What belongs on an executive dashboard
The biggest mistake in executive dashboard design is trying to show everything. A dashboard with 40 metrics tells you nothing — your eye doesn't know where to go and your brain doesn't know what to act on. The right executive dashboard has 5-8 metrics that are updated daily and tell you whether the business is healthy or not.
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The five metrics
For a COO, the five metrics that matter most are: (1) Operating margin — is the business getting more efficient as it scales? (2) Headcount productivity — revenue or output per employee. (3) Customer acquisition cost vs lifetime value — is growth sustainable? (4) On-time delivery or SLA compliance — are you doing what you promised? (5) Cash runway — how many months at current burn rate? These five tell you the operational health story.
Making them reliable
The value of these metrics depends entirely on their reliability. A metric that might be wrong is worse than no metric — it creates false confidence. Before adding any metric to an executive dashboard, you need to trace it back to source, define exactly how it's calculated, and test it against known values. This is the infrastructure work that makes the dashboard trustworthy.
Ankit Parihar
Founder & Principal Data Consultant · Paris, France