Data everywhere, alignment nowhere: What dashboards are getting wrong, and why you need a data product manager

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In the past decade, companies have spent billions on data infrastructure. Petabyte-scale warehouses. Real-time pipelines. Machine learning (ML) platforms.

And yet — ask your operations lead why churn increased last week, and you’ll likely get three conflicting dashboards. Ask finance to reconcile performance across attribution systems, and you’ll hear, “It depends on who you ask.”

In a world drowning in dashboards, one truth keeps surfacing: Data isn’t the problem — product thinking is.

The quiet collapse of “data-as-a-service”

For years, data teams operated like internal consultancies — reactive, ticket-based, hero-driven. This “data-as-a-service” (DaaS) model was fine when data requests were small and stakes were low. But as companies became “data-driven,” this model fractured under the weight of its own success.

Take Airbnb ...