The Dashboard Roast.
Every quarter, our editors pull apart a reader's dashboard in public — line by line, chart by chart, KPI by KPI. Four thousand, two hundred and counting have been through the audit. Yours could be next.
No vendor submissions. No sponsored picks. Every roast is selected by the editorial team from the open submission pool and audited against the original CSV — published alongside the post.
What a Roast actually is.
The Roast is not a takedown. It is a post-mortem with teeth. We pick a real dashboard submitted by a real operator, run it against the original CSV the submitter provides, and publish the audit in full — annotated screenshots, corrected queries, and a written verdict on what the chart claims versus what the data actually says.
The editorial team — three PhDs in statistics, two former Fortune 500 analytics directors, and a former Netflix data scientist — reads every submission. Roughly one in forty is selected for publication. The rest receive a private note with a short list of corrections they can apply immediately.
We do not accept submissions from analytics vendors. We do not run sponsored roasts. We do not publish anything that was not fact-checked against the original dataset. And we never publish a submitter's name, company, or proprietary data without explicit written consent.
“The point is not to embarrass anyone. The point is to retire a chart that has been misleading a team for six quarters.”
Recent roasts.
Four issues per year. Below: the four most recent editions, with thumbnails of the dashboards as submitted and the verdict they received.
A retention dashboard that started its axis at 47%.
Verdict: Re-issued. The chart implied a 22-point quarterly swing that, with an honest baseline, was closer to four.
Two charts, one number, one confused exec team.
Verdict: Restructured. The two panels read as independent metrics but shared an underlying query — one of them was redundant.
The funnel that hid its biggest drop-off.
Verdict: Re-issued. A 14% overall conversion figure buried a 71% drop between two adjacent steps that the team had stopped investigating.
A pie chart of time spent. By category. Maybe.
Verdict: Withdrawn by submitter. The chart's underlying definition had drifted across three product versions; we declined to publish without a reconciliation.
The full archive — 24 issues, 2019 through 2024 — is indexed at /dispatches/. Every archived roast ships with the original CSV the submitter provided.
From your inbox to a published post-mortem.
Four steps. Median turnaround from submission to verdict: 31 days. Roughly one in forty submissions is selected for publication; the rest receive a private corrections note within the same window.
-
01
Submit the dashboard and the CSV.
Upload a screenshot or export, plus the original query or CSV that produced it. If you cannot share the data, tell us why — we will work with you on a sanitized substitute, but we will not publish without the underlying numbers.
-
02
Editorial triage within 7 days.
Two editors read every submission. Roughly 38% are returned with a quick private note. The remaining pool is ranked against the editorial calendar and the prior quarter's archive.
-
03
Audit and rewrite.
The selected dashboard is rebuilt by hand against the CSV. We annotate the original, draft corrected queries, and write the verdict. You review every factual claim before publication and may withdraw at any stage.
-
04
Publish with consent.
Final sign-off from you, then the roast runs in the next quarterly issue with the CSV attached. Your name, company, and any proprietary fields appear only if you have explicitly approved them in writing.
Submit your dashboard for the next quarterly roast.
The next edition audits submissions received before 14 June. Selection is made by the editorial team only. There is no fee, no sponsorship tier, and no guarantee of publication — but every submitter receives a private corrections note from one of our editors within 31 days.
- Eligibility. Operators at operating companies. Vendor and consultancy submissions are not accepted.
- Files. A screenshot or PDF of the dashboard plus the underlying CSV, SQL, or LookML that produced it.
- Confidentiality. Default is full anonymization. Named publication requires your written consent on the corrected draft.
- Right of reply. You review every factual claim and may withdraw at any stage before publication.
- Format cap. Files under 25 MB per upload. For larger datasets, share a read-only link in the notes field.
Questions before submitting? Write to [email protected] with the subject line “Roast submission”.
The four questions we get most.
Anything else, write to [email protected]. We answer every note.
- Will my company be named in the roast?
- Not by default. Every roast is published with the submitter anonymized unless you have explicitly approved named publication on the corrected draft. We do not name internal teams, products, or proprietary fields without written consent. Roughly one in three published roasts is named, with the submitter's prior approval.
- What is the realistic turnaround from submission to verdict?
- Median is 31 days from submission to a private corrections note. If your dashboard is selected for publication, add roughly three weeks for the audit, your review, and the publication slot — the next quarterly issue closes for submissions about six weeks before it runs.
- What file formats can I upload, and what if my dataset is too large?
- Each upload is capped at 25 MB and accepts PDF, PNG, JPG, WEBP for the dashboard image, and CSV, SQL, LookML, JSON, or TXT for the underlying data. For larger datasets, paste a read-only link (Snowflake, BigQuery, S3) into the notes field and we will work with you on access.
- What happens if my dashboard turns out to be fine?
- It happens. About one in ten submitted dashboards passes the audit with no meaningful corrections — we publish a short note acknowledging that and link the original. If the audit surfaces a real but minor issue, we send you the private corrections note and do not publish. If the underlying data cannot be reconciled, we withdraw the submission entirely.
Can vendors or consultancies submit? No. The Roast is an operator-to-operator audit. If you work at a vendor, write to [email protected] about being quoted in a future independent research paper instead.