Unpopular opinion, you use way too many dashboard and KPIs

Lior Barak
1 reply
Yes, I am talking to you dear creators, looking to grow your business is not a simple task for that we learned to say "We are data-driven" just because someone told you saw, but the problem is that we all don't really understand what it means to us. Dashboards should be simple and created really not every question or problem should be accommodated by a dashboard Dashboards should give you an answer, should you invest more in acquiring users, retargeting them, build a new feature, reaper an old one, or just kill it, but the only way to achieve this understanding is by having one number that helps you understand how your users using your product compared to what you expect them to do. We have so many KPIs when the reality is that you don't need more than 3 to understand the direction of the business, anything higher than that will just cause confusion, mix feeling and instead of making the decision simple we will ask for more data which cause longer delays and why too much spent. We also invest so much into data during the meetings, but as often happen, different source showing wrong numbers, resulting in us doubting our decision or even the sanity of our product and it's all because we didn't form one clear data strategy that tells us what are our goals and how should we make decisions from day one Do you agree?

Replies

Deep Sherchan
Agree. However, it also depend on the scale of your business. If you talk about Saas business, our primary point of contact with customers in our website or app. So we have all these trackers placed to give us insight on the performance. Initially, it is great to see numbers and make some decision. But it is not always that you uncover path breaking insight from your data. After few months, the trend and insights gets old. I feel when this happens, we try to apply more tools to beat the data to reveal secret which isn't there. Unless, the business is making massive changes to its strategy, data cannot really reveal anything new. But often we stop making decision and get stuck with numbers. We fancy dashboards - I do. Numbers, graphs and interactive graphics. They are visually appealing but does very less to provide insight. Moreover, I feel when you implement any data analytics too we imagine it to do everything. But in reality, you have to spend huge amount of time setting up you parameters so that you can extract values and it is difficult. Most web analytics tools like Google Analytics has tonnes of features and KPIs - not all are useful. But if you just take the numbers on its face value you won't get anything. More than KPIs, its important to ensure quality of data and truely understand it.