Here’s your article—grounded, direct, and focused on making dashboards that don’t just exist, but get used:
Building a Metrics Dashboard the Whole Company Actually Checks
Most startups have a dashboard. Few have one people actually look at.
You know the type—built in a rush, linked once in Slack, never updated. The marketing team has their own. Sales runs a separate sheet. Product relies on Post-it Notes and instinct. Meanwhile, the founder is refreshing Stripe and guessing churn in their head.
The problem isn’t tools. It’s relevance.
A dashboard only works if:
- The data matters to the person looking at it.
- It updates often enough to reflect reality.
- It lives where people already work.
If it fails any of those, it becomes wallpaper.
So how do you build one that sticks?
Start by killing vanity metrics. No one needs to see social impressions in an engineering all-hands. Show what moves the business: trial-to-paid conversion, NPS trend, ticket resolution time, feature adoption.
Then tie each section to a team. This isn’t about KPIs for KPI’s sake—it’s about visibility. Let marketing see pipeline shape. Let support see churn signals. Let finance see burn. Everyone sees the same truth.
Next, automate the inputs.
If someone has to manually export from five tools and clean the spreadsheet every week, it dies. Connect it to the source. Use Looker, Metabase, even Google Sheets if you must—but make updates frictionless.
And last: make it a habit. Pull it up in your weekly, use it to frame decisions, refer to it in Slack. Dashboards don’t need to shout. But they do need to be present.
The goal isn’t to have the prettiest data. It’s to make sure your team isn’t flying blind.
A good dashboard doesn’t just report the score. It helps your company play better.
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