Field notes

Five questions before adding another KPI tile

· 5 min read

Person writing a checklist in a notebook next to a laptop

Dashboard bloat rarely arrives as a grand redesign. It arrives as “can we just add one more tile?” Five questions slow that habit without requiring a formal governance committee.

  1. Which decision changes if this number moves? If nobody can name a decision, the tile is decoration.
  2. Who owns the definition in writing? A metric without an owner becomes folklore within a quarter.
  3. What event or billing field feeds it? Hand-wavy “engagement” scores fail this test.
  4. What do we remove to make room? Core dashboards are scarce attention, not infinite canvas.
  5. How will we know the tile is wrong? A sanity check or reconciliation path prevents silent drift.

During subscription KPI dashboard reviews we paste these questions above the candidate list. Roughly half the proposed tiles never survive the fifth answer — which is the point.

All field notes