Stop Dating Vanity Metrics - Fall in love with metrics that actually commit.

Stop Dating Vanity Metrics Fall in love with metrics that actually commit.

In today’s AI-driven, dashboard-heavy workplaces, we are surrounded by numbers. Impressions rise. Followers grow. Views spike. Yet behind the applause of “good metrics,” many teams struggle to answer a simple question: Did this actually move the decision?

This talk explores the gap between metrics that look impressive and metrics that influence real-world outcomes. Drawing from experience working in institutional strategy, admissions marketing, and AI-led product environments, I will unpack how visualization often reinforces vanity rather than clarity — and how we can redesign it to drive action.

At its core, this session is about reframing how we think about data at work. Instead of optimizing for visibility, we should optimize for decision-making. Instead of building dashboards that perform well in presentations, we must build visual systems that survive executive scrutiny, budget cuts, and real-world constraints.

The talk will move through three main sections:

1. The Illusion of Impact How vanity metrics emerge in organizations, why they are psychologically attractive, and how visualization design unintentionally amplifies them.

2. Designing for Commitment, Not Attention Practical principles for creating visualizations that highlight decision-critical signals — conversion funnels, trade-offs, risk indicators, and opportunity costs. This includes aligning charts with stakeholder questions, simplifying noise, and structuring dashboards around action.

3. From Reporting to Influencing Case reflections on how visualization shifts when it becomes part of workflow rather than an end-of-month artifact. What changes when data is designed to guide conversations instead of decorate slides?

This topic matters deeply to me because I have seen how easily teams mistake activity for impact. In AI and product-driven spaces especially, data can create a false sense of confidence. Thoughtful visualization is not just aesthetic craft — it is organizational responsibility.

Within broader data visualization conversations, this session contributes to the ongoing dialogue about ethics, communication, and decision-support systems. It bridges design, strategy, and domain practice by focusing not on tools, but on intent.

This talk is intended for analysts, designers, product teams, marketing professionals, and leaders who build or rely on dashboards in their daily work.

Participants will leave with:

A framework to distinguish vanity metrics from value metrics

A checklist for designing decision-oriented dashboards

Mental models for aligning visualizations with stakeholder questions

A new lens for evaluating whether their data is influencing or merely informing

Because at work, attention is easy to get. Commitment is harder. And the best visualizations are the ones that stay when it matters most.