business-intelligence

# Business intelligence Most organizations have too many dashboards and too little insight. The two are related: when everything is measured, nothing is watched. ## Start from the decision Every report answers one question for one audience who can act on it. Before building, name the decision it informs and what a viewer would do differently based on it. If nothing would change, do not build it. That single filter removes most dashboard requests, and the ones surviving it get used. ## Metric trees Structure metrics as a tree, not a list. One primary outcome at the top, decomposed into the drivers that mathematically produce it, each decomposed again. Revenue = customers × average value. Customers = new + retained. New = traffic × conversion. And so on. This does two things a metric list cannot: when the top number moves, you can walk down to find *where*; and it makes clear which metrics are levers and which are outcomes. Teams should be measured on levers they control, not on outcomes they influence. ## Dashboard design - **One screen, one question.** Scrolling dashboards are several dashboards that were not separated. - **Lead with the answer** — the primary number, its comparison, and whether that is good. A number with no comparison is not information. - **Comparison always**: prior period, target, or cohort. Choose deliberately, because each tells a different story. - **Say what "good" is.** A viewer who cannot tell whether 4.2% is good will not act. - **An...