Summary: A good dashboard answers specific business questions at a glance. Here's how to choose KPIs and the right BI tool.
Dashboards fail when they show everything. They succeed when they answer specific questions for specific people.
Start with decisions
For each audience — leadership, sales, marketing, operations — list the decisions they make and the numbers they need.
Choose KPIs
- Leadership: revenue, margin, cash, pipeline, customer growth
- Sales: leads, conversion rates, deal velocity, quota attainment
- Marketing: cost per lead, channel performance, ROI
- Operations: throughput, cycle time, backlog, quality
Choose the tool
| Tool | Best for |
|---|---|
| Power BI | Microsoft environments, rich modeling |
| Looker Studio | Google stack, marketing reporting |
| Tableau | Advanced visual analytics |
| Metabase / Superset | Open-source, self-hosted |
| Custom dashboards | Embedding analytics inside your product |
Data foundation
Reliable dashboards need clean data pipelines — often a warehouse such as BigQuery, Snowflake or PostgreSQL.
FAQs
How many KPIs should a dashboard have?
Usually 5–10 per view; more detail can live in drill-down reports.
Can dashboards update in real time?
Yes, depending on data sources and tools.
Should I build or buy?
Buy BI tools for internal reporting; build custom dashboards for customer-facing analytics.
