Creating A Management Dashboard

We've all seen the powerful dashboards that some companies have, and how they help them make decisions. But it is easy to be overwhelmed about what actually should be in a dashboard, and also how to use it.

Not sure if you've had reactions like this one: We had one of the main board members from the parent company I was working for. He loved walking around the office, talking with people when he arrived. And we've been running two radiators for a couple of months, screens containing some of the main dashboards.

He was really impressed and curious about the data we were showing there. He loved the idea of having information available to everyone at the company.

The goal is not to have all information available, but what is most relevant at a given time.

So let's talk about why you should have a dashboard, how to create one that fits your needs. I will concentrate on a management dashboard and how to use these dashboards.

Why do you need a dashboard?

The goal of a dashboard is somehow easy: show information or status that is relevant to the teams.

In the case of a management dashboard, often you will want to understand how the business is performing, so you will concentrate on aspects like: are you reaching your target audience, are you creating enough leads, and are you converting them, among other aspects.

Your dashboard will be the single source of truth for key metrics, helping you to eliminate data arguments between departments.

In the end, the goal of the dashboard is to bring that visibility to help teams plan their work, make decisions, and adapt plans if needed. 

For example, if your marketing campaign is not generating enough sales, you can adapt and modify it to make sure it reaches more people by increasing advertising or bringing more focus to some of the target personas.

What should you include in a management dashboard?

It is very tempting when creating a dashboard to try to include as much information as possible, but I actually would recommend the opposite.

Start small, and show just a handful of metrics. Start using this dashboard and see how you need to modify it to adapt to your needs: are there metrics that you miss, or do you have metrics you never pay attention to? Modify the dashboard according to your needs.

When building a management dashboard, the goal is to understand the business performance, so these are some of the aspects that I would pay attention to, and some example metrics that you could track.

Awareness

How well are your prospects finding your product or service? Are you reaching out to your ICP where they are? 

Here you can measure different data points, like website traffic, social media engagement, videos, or ad impressions/views. The goal is to start identifying leads.

Consideration

In this phase, you want to figure out how many of the prospects you initially reach out to really resonate with your offer: are you solving their problem?

This is often known as lead generation. You want to find out the ICPs that are potentially ready for you to start a conversation and make an offer. And you want them to move down the funnel: lead -> prospect -> opportunity.

Metrics that are interesting to track here are: number of leads, prospects, opportunities, and conversion rates. Downloads of free PDFs, using a free version of a product, or attending a webinar usually get people into the first stage of the funnel. Different activities: engaging with the product further or sales calls will move them down the funnel.

Sales

For all the companies that are created for-profit, measuring sales is the most important metric, ensuring not only that you are potentially being profitable and building a business, but also that you are really reaching out to the right audience with the right message, and that your customers are willing to pay for your product to solve their needs. 

Here, the metrics will be around the sales process: time to close, number of sold products, number of sold products per company, average deal size, number of new customers, and number of new subscribers.

Service

The goal here is to make sure that your product really delivers on the value, not just to get them to buy, but to keep them as a long-time customer.

Here, the used metrics can be: customer life-time value, renewals, renew subscription, churn, among others.

Goals

For most of these KPIs, you want to make sure you have visible the value that is your goal, so you can see how well you are progressing towards achieving it. An example is that if your target is to grow 20% ARR, you should be able to see how far you are from accomplishing this.

How should you use the dashboard?

Dashboards are not created to just look pretty, but to be used often. They will help you understand how you are progressing towards goals, and adapt if needed.

A dashboard should be a strategic bets follow-up, that emphasizes continuous review of business outcomes.

This will depend on the status of your business, but you will regularly meet with the responsible leaders from the different areas to review the status of the data and how well you are moving towards your goals.

Depending on where you are in your journey, or mature, you might want to do reviews of this somewhere between weekly and monthly. Including all the responsible leaders.

Wrapping up

As a leader, you want to make sure that you have visibility into your business. It is a powerful tool to understand how well things are working, and also helps your teams understand how their work impacts the overall business.

What I described here is a high-level management dashboard, but you can also modify this to be a product-specific dashboard: where you could include data about product quality, new release adoption, or development of some specific project.

I would always recommend you to start small, is easy to add too much, and make the dashboard difficult to use, you would rather have less information and that people actually use it.

A potential downfall of this is that it might make you too reactive, and need to explain wihy website traffic is down on an specific week: this can be due to holidays on big markets, but if you have your teams investigating every single strange data point, you will end up being too reactive, and disrupting the progress of your teams' work, which eventually will lead to more problems in the data that you are seeing.

The dashboard's job is to flag portfolio risks early so they can be mitigated before they impact the bottom line.

Ready to up your game as a leader?

Having visibility over your business is a great tool for a leader, but it's only a fraction of the responsibilities that you have as a VP of product management or as a CPO. Get the Product Leadership Framework to help you visualize all the responsibilities you'll have and help you adopt them.