99% of Metrics Dashboards suck

You know what sucks? 99% of Metrics Dashboards out there. 📈📊📉

I’m sure if you go to your company Looker, Tableau, Metabase, Mode, and open any dashboards/reports, it will look like the 💩 Dashboard in the picture below.

If you are not the person who built or asked for this dashboard, you probably have 0 clues on how to interpret it. 🤔

A simple trick I learned is to name the charts based “WHY” you want that graph, AKA the question it is trying to answer. Don’t use the “WHAT” information the chart is displaying (That’s the job of the legend).

💡 Examples:

💩 Activities against Monthly Leads by Score
🤩 which leads are being worked on?

💩 Activities per accounts
🤩 Which accounts are we working on (or not)?

💩 Current month Closed Ops Value
🤩 How well is this month Sale’s performance going?

💩 Closed Ops vs. Payments per accounts
🤩 How much and which customers owe us money?

⭐ Bonus, if you have time, write 2 sentences describing why this graph matters to the business. With this simple tweak, anyone can understand these dashboards.

⏭️ Go to your BI/Reporting tool of choice, and look at the most used dashboard. Rename the graph’ titles to use the question approach. Trust me, your team will love it!