KPI Dashboard Template for Product Analytics

Between 5 and 10. Research from [Stephen Few](https://www.perceptualedge.com/) on dashboard design shows that humans can monitor 5-9 metrics effectively. Beyond that, attention fragments and the dashboard becomes a data dump. Use the three-tier hierarchy (business outcomes, product health, leading indicators) to prioritize. If you need more than 10 metrics, split them across two dashboards for different audiences.

A dashboard is a live, always-on view of current performance. It answers "what is happening right now?" A reporting deck is a periodic snapshot with analysis and narrative. It answers "what happened last quarter and what are we doing about it?" The dashboard feeds the deck. Review the dashboard weekly; build the deck monthly or quarterly. The [quarterly business review template](/templates/quarterly-business-review-template) provides a structure for the periodic reporting format.

Daily refresh is sufficient for most product dashboards. Real-time dashboards create a temptation to react to noise instead of signal. The exceptions are operational dashboards (error rates, latency) and launch-day dashboards where real-time monitoring is essential. For product health metrics like activation rate or NPS, daily is more than enough.

Start with historical data. Look at the metric's range over the past 90 days. Set the warning threshold at the 10th percentile (the bottom of normal range) and the critical threshold at a level that has never been sustained for more than 1 day. After 30 days, adjust based on alert volume. If you are getting more than 2 alerts per week on a single metric, the threshold is too tight.

The tool matters less than the metric definitions and layout. Amplitude and Mixpanel work well for product analytics. Looker and Metabase work well for cross-source data (product + revenue + support). Google Sheets works in a pinch for small teams. The key criteria: can it pull from all your data sources, does it support auto-refresh, and can it send alerts? Pick the tool your team will actually look at. ---