12 January 2026 · craft
The quiet cost of too many dashboards
A second board feels like diligence. A seventh is a filing cabinet with no index. App analytics dies in the gap between those two.
Vendor workspaces make it cheap to clone a board for every squad. Each clone inherits default tiles that nobody chose. After a year the company has a gallery of similar lines and no shared sentence for “returned.” Meetings then become tours. Tours are not decisions.
Where the cost actually lands
The cost is not the licence. It is the hour a product lead spends reconciling two D1 numbers that used different ghost filters. It is the engineer who will not delete an event because a forgotten board still charts it. It is the quiet agreement that nobody will open the raw log because the pictures look finished.
Cohort Craft week five forces a split: a lab notebook with as many sketches as you like, and a steering page that may hold four figures. If you need a fifth, one of the four leaves. Alumni from media and grocery have both told us the argument about which four was more useful than the charts themselves.
A practical cull
Write the question each board claims to answer in one sentence. If two boards share a sentence, merge them. If a board has no sentence, archive it with a date. Keep a list of retired tiles the way we keep retired events — so a future colleague cannot resurrect décor and call it heritage.
This pairs with reading retention without vanity and with the stance on app analytics as a craft rather than a gallery.