When it comes to dashboard design, one of the most important principles to understand is this: not all users need to see the same data, in the same way, at the same time.

Executives, middle managers, and analysts all engage with business data from different viewpoints. A one-size-fits-all approach will often fail to satisfy anyone completely—and may even lead to misinterpretation, inaction, or data fatigue. That’s why a strong dashboard strategy involves tailoring views based on user type, responsibility level, and decision-making needs.

Understanding Stakeholder Roles in Dashboard Planning

Let’s take a closer look at how three common business roles typically interact with dashboards:

Executives

Executives need high-level visibility. They’re focused on business outcomes, strategic KPIs, and quick snapshots of performance across departments or regions. Views should be simple, visual, and highlight exceptions or trends that require attention.

Managers

Managers operate a level down. Their dashboards should help them track performance, spot issues early, and drill into category or team-level data. They need both visual summaries and the ability to explore details as needed.

Analysts

Analysts perform diagnostics. They require access to granular data and comparisons over time. Their dashboards should include filters, drill-down capabilities, and robust reporting tools that empower them to uncover patterns and generate insights for others.

How Multi-Level Dashboards Solve This Issue

To serve all these users in one coherent ecosystem, leading organizations adopt what’s known as a multi-tier, or multi-level, dashboard structure. Here’s how that works in practice:

• Level 1: Executive View – Fast, digestible charts that focus on goals vs. actuals, trends, and exceptions.
• Level 2: Manager View – More detailed breakdowns, filterable by category, team, or timeframe.
• Level 3: Analyst View – Full data access, drill-downs, export tools, and advanced comparisons.

This format simplifies dashboard usability for business teams, allowing each stakeholder to stay within their functional comfort zone. For example, a Tableau dashboard might open with a CEO-level summary, then offer links to deeper modules for operational managers, with the full dataset available behind the scenes for analysts. Tools like Power BI or Domo have built-in capabilities to support this structure—but only if the dashboard is planned with these levels in mind.

The Bottom Line

Your data visualization efforts should map to your organizational structure. Before building anything, take time to define who needs what information, and how they’ll use it. This early step in dashboard setup for different business users is one of the most overlooked—and one of the most powerful.

With the rise of DIY dashboard tools like Power BI, Tableau, and Domo, many teams begin dashboard design with the best intentions. But far too often, a lack of planning leads to the same critical mistake: trying to serve everyone with the same dashboard view. The result? Overcrowded visuals, irrelevant metrics, and frustrated users who stop using the tool altogether.

Top Issues That Arise in Generic Dashboards

Below are some of the most common dashboard problems we see within research teams and business units alike:

• Information Overload: Trying to include every possible chart or KPI leads to clutter, making it hard for users to find what matters to them.
• Lack of Context: Numbers on their own mean little without narratives. Executives in particular need comparisons, benchmarks, or insights—not rows of raw numbers.
• Data Access Confusion: If too many user types have editing access or see data outside their scope, confusion (or worse, data risk) increases.
• Friction in Usability: When dashboards aren’t tailored by role, users have to navigate dozens of filters or pages to get to their answers, reducing adoption.
• Missed Insights: Without drill-down reports and flexible views, analysts can’t uncover insights beneath the surface.

Real-World Example (Fictional for Illustration)

Imagine an insights team launches a company-wide sales dashboard in Power BI, meant to support everyone from sales execs to customer success teams. But they build only one view, showing every metric at once: revenue goals, churn rates, rep activity, and customer sentiment mixed together.

The outcome? Executive sponsors quickly disengage—they can’t find the metrics tied to strategic goals. Customer success managers are distracted by datasets they don’t use. And analysts waste time slicing data they should’ve had direct access to. Despite the effort, the dashboard flops as a strategic tool.

Why These Problems Happen—and How to Avoid Them

Many of these issues arise not from poor effort, but from gaps in dashboard design strategy. Teams often rush to execute in a BI tool without fully understanding user needs, stakeholder workflows, or long-term usability goals. These pitfalls can be even more pronounced in lean teams trying to handle dashboard setup in-house.

This is where On Demand Talent professionals can bring tremendous value. Instead of struggling through trial and error, teams can lean on experienced dashboard strategists, familiar with the nuances of tailoring dashboards for stakeholder needs and troubleshooting analytics dashboards across toolsets. These experts can step in temporarily to guide set-up, conduct user interviews, build user-appropriate layers, and teach your team how to maintain and evolve the dashboard as your organization grows.

Planning for Long-Term Success

To avoid common dashboard problems—or to fix them—it’s important to go beyond basic visuals and into purposeful dashboard strategy. By organizing dashboards by user type and leveraging the expertise of On Demand professionals, teams can move from generic reporting to impactful, role-driven insight delivery.

One Size Doesn’t Fit All: Why User-Based Dashboard Design Matters

While BI tools like Tableau, Power BI, and Domo make it easy to build custom dashboards, they don’t automatically align with the unique needs of diverse stakeholders. A dashboard that works well for an analyst might overwhelm an executive – or leave a manager without the insights they need. A strong dashboard design strategy requires thinking through how different team members use data and what level of detail they actually need.

Executive Dashboards: High-Level, Action-Oriented Views

Executives typically want to see overall performance, key trends, and progress toward strategic goals. Dashboards designed for leadership should prioritize high-level metrics and compelling data visualizations that highlight outcomes – not operational noise. Less is more here.

Features of an executive dashboard include:

• KPI scorecards with color cues and trend indicators
• Fast-loading snapshots of company performance
• Minimal drill-downs – just enough to support strategic conversations

Manager Dashboards: Mid-Level Monitoring and Course-Correcting

Managers operate between strategy and execution. They need to understand team-level performance and identify early signs of risk or opportunity within their area. These dashboards should connect the dots between top-line goals and operational drivers.

Good manager-level dashboards include:

• Segmented performance by region, team, or function
• Drill-down capabilities into specific processes or campaigns
• Alerts or indicators where targets are being missed

Analyst Dashboards: Detailed, Interactive Workspaces

Analysts go deep. They need granular, filterable data with multiple visualization options. These dashboards should be built for exploration and usability, providing access to raw data behind summary metrics so they can identify patterns and generate hypotheses.

Analyst dashboards might include:

• Multiple filters and slicers (e.g., timeframes, customer types)
• Interactive charts and trend lines
• Data exports and detailed tables for further analysis

When dashboards are built on a strong architecture linking these layers together – an executive summary at the top, management views in the middle, and analyst tools at the base – stakeholders can transition smoothly from big-picture insights to tactical planning or root cause analysis.

Ultimately, organizing dashboards by user type improves usability and drives smarter, faster decision-making across the organization.

DIY Tools Are Powerful – But Come With Hidden Pitfalls

Platforms like Power BI, Tableau, and Domo have democratized access to data visualization. Many companies invest in these tools thinking they’ll solve their dashboard challenges overnight. But while these platforms offer impressive capabilities, the reality is that DIY solutions often fall short when teams lack dashboard strategy, design experience, or technical integration skills.

Here are some of the most common issues organizations face when building dashboards internally:

• Misaligned views – Dashboards aren’t tailored by stakeholder role, leading to confusion and underuse
• Information overload – Too much data crammed onto a dashboard without clear prioritization
• Broken drill-downs – Links between top-level metrics and detailed insights don’t function well or are missing entirely
• Inconsistent definitions – Different teams use conflicting metrics or unclear calculations, leading to credibility issues
• Design and usability challenges – Cluttered visuals, clunky filters, or poor mobile formatting limit adoption

How On Demand Experts Bridge the Gap

This is where experienced dashboard professionals – like those available through SIVO’s On Demand Talent network – make a real difference. Unlike generalist freelancers or one-size-fits-all templates, these experts know how to design dashboards rooted in business decision-making. They help teams go beyond just “getting a dashboard live” to ensuring it drives the right actions at the right levels.

What On Demand professionals provide that internal teams often miss:

• Dashboard planning aligned with stakeholder needs and business objectives
• Clear strategy for structuring executive, manager, and analyst views
• Troubleshooting of BI tool frustrations, from Power BI model errors to Tableau navigation challenges
• Usability best practices around layout, filtering, and mobile responsiveness
• Integrations that ensure real-time data accuracy from multiple systems

By working alongside your team, On Demand Talent can not only solve immediate dashboard issues, but also empower your team with the skills and knowledge to maintain and evolve your analytics dashboards long term. Their goal isn’t just building a dashboard – it’s elevating your ability to use dashboards to accelerate insight and action.

From Data to Decisions: Why Dashboard Design Needs the Human Expert Touch

A great dashboard doesn’t just show data – it clarifies it, contextualizes it, and leads to smarter business decisions. But with the rapid rise of dashboard DIY tools and increasing pressure to do more with less, many insights teams are struggling to build dashboards that actually drive action. This is where On Demand Talent brings real, strategic value.

On Demand Talent are experienced insights and data visualization professionals who step in where capacity, expertise, or bandwidth is missing. They’re not freelancers working in isolation – they’re active partners who work hand-in-hand with your team to ensure dashboards serve business goals, not just numbers on a screen.

How On Demand Talent Helps Teams Build Better Dashboards

When organizations tap into SIVO’s network of professionals, they benefit from:

• Deep experience across tools like Tableau, Power BI, and Domo – configuring dashboards that scale with your needs
• Cross-functional collaboration to gather requirements from executives to end users
• Workflow-aligned design that keeps dashboards embedded in daily processes, not accessed once a month
• User empowerment through training and change management, helping teams adopt and own their dashboards

One fictional example: A retail brand attempted to design a Power BI sales dashboard in-house. It quickly became bloated, slow, and confusing to leadership. By bringing in an On Demand Talent expert who optimized the data model, redesigned the dashboard for layered access levels, and added custom drill-downs, they transformed the tool into a weekly decision-making must-have.

Transforming Dashboards Into Living Business Tools

Too often, dashboard projects stall with a good-looking interface that no one uses. On Demand experts help teams avoid this by focusing on actionability – ensuring dashboards are designed to answer actual business questions, not just display data. That includes:

• Setting up alerting or notifications for metric changes
• Linking dashboard KPIs to specific departmental goals
• Building in filter options that support real-time scenario planning

With On Demand Talent, you’re not just bringing in dashboard firepower – you’re investing in scalable knowledge, smarter processes, and a culture of decision-making grounded in insight. Whether you need temporary support for a dashboard rollout or want to upskill your team long term, the flexibility and experience these experts provide is invaluable in today’s insight-driven environment.