We counted recently: our main analytics dashboard has 40 tiles. We check three of them regularly. The other thirty-seven exist for a different purpose entirely, and in the interest of honesty, we'd like to say what that purpose actually is.
The three tiles anyone actually looks at
Active users, revenue, and churn. These three numbers drive every real decision made in this building. Everyone who matters checks them at roughly the same cadence, reacts to the same swings, and could, if forced, recite last week's figures from memory. This is the entire dashboard that matters. It would fit on an index card.
The thirty-seven tiles that exist for a screen share
Average session duration, broken down by device type, by region, by day of week, color-coded, with a seven-day rolling average layered under a thirty-day one. Nobody has made a decision based on this tile in the dashboard's history. Its actual function is to be visible, briefly, during a board meeting or an investor update, conveying a specific message without anyone having to say it out loud: we are the kind of company that measures things. The tile's job isn't to inform. It's to furnish the room.
Why the vanity metrics never get deleted
Deleting a tile requires someone to assert, on the record, that a metric doesn't matter, and that assertion always has a name attached to it — the name of whoever originally insisted on building it. Nobody wants to be the person who tells a VP their pet metric from eighteen months ago is now dead weight. So the tile survives every redesign, migrates to every new dashboard tool, and quietly accretes with thirty-six others into a wall of charts that looks, from a distance, like total operational visibility.
The tile that exists because of one bad quarter
Somewhere on this dashboard is a chart tracking a metric that only started being tracked after one specific executive got one specific hard question in one specific board meeting and had no number ready. The tile was built within the week, as insurance against that exact question ever landing undefended again. It has answered that question zero additional times since, because the question was never really about the metric — it was about the moment, and the moment passed.
What a 40-tile dashboard is actually optimizing for
Not decision-making. Defensibility. A wall of charts signals that nothing could possibly be happening in this business that isn't being watched, which is reassuring in exactly the way a security camera is reassuring — mostly unwatched, functioning primarily as a deterrent against the accusation of not watching. The dashboard's real audience was never the team making decisions day to day. It's whoever walks in and asks, implicitly, "are you on top of this?" The forty tiles are the answer, regardless of whether anyone behind them actually reads all forty.
The screen-share tell
Watch anyone present this dashboard live: they scroll past thirty tiles at a pace that makes reading any one of them impossible, then stop, deliberately, on exactly the three that matter, and spend the rest of the meeting there. The scroll isn't an oversight. It's doing real work — establishing, wordlessly, that there's a lot of surface area being watched, before settling on the three numbers that are actually driving the conversation.
What we're not saying
We're not saying extra metrics are worthless — some of those thirty-seven tiles genuinely matter to someone, in some context, on some particular week when a specific question comes up. We're saying a dashboard's size is not the same thing as its usefulness, and a wall of charts nobody checks regularly is doing a job closer to wallpaper than to instrumentation, however rigorous it looks in a screenshot.
Our recommendation
Keep the three. Archive the rest into a "break glass in case of board question" folder instead of the main view, so the dashboard that everyone actually opens daily stays small enough that checking all of it is a genuine habit, not a performance.
If your own dashboard currently has a tile nobody's opened since the quarter it was built for, email us at contact@b2bsaas.guru. We'll help you audit it. We'll probably recommend keeping it anyway, just somewhere further from the screen share.