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Your Startup Needs a Dashboard

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Re: Your Startup Needs a Dashboard

#51

Post by gnarbarian »

sonofabell wrote: post #43
sophacles wrote: post #28

I worked at a place doing network appliance stuff. We managed and developed the machines, and product to end users. A simple dashboard increased our effectiveness by an order of magnitude. Some simple graphs and deep knowledge of the code really really helped. Some data from other departments combined with this was amazing. A simple color coded call queue count told us there was a problem before the front-line tech s…

I completely agree with your point 'the human mind is amazing at pattern recognition'. From personal experience, I can say I am a 'visual' person. (So much so that my startup is entirely based on this premise, because I think our eyes are amazing analytics tools.) But to my point: is that the case for everybody? Is everyone 'visual', or do some folks think better 'visually' than others?

well definitely not blind people.

Re: Your Startup Needs a Dashboard

#52

Post by moe »

roc wrote: post #45
MicahWedemeyer wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I won't disagree, but my main point is that everything has a cost. These blog posts often present what your business "needs" to do in a context-free manner. If you are sitting on your thumbs looking for something to do, then definitely add a dashboard. If you're like me and have a backlog a mile long, maybe a dashboard isn't the best way to spend your time.

> "maybe a dashboard isn't the best way to spend your time." The point of the dashboard is that when you have one, you have actual accessible data from which you can plausibly determine what is the best use of your time. e.g. If you can see that conversions are already coming in faster than the database is scaling then you know that you need to solve the scaling problem before you worry about A/B testing. Or vice-ver…

That's a rather simplistic view and a slippery slope.

Spending time on a pretty dashboard is one of the easiest ways to get drawn into vanity metrics and fapalytics.

Proper monitoring is important, but that usually means completely different things for different departments.

The CEO doesn't need to see database performance charts because he can't make sense of them anyway. Likewise the admin doesn't need to see conversion charts because they are not relevant to his work.

Trying to squeeze unrelated data into a common dashboard often leads to false correlations and entire herds of shaved yaks.

You provided a nice example for a false correlation yourself: The conversion-rate almost never relates to database performance in any meaningful way.

Re: Your Startup Needs a Dashboard

#53

Post by slantyyz »

j_s wrote: post #46
chucklarge wrote: post #27

I suggests everyone read these whitepapers on dashboard design. http://www.perceptualedge.com/articles/Whitepapers/Dashboard... http://www.perceptualedge.com/articles/Whitepapers/Common_Pi... The author also has written a great book on dashboard design. Operations dashboards are essential for any (tech?) company. Business dashboards are another beast all together.

Here is the book: http://www.amazon.com/Information-Dashboard-Design-Effective... Do you have any additional suggested reading material? Thanks much.

That Stephen Few book is pretty much all you need, but you can also check out Edward Tufte's books, and Juice Analytics' white papers (http://www.juiceanalytics.com/).

Re: Your Startup Needs a Dashboard

#54

Post by TimGebhardt »

moe wrote: post #52
roc wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "maybe a dashboard isn't the best way to spend your time." The point of the dashboard is that when you have one, you have actual accessible data from which you can plausibly determine what is the best use of your time. e.g. If you can see that conversions are already coming in faster than the database is scaling then you know that you need to solve the scaling problem before you worry about A/B testing. Or vice-ver…

That's a rather simplistic view and a slippery slope. Spending time on a pretty dashboard is one of the easiest ways to get drawn into vanity metrics and fapalytics. Proper monitoring is important, but that usually means completely different things for different departments. The CEO doesn't need to see database performance charts because he can't make sense of them anyway. Likewise the admin doesn't need to see conve…

What about a small organization or a one-man e-commerce company where database performance affects conversions, and you're the one-and-only tech-guy?

Re: Your Startup Needs a Dashboard

#55

Post by jakejake »

MicahWedemeyer wrote: post #30

At any given time, there are a near infinite number of things your business "needs" to do: add a dashboard, A/B test your landing pages, test your database backups, fix your security holes, improve your customer service, add more metrics tracking, etc, etc. The list goes on and on. A big part of running your business involves looking at this list and picking the ones that make sense for your business, not what the bl…

Those are all good things but to me there's only one thing on your list that can instantly end just about any company with no way to recover. That's not having working backups. I would always put that one first!

Re: Your Startup Needs a Dashboard

#57

Post by GauntletWizard »

It's worth noting that dashboards and instrumentation are one of my key job functions - As it is for all Google SREs. Having the data to tell when you're doing well and when your failing is key - Without knowing you're broke, how do you know to be fixing?

Re: Your Startup Needs a Dashboard

#58

Post by nathan_f77 »

I really, really want to see a beautiful, open source dashboard app, preferably written with Rails.

So far, I've only seen beautiful but closed source SaaS apps, and pretty ugly open source PHP or Python projects. I'm very tempted to start my own, but I just wish someone like Panic would open source their awesome design.

Re: Your Startup Needs a Dashboard

#59

Post by chucklarge »

j_s wrote: post #46
chucklarge wrote: post #27

I suggests everyone read these whitepapers on dashboard design. http://www.perceptualedge.com/articles/Whitepapers/Dashboard... http://www.perceptualedge.com/articles/Whitepapers/Common_Pi... The author also has written a great book on dashboard design. Operations dashboards are essential for any (tech?) company. Business dashboards are another beast all together.

Here is the book: http://www.amazon.com/Information-Dashboard-Design-Effective... Do you have any additional suggested reading material? Thanks much.

There is this as well http://www.amazon.com/Enterprise-Dashboards-Design-Best-Prac...

The The Grammar of Graphics (Statistics and Computing) by Leland Wilkinson is also great, though more focused on building graphing systems. I believe it is the inspiration for a lot of d3.js http://www.amazon.com/The-Grammar-Graphics-Statistics-Comput...

Re: Your Startup Needs a Dashboard

#60

Post by fennecfoxen »

Swizec wrote: post #12
tomgallard wrote: post #3

I have to say, I'm in two minds about this. On one side- yes it's supercool to have a dashboard with maps and metrics and everything like that. And I can see it could be really useful too when something's going wrong. On the other hand, I'd be wary of building anything like this until I had a good number of customers, paying me money for a service. Is the product so complete (I would ask myself) and my users so happy…

Alert emails can do a lot, but not everything. Sometimes you need a way to look at the system and say "Hmm, everything works, but those two queues shouldn't have 20k items waiting in them ..."

Or, even better, "Things aren't working. Why not? Oh, snap, these queues have like 20k items in them. Maybe something's wrong with their consumer."

handy, that one.

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