Telemetry minimalism for skeptical engineering managers

Dashboard sprawl is not a tooling failure; it is a negotiation failure. Managers adopt telemetry when it answers questions already on their calendar: Are we carrying too much WIP? Which dependency blocked yesterday’s release? Did incident remediation shorten? We recommend starting with three signals per squad, each tied to a decision in the weekly ops review. Anything else waits in a backlog labeled “nice-to-have.” That discipline keeps noise low enough that executives glance at the digest instead of ignoring it. This note includes examples from agency-style squads juggling multiple clients without leaking private identifiers into shared charts. We close with a candid limitation: if leadership refuses to retire vanity charts, minimalism cannot stick—governance has to back the simplification.