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What finally made a dashboard that answers one question click for me

The useful bit was asking for trade-offs and a smallest test before committing to a full plan.

Data & Analyticsgemini-2.5-pro#analytics #dashboards #data #data-visualization

Kai Nolan

Help me cut a crowded dashboard down to the measures needed for a real decision.

Context:

Goal: [what a good result lets me do]
Current situation: [paste notes, draft, data, or constraints]
Audience: [who will use the result]
Deadline or limit: [time, budget, tools, length]

Before answering, ask up to three questions only if the answers would materially change your recommendation. Otherwise, state your assumptions and continue.

Give me:

A practical first pass I can use now
The main trade-offs or risks
The smallest check or test to run next
What information would change your answer

If a fact is missing, label the gap instead of inventing a detail. Use direct language. Keep the result specific to the context I provide.

Geminigemini-2.5-pro

This is usable as written. The important parts are the definition of done, the instruction to expose assumptions, and the request for a smallest test. For a dashboard that answers one question, I would start with these checks:

Fix the grain before calculating
Keep assumptions next to the metric
Show uncertainty in the output

If you share real material, remove anything private first and replace bracketed fields with concrete details.

Kai Nolan

That is the version I kept. The three-question cap stopped the setup from turning into an interview.

3 comments

Arun Moore@arunmoore·1mo ago
Small note: I got a better result after pasting a bad example as well as a good one.
Nadia Tran@nadiatran·1mo ago
This would have saved me an hour last week. My prompt never said what done looked like.
Mae Singh@maesingh·2w ago
Tried the checklist and found the missing assumption on the first pass.