Teams use dashboards to manage their own work. Fewer teams use them to communicate with leadership, and that is a missed opportunity.
Building a custom dashboard for the executive team means putting everything they need in one place, updated without requiring anyone to prepare a report or send a separate update.
Add widgets for task statuses, project timelines, and approval workflows. A Task Status widget can show, for instance, which campaigns are in progress, pending approval, or completed. A File Widget stores important documents like campaign briefs, budgets, and creative assets so they are always accessible from the same place.
Every time a team member updates a task or completes a milestone, the dashboard reflects it immediately. This reduces the need for status update meetings held purely to keep leadership informed.
You can set up automations to notify leadership when specific tasks are ready for review or approval. Notifications go out automatically when something reaches the point where leadership input is needed.
Start with the minimum. The mistake most people make with dashboards is adding too much. Start with the most critical metrics your leadership uses to make decisions. You can always add more widgets later.
Build for your audience. A dashboard for a marketing director looks different from a dashboard for a finance lead. Think about what decisions each viewer needs to make and build the widgets around those decisions. Budget tracking, timeline status for each active project, and approval bottlenecks where approvals are a common source of delay.
Also, build team dashboards alongside leadership dashboards showing what everyone on the team is working on at a quick glance. These serve a different purpose.
You can take it a step further with a personal task dashboard that shows tasks and approvals for whichever user is loading the board, so it works for everyone without adjustment.