(2022-05-06) Critchlow Some Notes On Executive Dashboards

Tom Critchlow: Some Notes on Executive Dashboards. Why are executive dashboards so bad? These days it’s less a case of completely missing reporting (though that still happens) but rather the things the executive team are looking at regularly lack any real insight into the business.

Most of my consulting work revolves around putting together some kind of strategic plan. It usually boils down to a kind of basic equation, something like: “If you invest $$ into activities X, Y and Z then over 2 years we can achieve $$$”

Oddly though - companies only tend to measure the right hand of the equation.

But perhaps I could better articulate how this future investment will play out. Not just a business model showing X, Y and Z with revenue potential, but actually showing how you would measure progress on each initiative

The book Working Backwards explores this idea

I think the basic working model for people is that metrics measure the business, when in fact input metrics help you learn about the business

Dive into the full post from Cedric Chin here for a bit more.

But, there’s something deeper here. Over the last few years I basically only work with the C-suite of organizations. Supposedly the “people in charge”. But time and time again my point of contact is frustrated at the state of reporting internally, while also not doing anything about it. So why not fix it?

This brings a power dynamic into play that I find interesting. Senior executives - CEOs or founders even - who feel unable (or unwilling) to impose new dashboards and metrics on the business. Everyone is scared of micro-managing. Perhaps also senior executives don’t feel confident understanding the mechanics of the actual work well enough to oversee the creation of input metrics?

I often see teams frustrated that the way they’re measured doesn’t accurately reflect the effort / nuance / expertise / care that they feel is necessary for their work to succeed. But I rarely see teams advocating to change the measure!

I’m very interested in what Doubleloop.com is building. They’re basically a kind of strategy canvas where you can plug various input metrics into output metrics and measure them with live data

I’m also interested in what Variance.com is building. Starting with the opinionated thesis that Product-Led Growth should enable prospects to engage, sign-up, set up billing and then actually use the product - Variance is building a reporting product that allows you to see prospects on an account by account basis as they move through various “milestones” of user action. (onboarding, activation) because it’s building software around an embedded thesis or ideology. IF product-led growth, THEN here’s the CRM product for you… I think we’ll see more of this kind of opinionated software in B2B emerging.

My brother is raving about the book Four Disciplines of Execution (summary). The book has a similar notion to Amazon’s around leading indicator vs lagging indicators. But they also have this idea of scoreboards.

Talking of the “medium of dashboards” - I’ve been spending a lot of time in Google Data Studio recently and I really appreciate the idea of a blank canvas to design layout and reporting on top of. It implicitly encourages layout as a primary activity.