Dashboards & Reporting

Dashboards are visual interfaces that display key metrics (MRR, CAC, retention, funnel conversion) in real-time or near-real-time. They let executives track performance, product teams measure feature adoption, and marketing teams optimize campaigns without querying databases or asking analysts.

The core components are: a data source (warehouse, analytics tool, or API), a BI tool (Looker, Tableau, Metabase, Mode), pre-built metrics and dimensions (semantic layer), and alerts that notify teams when metrics move outside expected ranges. Most companies also need scheduled reports, custom exports, and role-based access.

Common failure modes: dashboards that are too complex (no one uses them), metrics that don't match (different definitions across tools), slow query performance (5+ second load times), and no ownership (stale data, broken charts). We focus on simplicity, performance, and governance.