1.6 KiB
1.6 KiB
Reflection: Leadership dashboard is not an audit log
Trigger
The first operations-dashboard implementation met the read-only who/instruction/result data contract but organized the page as a searchable instruction history. The user corrected that framing: leaders need an aggregate platform-running view with touchable business dimensions, not technical audit history.
Lesson
- Start dashboard work by defining the audience, decisions, and primary questions before selecting tables or detail fields.
- A leadership operations dashboard is aggregate-first: task volume, people, time, type, progress, original input, and final output. Detail exists to explain an aggregate, not to reproduce a task log.
- Keep engineering/audit diagnostics as a separate surface even when both read the same durable task records.
- “Original input” does not always mean displaying bytes verbatim. Historical machine-shaped payloads should be replaced by an explicit no-business-instruction placeholder on a leadership surface, while the underlying audit evidence remains unchanged.
- Use both a server projection and a presentation-layer guard when an already-running deployment may temporarily serve an older projection during a frontend-only rollout.
Evidence
- User correction on 2026-09-01.
- Before/after authenticated browser verification of
/operations-dashboard. - Task record
20260901-leadership-dashboard-c4b9e1and its full regression results.
Candidate
Add an audience-and-decision-questions checkpoint to future dashboard design acceptance criteria before implementation begins.