KPI Dashboard

What a KPI dashboard shows

A KPI dashboard is organised around targets, not data sources. Each tile answers the same three questions: what’s the number, what should it be, and how far off are we?

In the example, a sales team’s Q3 page shows six KPIs. Win rate and pipeline coverage are ahead of target. Revenue and average deal size are slightly behind, at 93% and 92%. New customers is the clear problem, at 48 against a target of 60 (80%). Sales cycle is a “lower is better” metric, so 41 days against a 45-day ceiling is good news, and it’s coloured green.

Each tile uses a small bar with a target tick, a mini bullet chart, so the gap to target is visible without reading the percentage.

Common KPI dashboards

Most teams build one. The most common, and the KPIs they usually track:

Team	Typical KPIs
Sales	Revenue vs. target, win rate, pipeline coverage, average deal size, sales cycle length
SaaS / subscription	MRR or ARR, net revenue retention, churn, customer acquisition cost, CAC payback
Marketing	Leads, cost per lead, conversion rate by stage, marketing-sourced pipeline
Operations	On-time delivery, capacity utilisation, backlog, defect or error rate
Customer support	First response time, resolution time, CSAT, ticket backlog

Leadership’s version, covering the whole business, is the executive dashboard.

Anatomy of a KPI tile

Whatever the visual, each KPI needs:

• A clear label with a time frame. “Revenue (Q3)”, not “Revenue”.
• The current value, large and rounded.
• The target, stated as a number, so nobody has to remember it.
• A status. Percent of target, a variance, or a colour. Make sure the colour logic handles “lower is better” metrics like cost, churn and cycle time.
• Optionally, a trend. A sparkline shows whether a metric that’s on target today is heading the wrong way.

The simplest version is a row of KPI cards. Dashboards with more metrics often switch to a table of KPIs with a bullet chart or sparkline column.

Best practices

• Every KPI needs an owner and a target. If nobody can say what “good” looks like, it’s a metric, not a KPI, and it belongs on a detail page.
• Order by importance. The KPI the team is judged on first goes top left.
• Use the same tile layout throughout. When every tile puts value, target and status in the same place, readers scan instead of read.
• Colour sparingly. Reserve red for what needs action. If half the page is red, nothing is.

Mocking up a KPI dashboard

Choosing the KPIs and agreeing their targets is most of the work, and it’s a conversation rather than a build task, so sketch the tiles on a mockup first. Our dashboard wireframe best practices show how to lay them out.