1 tip & 3 resources per week to improve your Strategy, OKRs, and Discovery practices in less than 5 minutes. Explore my new book on realprogressbook.com
Stop Looking at Flat Dashboards
Stop Looking at Flat DashboardsDear Reader, Jeff Patton explained why flat backlogs don’t work for prioritizing user stories more than 16 years ago: Arranging user stories in the order you’ll build them doesn’t help me explain to others what the system does. Try handing your user story backlog to your stakeholders or users when they ask you the question “what does the system you’re building do?” I believe the same issue occurs from putting metrics on a flat dashboard: Evaluating the month-over-month changes in metrics like registrations or bookings in isolation doesn’t help teams and stakeholders understand their contribution to business goals and how their work influences leading indicators. Just as user story mapping provides context by linking User Stories to User Activities, linking metrics to a team’s output and business goals provides context for evaluating progress: Three things determine the context of a metric:
One of my biggest frustrations is the lack of context whenever I meet teams that are asked to report metrics through flat dashboards. These organizations play the reporting game rather than focusing on steering. Imagine a SaaS company tracking Signup Conversion Rate as a key engagement metric on a dashboard. 📈 The Signup Conversion Rate jumped from 5% to 8% this month. The dashboard shows a healthy trend, and leadership is thrilled—more users are completing signups as a percentage of those who start! What’s Actually Happening (Leading Indicators)🔍 Signups Started dropped from 10,000 to 5,000 (-50%). 🔍 Signups Completed dropped from 500 to 400 (-20%). Even though the conversion rate increased, the number of completed signups decreased. The improvement is misleading because it’s based on a shrinking pool of users, not better engagement. What Caused This? (Output)💡 The team added a mandatory credit card field during signup to reduce spam accounts. While this filtered out low-quality signups, it also deterred real potential users from even starting the process. Upstream Impact on North Star Metric & Business Goals 📉 North Star Metric: Active Teams Using Core Features—The number of teams actively using the product stagnates because fewer users make it through the signup and start experiencing real value. 📉 Business Goals: Expansion Revenue—With fewer teams adopting the product, there are fewer opportunities for account expansion (e.g., upgrading to higher tiers, adding more seats). Consider using contextual metrics tools like DoubleLoop or Vistaly to shift from flat dashboard to metrics views with context. Of course, OKRs traditionally also represent metrics only in a flat layout. But that’s why I’m arguing that metrics trees should be a vital input to OKR drafting: so that teams can choose and argue for metrics that matter in their context based on their relationship to upstream business goals and downstream user behaviors and Outputs. Did you enjoy the newsletter? Please forward it. It only takes two clicks. Creating this one took two hours. Thank you for Practicing Product, Tim Gespräche über ProduktmanagementIch durfte mit meinem geschätzten Fast-Ex-Kollegen Jan Hoppe in seinem Produktkraft-Podcast einen unterhaltsamen Austausch über den sinnvollen Einsatz von Methoden führen (zur Abwechslung mal auf Deutsch).
As a Product Management Coach, I guide Product Teams to measure the real progress of their evidence-informed decisions. I focus on better practices to connect the dots of Product Strategy, Product OKRs, and Product Discovery. |
Product Practice Newsletter
1 tip & 3 resources per week to improve your Strategy, OKRs, and Discovery practices in less than 5 minutes. Explore my new book on realprogressbook.com
Product Practice #425 What Part of YouIs Making the Decision? PUBLISHED Sep 11, 2026 READ ON HERBIG.CO Dear Reader, For much of my career, I’ve helped product teams work through uncertainty. Chilling with my buddy King Arthur at Tintagel Castle I challenged assumptions, introduced frameworks, and helped people make better decisions when there was no obvious answer. While I still love doing that work, I’ve become increasingly interested in a deeper question over the past six years: From where...
Product Practice #424 Linked Better Practices over Stacked Best Practices PUBLISHED Sep 4, 2026 READ ON HERBIG.CO Dear Reader, “Let’s prioritize by value.” Value for whom? That was the question I explored in last week's essay Business Value, Customer Value, and Team Value Are Different Arguments. Today, let's demystify the term value even further. Nothing is inherently valuable. The same opportunity can have different value under different strategies. For that narrative to check out, we need...
Product Practice #423 Business Value, Customer Value, and Team Value Are Different Arguments PUBLISHED Aug 27, 2026 READ ON HERBIG.CO Dear Reader, As long as everyone focused on Value you can't do the wrong work, right? RIGHT? Well, as lovely as that sounds, I believe there's a tremendous amount of misdirected focus on value going on in teams. Let's dive into it. Three questions hide behind "value" in most conversations: Did this move a number the business gets paid on. Did customers change...