The Dashboard Trap: How Product Teams Confuse Measurement With Decision-Making
Throughout my work with product teams, I kept seeing the same pattern. Whenever the conversation turned to analytics, it almost always started the same way: Which events should we track? Which KPIs belong on the executive dashboard? What new funnel should we build? None of these questions are wrong. The problem is that they’re usually asked too early.
Before deciding what to measure, product teams should first decide what decisions analytics is supposed to support. In practice, however, the order is often reversed. Teams build increasingly sophisticated measurement systems, hoping those systems will eventually answer whatever questions arise later. Over time, the measurement system develops a logic of its own. Every new feature generates additional events, every experiment creates another report, and every quarter introduces new KPIs while almost none of the old ones disappear. Dashboards become remarkably good at describing the product—but surprisingly ineffective at helping teams decide what...
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