We open a lot of dashboards in our first week with a client. The typical one has forty metrics, six colours and a filter panel nobody touches. It is updated every Monday and read by almost no one.

A dashboard is not a place to store numbers. It is a tool for making one decision a week a little better.

Start with the decision

Write down the decisions your leadership team makes every week. Hiring, pricing, where to send a crew, which customer to call. Then keep only the numbers that would change one of them.

Five is usually enough

In most mid-sized companies we end up with five numbers on the main screen. Each has an owner, a target and a short note when it moves. Everything else lives one click away.

• One number for cash

• One for the customer

• One for the team

• Two for the constraint you are working on this quarter

Make it boring

Same layout, same order, same time every week. When the dashboard is predictable, people notice the one number that is not.