KPI Dashboard Design
Design effective KPI dashboards that surface the right metrics for decision-making. Covers metric selection, hierarchy, visualization types, and alerting thresholds.
Usage
Provide your role, business type, key goals, and current data sources. Specify dashboard audience (executive, operational, team-specific). The skill delivers:
- Metric Selection: Primary KPIs, secondary metrics, and leading indicators
- Dashboard Layout: Information hierarchy and visual arrangement
- Visualization Choices: Chart type recommendations for each metric
- Definitions: Precise calculation formulas for each metric
- Thresholds & Alerts: Green/yellow/red ranges and notification triggers
- Refresh Frequency: How often each metric should update
Examples
- SaaS Executive: "Design an executive dashboard for a B2B SaaS company. Key metrics: MRR, churn, CAC, LTV, NPS. Data from Stripe, Mixpanel, Intercom."
- E-commerce Operations: "Build an operations dashboard tracking order fulfillment, inventory levels, return rates, and customer satisfaction for a DTC brand."
- Marketing Team: "Design a marketing performance dashboard covering campaign ROI, funnel conversion, channel attribution, and content performance."
- Engineering: "Create an engineering dashboard with deployment frequency, lead time, MTTR, change failure rate, and sprint velocity."
Guidelines
- Follow the pyramid principle: most important metrics at the top, drill-down detail below
- Every metric needs a precise definition — "revenue" means different things to different people
- Include leading indicators (predict future performance) not just lagging (report past)
- Choose chart types deliberately: line for trends, bar for comparisons, single-number for KPIs
- Set meaningful thresholds based on historical data and targets, not arbitrary values
- Design for action: each metric should suggest what to do when it changes
- Limit dashboards to 8-12 metrics maximum — more causes decision paralysis