Forty seven metrics, and nobody is looking

Every dashboard starts clean. Then a director asks for one more chart before a board meeting, and it stays. Then a new head of sales wants their own view, and that stays too. Two years later the page has forty seven metrics, takes nine seconds to load, and the first thing anyone does when they open it is scroll past most of it.

The problem is not that the extra metrics are wrong. It is that a page with forty seven numbers on it does not tell anyone what to think, which was the entire job.

The test: name the decision

For every metric on the page, answer one question. What decision changes when this number moves? If nobody can name one, the metric is not a metric, it is a fact. Facts belong in a report you can go and look up. They do not belong on the page people look at every week.

This test kills most vanity metrics on contact. Total registered users, cumulative revenue since founding, page views: interesting, occasionally satisfying, and not attached to any decision anybody makes.

Most businesses run on five

• Cash: the balance now and the lowest point ahead.
• Revenue against plan, with the driver that explains the gap.
• Gross margin, because it moves quietly and matters enormously.
• One operational leading indicator, specific to how the business actually makes money.
• One thing that is currently broken and being fixed, which changes every quarter.

The last one is the one most dashboards miss. A permanent set of metrics implies the business always has the same problem, which it does not. Reserve a slot for whatever is genuinely in question this quarter and change it when the answer arrives.

Where the rest should live

Retiring a metric is politically harder than adding one, which is why dashboards only ever grow. Make it easier by moving rather than deleting. Everything that fails the decision test goes into a detail view that is one click away and always available. Nobody has lost their chart. It is simply no longer competing with the cash line for attention.

A good dashboard is not the numbers you could show. It is the handful you would defend keeping if you had to remove everything else.

This is why Dash chooses a starting set of KPIs based on the business and the industry rather than presenting an empty canvas. A default that is roughly right beats a blank page, and it is far easier to argue with a suggestion than to build a view from nothing at nine o'clock on the morning of a board meeting.