A dashboard fails quietly. Nobody announces they have stopped looking at it; the tab just closes and never reopens. By the time anyone notices, the data pipeline behind it has been running for months for an audience of nobody.
The surviving ones have something in common: they answer a question that a specific person was already asking, in a form that person recognises. Not "here is everything we can measure" but "here is the number you ask the operations head for every Monday morning."
That suggests a sequence. Find the recurring question first. Confirm who asks it and what they do with the answer. Then build the smallest thing that answers it reliably. Additional charts can follow once the first one has earned the habit.
Refresh behaviour matters more than chart choice. A number that is silently stale is worse than no number, because decisions get made on it. Every metric should show when it was last updated, and say so plainly when a source has failed.