gtmjosh | Ask a Business Question, Not for a Dashboard

Ask a Business Question, Not for a Dashboard

A question with a decision behind it, and one named reader.

The previous guide opened on this and it is worth doing once more from the reporting side, because the failure looks different here.

There, the problem was that the process had not captured what the question needed. Here, the capture is fine and the question was never asked. A surface gets built to show what is available rather than to answer what is at stake, and the tell is that it is comprehensive. Twelve charts. A filter panel. Everything anybody might want.

A report that shows everything has made no decisions, which means it has left every decision to the reader, which is the work it was supposed to do.

Three things

The question, phrased so it has an answer somebody could disagree with.

The decision at stake, which is the test separating a real question from an interesting one. What happens if the answer is bad? If nothing, that is honest, and it means this report should be cheap.

The audience, which most briefs skip and which changes almost every subsequent choice. A number for the person who owns the process and a number for the person who funds it are different artifacts, and Chapter 8 is about why.

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A question, and one reader

The surface above shows everything, which means it decided nothing. Write the question, then pick the one person it is for.

Sample situation

A report that made no decisions

FIXTURE-TWELVE-CHARTS

Charts: Twelve, plus a filter panel
Requested as: "Visibility into follow-through"
Covers: Everything anybody might want
Decisions it makes for the reader: None
Where the work went: To the reader, which is what it was meant to do for them

Which of these has a decision behind it?

Of the qualified inbound requests last quarter, what share reached a booked conversation, and where did the rest stop?
A population, a window, an outcome, and a second half that tells you where to look when the answer is bad.Can we see how inbound follow-through is performing?
What almost every reporting request sounds like, and a completely reasonable thing to want.How many requests came in, how many were qualified, and how many were contacted?
Three precise, countable numbers that will be exactly right every time.

Who is this brief for?

The sales leader who owns the outcome and can reassign people to it.
One reader who can act on the answer, which is what makes every subsequent design choice decidable.Everyone with an interest: the owner, the funder, and the analysts.
Nobody is excluded, and one artifact is cheaper to maintain than three.The analyst who will maintain it.
They are the person who most needs the definitions and the caveats to be right.

Chapter 1 of 90 complete