktop, mobile, or embedded in a platform like Salesforce? Consider screen size, data-driven alerts, and subscriptions to minimize clicks to insight and maximize impact and user engagement.
Wireframing: The Path to Efficient Design
I like wireframing for a number of reasons. Top on my list is that allows you to focus on the dashboard’s narrative without being constrained by technology. This luxury allows you to plant yourself in the shoes of the primary user. Think about their concerns, their definition of success, and craft a design that speaks to them.
Wireframing allows you to focus on what matters most—solving the business problem. Tools for this process vary from pen and paper for quick sketches, to slideware for intermediate designs, to online whiteboarding tools for collaborative mockups. Whether you start with a low fidelity sketch on a whiteboard, or jump to pixel perfect wireframes in Figma, taking time at the beginning to mockup ideas is bound to serve you in the long run.
Wireframing helps to confirm alignment with stakeholders before full development begins, thus reducing waste and increasing the project’s return on investment. By reviewing sketches, you open the door for stakeholders to ask further questions or make adjustments that enhance your final product.
To help a business user visualize the end result, I will often prototype a few charts with the actual data that is available and add screenshots from those prototypes to my wireframe. This can help a stakeholder think through the next level questions earlier in the process and accelerate time to project completion.
In Conclusion: Now it’s your turn!
Delivering a dashboard that drives business impact demands a thorough discovery and design process. By understanding your audience, asking the right questions, and leveraging wireframing, you set the stage for project success and efficiency. We hope you’re able to put these tools to use in your context and would love to hear from you on your results!
Connect with me on LinkedIn: Melanie Manning