More than a dashboard - how to make sure your metric tree succeeds

After I wrote about metric trees a few weeks ago, I received a lot of questions about them, but none stood out more than this one:

“At the end of the day, aren’t metric trees just another dashboard?”

This is correct at some level. If you build a metric tree like you build a dashboard - which is to say alone, and as something you serve to the business - it is likely to have many of the same issues.

So are metric trees different? Is there more to gain here than a handy new way to display data? And if so, how do we make sure we achieve that vision?