Creating and maintaining reports and dashboards

Overview

Regularly collecting quantitative customer insights and product performance metrics is crucial for making informed decisions, especially when prioritizing your roadmap and backlog. It also provides value across the organization for stakeholders monitoring product health and their own KPIs. However, without clear, easily accessible data in a summary format, it can become overwhelming — particularly for those not deeply involved in product details or data analysis.

Result

Our Product Ops Assistant will help democratize your data and analytics by creating and maintaining reports and dashboards tailored to the needs of the audience. This ensures that decisions across the organization are based on the most up-to-date and relevant insights.

Share playbook

Process

Meet to discuss reports and dashboards

Product Ops Assistant & Product Leader

Discuss the need for reports or dashboards that summarize relevant data. Understand who the audience is, what information would be useful based on their needs and goals, and any tools currently used (e.g., Amplitude, Mixpanel, Google Analytics, Looker). Assess whether these existing tools can be leveraged or if a report/dashboard created with a different tool is necessary.

Gather inputs

‍Product Ops Assistant

‍Engage with team members and stakeholders who will use the reports or dashboards to understand their specific requirements. Use the following questions to guide your discussions:

Current challenges — are there existing reports addressing similar needs? What gaps or pain points exist in the current data?
Goals and KPIs — what are the key goals and KPIs, and what metrics will help track progress (See our “Working with stakeholders to define KPIs” playbook on this topic).
Benchmarking and Targets — are there any internal or industry benchmarks to measure against? Do you want to compare the data with historical performance?
Actionable insights — what decisions or actions will be driven by the data? What insights do you need to act on?
Product/Feature Usage — what product or feature consumption trends are important to understand?
Segmentation — are there specific variables (e.g., user type, geography) to filter or segment data? What cohorts or behaviors are you interested in analyzing?
Trends and health — what regular data is necessary to monitor product health? Are there key thresholds that require alerts?
Compliance and security — are there data sensitivity or compliance concerns to consider when building the reports?
Report format and visualization — what type of visualizations do you prefer (charts, graphs, tables)?‍
Frequency — how often do you need these reports or dashboards updated?

Create the report or dashboard

Product Ops Assistant

If possible, build the report or dashboard based on input from the Product Leader and stakeholders. Alternatively, you may need to collaborate with a data analyst or other specialist on implementation of the report or dashboard. Provide them with the requirements that you’ve gathered and give feedback on the outcome.
A few key principles to follow include:

Clarity and simplicity — present data in a clean, straightforward manner. Ensure charts and visualizations are easy to interpret, with intuitive labels, axes, and legends.
Contextual information — Include benchmarks, targets, or historical comparisons where possible. Use notes or tooltips to help users quickly interpret complex data points.
Actionable insights — prioritize actionable metrics that drive decisions. Implement alerts or triggers for critical data thresholds when applicable.
Prioritization — highlight the most important metrics prominently. Align the dashboard’s structure with business goals and key KPIs.
Consistency - maintain a consistent use of colors, chart types, and formats to make the dashboard easy to follow and interpret.

Share the report or dashboard

Product Ops Assistant

Once the report or dashboard is created, share it with the Product Leader for review and make any necessary revisions based on their feedback. After finalizing the report, distribute it to the relevant team members and stakeholders, ensuring they receive clear instructions on how to interpret the data and any important context behind the numbers. If the report or dashboard is live or will be updated regularly, provide details on how they can access it for ongoing updates. Encourage them to reach out with any questions, and ask for feedback regularly as their data needs evolve.

Maintain and update based on feedback

‍Product Ops Assistant

‍Ensure the report or dashboard is maintained and continuously reflects the most recent and relevant data. Actively incorporate feedback from the Product Leader and stakeholders to keep the reports aligned with their goals. Stay aware of new initiatives or objectives within the organization, and update the report or dashboard as needed to ensure it remains useful and relevant. Proactively making these updates will ensure that the data remains a key resource for decision-making across the organization.