Most dashboards quietly stop getting used long before anyone will say so out loud. Here’s why that happens and what to build instead. TL;DR: A dashboard graveyard is a collection of reports that technically exist but are never opened by the people they were built for, soaking up maintenance time while influencing zero decisions. A practical rule of thumb: no opens by a non-builder in 90 days. Dashboards usually fail because they’re created around whatever data is handy, not around concrete decisions. The six core failure modes are: misaligned audience, analyst bottlenecks, too many metrics, lack of context, inconsistent metric definitions, and neglected upkeep. Databox’s Time to Insight survey found that 54.29% of teams report inefficiencies or delays in their reporting process. To review an existing graveyard: pull 90 days of usage logs and use a 2×2 triage matrix—Usage vs. Business Relevance—to classify each dashboard as maintain, diagnose, investigate, or sunset. To create dashboards that actually get used, answer three questions before you open your BI tool: what decision will this support, who is the explicit owner, and what behavior or action should change based on what it reveals. Introduction You open the analytics tab for the dashboard you spent a week putting together. Two views. Both yours: one when you published it, one when you checked whether anyone else had looked at it. The stakeholder who requested it just pinged you on Slack asking if you can “pull together a quick breakdown” of the numbers. The same numbers that have been sitting in a dashboard with her name in the title for a month. Most business analysts know this moment all too well but rarely label it…