The dashboard nobody opens is a maintenance cost with no return
Most BI backlogs aren't a build problem. They're a decision problem — dashboards get commissioned for meetings, not for the Monday morning someone has to act.
Ask most data teams how many of their dashboards get opened weekly, and the honest answer is usually under a third. The rest were built for a specific meeting, presented once, and left running — still costing warehouse compute, still listed as a deliverable, still never quite finished because nobody's asked to finish it.
The fix isn't a better dashboard tool. It's a different starting question. Instead of "what metrics does this team care about," we ask what decision gets made differently because of this number, and who's making it. If there's no clean answer, the dashboard doesn't get built — or it gets built smaller, as the one chart that actually changes what someone does on Monday.
This sounds obvious and is still routinely skipped, because commissioning a dashboard is easier than commissioning a decision. A stakeholder can ask for "visibility into churn" in one sentence. Getting them to say what they'd do differently if churn ticked up 2% next Tuesday takes a real conversation — one worth having before a single chart gets built.