A few short questions, plain English, no jargon. Your answers become Claude's standing instructions.
What decision or question should this dashboard answer? Be specific: "Track weekly feature adoption so the product team can prioritize the next sprint" is better than "show feature usage."
The single most important metric on this dashboard. Everything else should support it.
Who opens this dashboard most? The audience determines vocabulary, detail level, and how much context to embed in the charts.
How fresh does the data need to be? This shapes which metrics are feasible and what infrastructure is required.