Organizations spend real money commissioning dashboards that get opened twice and then quietly abandoned. It is rarely a technical failure; the charts work fine. It is a design failure, and it comes from building the dashboard around the data that exists rather than the decisions it is supposed to inform.
The abandoned dashboard has a few tells. It shows everything, because no one was willing to choose, so the signal drowns in forty metrics of equal visual weight. It answers questions nobody is actually asking. It leads with numbers instead of meaning, leaving a busy director to reverse-engineer the "so what." And it was built for the person who made it, not the person who has to act on it.
The best dashboard is not the one with the most charts; it is the one that changes a decision.
A useful dashboard starts from the other end. Name the handful of decisions it should support, and build only what informs them. Show a few things well. Lead with the "so what" and let the chart be the evidence underneath it, not the headline. Be honest about confidence and gaps, because a dashboard that hides its uncertainty is worse than no dashboard. And make it accessible and plain, so a tired person can read it on a hard day.
The test I use is simple: can someone glance at it and know what to do differently? If the honest answer is no, you have not built a decision tool. You have built decoration with good production values.