---
name: KPI Dashboards
description: Surface the metrics that drive decisions.
---
# KPI Dashboards

A dashboard is useful only if it changes a decision. Dashboards full of metrics nobody acts on are expensive decoration.

## Design
- **Lead with the north star.** The one metric that captures core value, biggest and on top.
- **A few metrics, not many.** Three to seven; the brain can't track more. The rest lives in drill-downs.
- **Show trend, not snapshot.** A number without history is meaningless. Is 42 good? Depends if last quarter was 50 or 30.
- **Annotate.** Mark when known events happened (a launch, an outage). Without context, spikes are mysteries.

## Use
- A weekly review against the dashboard. Without the ritual, the dashboard is furniture.
- Drives actions: what moved, why, what to do about it.