How many different layouts do you need? You could also create a invisible Dashboard Page for each layout and create Action links to navigate to them.

I still think the presentation variable / conditional section approach is not preferable because it involves a lot of trickery.

Create a dashboard with a main page, a page for CI Adoption and Sonar Adoption and a page for Release and Incident

On each page place the reports that you want to display.

You can hide thendashboard pages in the dashboard properties:

The main page is not hidden, it contains either separate action links or a action link menu with links that navigate to bi content, which are the hidden pages in this case.

If the User clicks on the action link the corresponding tab should be displayed.

Not exactly what you manager wants but a quick and easy workaround