Chapters
- 01 · Ask a Business Question, Not for a Dashboard
- 02 · Choose the Right Population and Denominator
- 03 · Separate Volume, Speed, Quality, Cost, and Outcome
- 04 · Compare Trends and Useful Segments
- 05 · Use Leading and Lagging Indicators
- 06 · Show Sample Size, Missing Data, and Blind Spots
- 07 · Connect Summary Metrics to the Records
- 08 · Design for the Person Using the Report
- 09 · Capstone: Build a Reporting Brief
16 min · Interactive exercise
Capstone: Build a Reporting Brief
Read the assembled brief four ways, validate it, and approve version 1.0.
The brief is finished, and nobody has yet read it the way a person who has to use it would. This chapter does that four ways.
Three of the readers are trying to use it: the owner who can reassign people, the funder who decides the spend, and the analyst who has to reproduce it. Each needs something different and the brief either has it or does not.
The fourth reader is trying to misread it, in good faith. Nothing about that reader is careless. Quoting the strongest segment as a target and reading a middling composite as partial health are both the natural thing to do with numbers as they are usually presented. The brief prevents both, and it does so by printing two things next to the numbers rather than by asking anybody to be more careful. That is the whole method of this guide in one reading.
Then thirteen validation checks run by stable ID, testing the seams. Does the incompleteness name its direction? Does every ratio claim carry its difference? Does the one metric that waives a disclosure say why? A section written on its own has no way to raise any of them.
What the brief is not
It does not make the numbers correct. They were correct before you started, and that was never the problem: every misleading number in this guide was arithmetically right.
What it buys is that somebody can now disagree with a number and point at exactly which choice they disagree with. The population, the denominator, the framing, or the disclosure. A report nobody can argue with is a report nobody can correct.
GTM Lab
Saved locallyMetric Dictionary and Reporting Brief
sample-reporting-brief · v1 · draft
Read the brief four ways
The same brief, four readers, four different questions. Three of them are trying to use it. The fourth is trying to misread it in good faith, which is the reading a brief actually has to survive.
- The owner, who can reassign peopleWhere it stopped, by segment, with a path into the records.
The decomposed stop-reason bucket and a drill-through path per metric. - The funder, who decides the spendThe outcome, the trend, and the cost per result.
An outcome metric, a trend on it, and a cost metric with its metering boundary stated. - The analyst, who has to reproduce itThe denominator, and what it leaves out.
A stated denominator, the incompleteness, and the direction it bends the answer. - The misreader, acting in good faithTo quote the best segment as a target and read a middling composite as partial health.
A record count beside every compared rate, and a composite shown with its components.
Run all 13 validation checks
The checks test the seams between sections, since every section was written while looking only at that section. Each runs by its stable ID and reports pass or fail with a reason.