Your manager looks at a dashboard. It shows velocity trending upward, capacity at 85%, and 47 tickets closed this sprint. Green lights everywhere.
You look at your week. It was exhausting. You spent Monday in meetings, Tuesday fighting a production bug, Wednesday catching up from Tuesday. You closed tickets frantically on Thursday to make the numbers work. Friday you were fried.
Same week. Completely different stories.
The Abstraction Gap
Reports abstract reality. They take complex, messy, human work and compress it into numbers and charts. This compression is necessary - managers can’t experience every team member’s week directly - but it loses information.
What gets lost: the quality of the work. The sustainability of the pace. The frustration and morale. The difference between tickets that matter and tickets that just close.
What gets kept: quantities. Trends. Comparisons. The stuff that fits in boxes.
Managers make decisions based on what they can see. When the dashboard shows green, decisions assume reality is green. But reality might be red in ways the dashboard can’t capture.
How Dashboards Lie
Dashboards don’t intentionally deceive. But their structure creates blind spots.
They count, but don’t weigh. Ten small tickets look the same as ten hard tickets. Velocity doesn’t distinguish between meaningful progress and busywork.
They lag reality. By the time metrics show a problem, the problem has been festering for weeks. By the time they show improvement, the improvement happened long ago.
They reward gaming. When metrics tie to performance reviews, people optimize for metrics. Split tickets to inflate counts. Close and reopen to reset SLAs. Game the system because the system games them.
They can’t show sustainability. A team sprinting to hit a target looks the same as a team cruising sustainably. The burnout arrives later, after the dashboard has moved on.
What Makers Actually Need
Makers need tools that show their work, not tools that show abstractions of their work.
Kanman takes this approach. It shows your projects and tasks. Not metrics about your projects. Not dashboards summarizing your tasks. The work itself.
This design choice means there’s nothing to screenshot for a status meeting. No charts to present to leadership. No aggregations to analyze.
That’s deliberate. Kanman is built for practitioners, not observers. If a feature only helps someone watch the work, it doesn’t ship.
The Information Bridge
The solution isn’t eliminating management visibility. Large organizations genuinely need coordination infrastructure. Leadership allocating resources across a hundred-person department can’t talk to everyone weekly. Portfolio decisions require aggregated signals. Cross-team dependencies need tracking.
The problem is applying enterprise-scale reporting to contexts where direct communication still works. A ten-person team doesn’t need dashboards - they need a standup. A single project doesn’t need velocity charts - it needs a shared understanding of what’s next.
As many processes as needed. As few as possible. All the time.
The solution is better information bridges - ways for reality to reach decision-makers without losing critical context. And honest evaluation of whether the reporting layer matches the actual coordination need.
This looks like:
- Regular conversation. Managers talking to makers directly, not just reading dashboards.
- Qualitative signals. “How sustainable does this feel?” alongside “how many tickets did we close?”
- Work-based updates. Sharing what shipped, not what scored.
- Trust. Assuming workers know their situation better than any dashboard can represent.
The Maker’s Lens
If you’re a maker navigating this gap, protect your own clarity.
Don’t let the dashboard become your reality. You know how the week felt. You know whether the work was good or just numerous. Trust your experience over the metrics.
Keep your own system. A tool like Kanman shows your projects without judgment. No metrics to internalize. No velocity to perform for. Just the work you’re doing and the work that’s done.
Communicate reality, not just metrics. When asked how things are going, share the real picture. “We closed 47 tickets, but I’m concerned about sustainability” is more useful than “47 tickets, all green.”
The Manager’s Responsibility
If you’re a manager, know your dashboard’s limits.
Green lights don’t mean everything is fine. They mean the specific things you’re measuring appear fine by the specific criteria you’re using. That’s a much smaller claim.
Talk to your team. Ask how work feels, not just how it measures. Watch for the gap between reports and reality, and take reality seriously when they conflict.
Design for doers. When choosing tools, ask whether they help workers work or help observers observe. A tool that serves makers might give you less to screenshot, but it might produce better outcomes.
Closing the Gap
The gap between the manager’s report and the maker’s reality isn’t fixable by better dashboards. It’s fixable by less reliance on dashboards.
Trust workers to report their own status. Let shipped work speak for itself. Value conversation over visualization.
And use tools that keep the focus on work, not on the artifacts of appearing to work.
Ready to focus on projects, not metrics? Shows your work - no dashboards, no velocity charts, no performance theater. Kanman - annual workspace subscriptions. €4 / month for individuals, €10 per seat / month.
Marco Kerwitz
Founder of kanman.de