TWhat is a growth dashboard, and what should you put on it?

A growth dashboard is a set of metrics that the team looks at regularly to understand whether the business is growing healthily and where to focus attention. Done well, it replaces hours of ad hoc reporting with a shared, consistent picture of what is happening. Done badly, it is a collection of numbers that look busy and tell no one anything useful.

Most marketing dashboards contain too many metrics. They include everything that is easy to pull from the tools the team uses, which means sessions, clicks, impressions, open rates, follower counts, and conversion rates all sit side by side without a clear hierarchy or a clear story.

When everything is on the dashboard, nothing has priority. The team ends up optimising for the metrics that are moving rather than the ones that matter, which are often different things.

A growth dashboard should centre on the North Star metric, the one number that most accurately reflects whether the business is delivering value to customers. Every other metric on the dashboard should either be a leading indicator that predicts movement in the North Star, or a diagnostic metric that helps explain why the North Star is or is not moving.

For most startups, the essential metrics are: the North Star metric itself, CAC by key acquisition channel, activation rate for new users, retention by cohort, LTV or a proxy for it, and revenue or MRR. Beyond those, the specific metrics depend on the business model and the current strategic priorities.

Metrics that belong on a channel-specific report rather than the top-level dashboard include click-through rates, email open rates, social engagement, and individual ad performance. These are useful for the people running those channels. They are not useful for the leadership team trying to understand the health of the business.

Weekly reviews of the key operational metrics, and monthly reviews of the strategic metrics with sufficient history to see trends, tends to work well for most early-stage companies. Daily reviews of most metrics create noise rather than insight, because daily variation is usually random rather than meaningful.

The test of a good dashboard is whether looking at it tells you clearly what to do next. If the answer is 'look at more things', the dashboard needs to be simplified.