Method category: Evaluative product experiment

How to Use This in GLIDR

A Dashboard gives you a visual display of your most important product metrics so that you can track changes over time and spot anomalies quickly and easily.

In GLIDR, this may be a one-time Experiment that you set up, or it can be an ongoing task. To set up the Dashboard, first you must decide exactly which metrics are the most important ones that you want to track. After you figure this out, enter this information into the Plan phase of an Experiment and decide which target metrics you want to hit for each of these items. In the Run phase, connect your metrics or your whole Dashboard as a piece of Evidence and track them over the time period you selected. Finally, in Analyze, reflect back on what you learned from the Dashboard and if you hit your targets, then iterate on the metrics you are tracking if needed.

Learn more about each of those aspects of GLIDR:

Article excerpted from The Real Startup Book
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A dashboard is a simple view of product metrics that displays information about the general health and viability of the product. While more detailed metrics are generally used to analyze the results of a specific feature-level experiment, a dashboard can indicate when complex factors are affecting the product. For example, competitor behaviors, seasonality, or multiple conflicting experiments are all potential factors.

In situations where there is great uncertainty, planning for the future has less value than having a clear picture of the current status. Dashboards give you a visual "information radiator," which shows the exact current status on key metrics affecting operations:

Dashboards help visualize inter-relationships among parts of a business. For example, a $10k investment in a channel may seem like a lot of money, unless you knew that last year's revenue was $250k.

Dashboards are inherently motivating. They presuppose an open and data-driven culture. For many employees and partners, this level of trust and transparency motivates them to do their best work. By going through the effort of choosing one or a handful of key metrics for the whole organization, you generate a lot of focus. Dashboards help maintain this focus operationally, if everyone continually checks a dashboard that contains those key metrics driving the business.

This technique can be used for:

In terms of how it works, it can be anywhere from "manually using a spreadsheet" to a custom-built monitoring system that integrates a number of the business systems so that you have a "real-time view" of the company.

Approaches that may or may not be helpful:

This method tends to require a significant investment of thought to decide what needs to be on each dashboard (1-5 days). The implementation of the dashboard itself can vary widely. If done manually, it could cost one hour a week of a junior employee's time. If automated, there would be no recurring cost, but instead a potentially significant up-front technical implementation cost. The actual cost would vary widely based on exactly which systems and data need to be visualized. There are also off-the-shelf SaaS solutions that can provide a sufficient subset of the data required in order to reap most of the benefits in a small company, without bearing a significant cost.

Possible resources include:

Dashboard colors, shapes (traffic light), and status icons help you quickly interpret the reported data. The size of each dashboard component should also reflect the importance of the particular data point.

Graphs and visualizations can easily be misleading.