Design Actionable Executive Dashboard

Business Context

NotionFlow, a B2B collaboration SaaS product, has grown from 40,000 to 58,000 monthly active workspaces in six months. The COO says the current executive dashboard is "busy but not useful": it shows 35 charts, yet product and go-to-market leaders still leave weekly reviews without clear decisions.

Metric Scenario

Last month, the dashboard showed MAU up 9%, trial signups up 14%, and total projects created up 11%. However, paid conversion fell from 4.8% to 4.1%, 90-day logo retention dropped from 88% to 84%, and expansion revenue slowed from 7% to 3% QoQ. The Head of Product wants a redesigned dashboard that surfaces the few metrics that explain business health, highlights where to investigate, and leads to concrete actions for product, sales, and customer success.

Requirements

1. Define the primary KPI or North Star Metric you would place at the top of the dashboard and explain why.
2. Select 5-7 supporting metrics that distinguish leading indicators from lagging outcomes.
3. Describe how you would structure the dashboard so stakeholders can quickly identify whether a change is good, bad, or noise.
4. Explain how you would diagnose the drop in conversion and retention using metric decomposition.
5. Recommend 3-5 actions or dashboard design principles that make the dashboard consistently actionable.
6. Identify guardrail metrics to ensure optimization of one metric does not harm overall business performance.

Data Available

• workspace_activity_daily
• user_events
• trial_funnel_events
• subscriptions
• account_health_scores
• nps_responses
• salesforce_opportunities