Building KPIs and Dashboards

An early attempt at a dashboard for MANIAC MINDZ tried to track nearly everything measurable at once, fifty-plus numbers on a single sheet, updated weekly. In practice, almost nobody actually reviewed it in full, and not a single number on it had a clearly named owner responsible for acting when it moved.

Why did fifty tracked numbers end up less useful than a handful would have been? Because attention is limited, and a sheet with fifty numbers spreads that attention so thin that nobody genuinely reviews any single one of them. A dashboard's job isn't to capture everything, it's to capture the few numbers someone will actually look at and act on.

A dashboard pulls a handful of the business's most important KPIs, usually one or two per major area (sales, quality, cash, customers, inventory, people), into a single view, each with its current value, its trend, and its named owner.

Here's the full version of the fifty-numbers story from the start of this chapter.

An early attempt at a dashboard for MANIAC MINDZ tried to track nearly everything measurable at once, fifty-plus numbers on a single sheet, updated weekly. In practice, almost nobody actually reviewed it in full, and not a single number on it had a clearly named owner responsible for acting when it moved.

More data hadn't meant more insight. It had meant less. Cutting it down to six KPIs, one per major area, each with a named owner and a monthly review slot, turned an ignored spreadsheet into a document the owner actually opened every month, and acted on.

The one number worth putting front and center on a dashboard changes depending on what actually drives each business.

Choose one KPI per major area of your business (sales, quality, cash, customers, inventory, people), six numbers total. Name an owner and a review rhythm for each before adding a seventh.