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# Dashboards that don’t lie
- URL: https://matteson.ca/notes/dashboards-that-dont-lie/
- Published: 2026-05-28T15:00:00.000Z
- Updated: 2026-07-10T03:34:16.000Z
- Description: A dashboard is a claim about what matters. Most of them are claims nobody meant to make.
- Author: Matteson Machielse
- Tags: ideas, #Import 2026-07-11 07:11, #Import 2026-07-15 05:50

A dashboard is a claim about what matters. Most dashboards are claims nobody meant to make — whatever the exporter shipped with, arranged in whatever order the defaults chose.

## Three tests

- If this panel went red at 3am, would anyone do anything?
- Can you name the decision this number feeds?
- Has anyone looked at it in thirty days?

Fail all three and the panel is decoration. Decoration is fine — I keep a graph of the constellation because it’s beautiful — but decoration that cosplays as monitoring erodes trust in the panels that are load-bearing.