We’ve been interviewing Dan Archer who is Marketing Director at 383, one of our customers. 383 is a digital product studio working with organisations to design and make new products and services to maximise emerging and unknown opportunities. Dan’s been telling us about some of the great ways 383 have gone about building a data-driven culture through KPIs both internally and for their clients.
Where and how do you display and share your dashboard to encourage the team to view, discuss and act-on the data?
We have a huge high resolution display in our studio that loops various dashboards that are relevant to the teams using them. For example, for our sales team we display live metrics of the number of leads, proposals issued and the sales pipeline. For production we display the jobs that are in the studio along with team velocity. For our technologists we display the number of deployments, server metrics and the status of our deployment tools.
These displays are always on during the day and automatically update to give us a constant view on the pulse of our business.
When working with clients we will create a Geckoboard and encourage them to have this visible within their office spaces.
How did you choose the KPIs to include on your dashboard?
For clients, this always maps back to their initial brief and requirements. We don’t display metrics for vanity sake, but instead to give a direction as to where action should be taken if the numbers are off track.
We also look at the sources of data and ensure that we’re offering a valuable snapshot with the detail still retained in each source for further investigation. The dashboard should enable anyone to quickly get an overview of the status of the business to the nearest minute. This is vital in the fast moving industries that both we and our clients operate in.
How did you decide the layout of your dashboard?
We prioritise the most important metrics and add those to the top of the board, and usually make them bigger. We utilise a mix of widget types to add some context to each type of metric. Overall, they’re configured to allow us to quickly consume important data at a glance and then in a little more detail when more closely interrogated.
Any other pro tips on how you can use dashboards to build a data-driven culture?
We firmly believe in the philosophy that ‘data solves arguments’, so we frame each question based on user research blended with data insights. Dashboards help us to focus people to always refer back to the data that matters to validate or disprove a hypothesis. By having instant access to a single view of data sources, we quickly compare these values and can see the bigger picture.
Finally, we saw you have an event called Canvas coming up. Can you tell us a bit about it?
Canvas is our annual one day digital product conference, attended by over 300 professionals working in product and UX design. This year we're hearing insider stories from product people at some of the world's most interesting products and services. We're really lucky to have speakers joining us from the likes of Withings, Medium, Etsy, Travelex and even NASA. It's happening in October at the swanky new Library of Birmingham, so a venue that really matches the content of the conference. All the details can be found at www.canvasconf.co.uk.
Sounds like a great speaker line-up, we’ll be sure to check-it-out. Thanks again for your time!
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