Your executive dashboard was wrong twice last quarter and leaders have stopped trusting it. How do you rebuild trust?

What the interviewer wants to hear

• Finds root causes of the past errors
• Adds automated data quality checks and alerts
• Documents metric definitions in one place
• Shows data freshness and known issues on the dashboard
• Communicates openly about incidents and fixes

Model answer

First I would do a short post-mortem on both incidents to find root causes, for example a late upstream load and a changed status code that broke a filter. Then I fix the causes, not just the numbers. I add automated checks on the pipeline: freshness, row counts within an expected range, uniqueness of keys, no unexpected NULLs and reconciliation of revenue with the finance system, with alerts to me before leaders open the dashboard. If a check fails, the dashboard shows a clear warning banner instead of wrong numbers. I put every metric definition in one documented place and show the last refresh time on the page. Finally, I am open: I tell leaders what went wrong, what changed, and I send a short note whenever an issue is caught. Trust returns through a run of reliable weeks.

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