What’s up everyone, today we’re taking a dive into the world of dashboard building.Startups may not always have the luxury of having a dedicated data analyst on staff, which means marketers may need to get more hands-on with data. Yeah I haven’t had the data analyst luxury in my career very often! In episode 38, we discussed marketing reporting and how you can use key reports to help highlight impact and find new opportunities. But we’re not talking about reports here right?That’s right, dashboards aren’t reports. They are living breathing snapshots of key areas you want to keep an eye on in your business.Yeah I think a lot of people don’t make that distinction and just assume reports = dashboards = chart. Where should marketers be starting? With charts?Scatter plots, bar charts, pie charts, maps, funnels, box plots… There’s a bunch of different chart types and visualizations at your disposal when you're designing your dashboard, but this isn’t where you should start.Here’s today’s main takeaway: When designing a dashboard, it's important to focus on the decisions you want to make, rather than just the metrics you want to track. Before building your dashboard, consider your audience and bring together the right people to answer key questions. This will help you create a prototype of your first version.Dashboard projects are close to both of our hearts. Both having worked for Klipfolio (a dashboard SaaS for startups and SMBs), we’ve spent a fair amount of time researching and writing about the internal dashboard building process.There’s obviously a critical collaboration piece to this that would be an initial starting point for anyone taking on a dashboard project. Yeah one thing we always said about building good dashboards is that it takes a village.So Phil, you’ve actually led the charge in this area at a few startups. What are some of the questions you should be asking as a marketer to get started?Questions before buildingThe first questions to tackle as a team are: What metrics would you look at on a regular basis to measure performance and determine areas for growth? What metrics do you care about the most?So ultimately, this depends entirely on your team goals and the top priority metrics we’ve selected as a group. These goals further inform how to prioritize views and metrics in our dashboard. What does this group of stakeholders look like when you’re starting to build things?Stakeholder groups:
Main viewers: Who will be digesting or regularly looking at the dashboard
Marketing Ops/Data Ops: What resources to you have to help you build the dashboard
Designer and point person: Who’s scoping out the dashboard and driving project management as well as designing the end dashboard
Admittedly, in startup land, you’ll likely be wearing all three hats. I know I have. But in bigger teams, you’re working with a lot more moving pieces. Yeah I’ve gotten a taste of both of these. Small teams and bigger teams. There’s advantages to both. But I think regardless, it’s important to get a lay of the land first.Yeah it might be helpful to walk through an example. You’ve been pretty deep in lifecycle marketing in your career. Maybe give us a real life example wearing a lifecycle hat. So Phil, you’re Director of lifecycle and you’re tasked with building out a lifecycle dashboard.Here’s a list of example questions to ask yourself and stakeholders Yeah I like the lifecycle example actually. It’s broad enough to touch most parts of marketing so I can  use it as goal posts as we unpack some of this stuff.Your goal with these questions is to figure out what metrics we care about the most, getting a benchmark and establishing a goal for each of these metrics and how they have been trending over time.
Current segment/vertical data we get on signups, are there specific segments we know we want to grow?
Current lead scoring on signup events, are we scoring leads based on email and domain and any other data we might be collecting?
What’s the current