Spec dashboards for BI teams

Specify dashboards for business questions with implementation-ready blueprint

Spec'd dashboards reduce back-and-forth with BI team and prevent dashboards that answer nobody's question; one document replaces three meetings.

• · Business question dashboard should answer
• · Primary audience and refresh cadence
• · Available data sources (Postgres, BigQuery, Mixpanel, Salesforce, etc.)

• · Dashboard Brief (MD or PDF) with: KPI cards, charts with specifications, filters/controls, layout diagram, data requirements, access & ownership
• · Implementation-ready spec for BI engineer (no follow-up meeting needed)

• · BI tool (Looker, Metabase, Tableau, Power BI, Grafana, or custom)

• · Business question clearly stated (not vague like 'show us the data')
• · Primary audience identified (exec vs. product team vs. ops)
• · Data sources available and documented

• · Dashboard with 20+ KPI cards (information overload, no narrative)
• · Charts without 'key insight' — shows data but doesn't surface signal
• · Missing derived fields or joins — BI engineer has to build data infrastructure
• · Filters too many (dashboard becomes paralyzed by options)

• · Business question framed as narrative (not 'show me metrics')
• · KPI cards limited to 3-6 (avoids noise)
• · Every chart has a 'key insight to surface' (data with purpose, not data dump)
• · Layout described in plain English (row structure, full-width vs. side-by-side)
• · Data requirements section flags missing fields or complex joins