Tips for Quarterly and Monthly Dashboards?

[paulmrau]

Hey All,
Are there any best practices for building quarterly business reviews (QBRs) and monthly business reviews in Looker? (Not Looker Studio for my use case in particular)

I want to build a home base for monthly and quarterly metrics.

[nateceee · Accepted solution]

Curious to hear what other people think, but here are some fundamentals: 

• Consider Your Audience First: Who are they, what data do they need, and why? Assume nothing and clarify everything.

• Gather Insights Regularly: Collect insights throughout the month or quarter. This allows you to pull from a rich source of data for your wrap-up analysis.

• Monitor Dashboard Engagement: Are your dashboards being viewed? If not, why? Pro-tip check out Looker usage reports. Understand if your audience prefers different formats, like slide decks. In such cases, a report generation tool like Rollstack can be beneficial.

• Simplicity is Key: Avoid cluttering a single dashboard with too much information. Less is often more when it comes to data presentation.

• Learn from the Best: If you haven't already, consider reading Storytelling with Data to enhance your ability to communicate effectively through visuals. 

• Dashboards shouldn't be static: Going back to understanding your audience, be willing to change your dashboard over time - don't change at the drop of hat, always strive to understand the root of the ask before making significant changes. 
  
  
  

[katietee12]

All of this is a good, but an initial assessment can be super helpful. For instance, what are the current monthly / quarterly reports and dashboards? Are the being used? Are data consumers happy with them etc., It's good to get a lay of the land before jumping in and making changes.

[nateceee]

That's a really great point, Katie. Yeah, I forgot that. Goal setting and initial analysis are key. They also help with anticipating ad-hoc asks. Anything else on the QBR front? 

[katietee12]

Applying first principles can be helpful for all things reporting...

[paulmrau]

Thanks for this answer, the dashboard engagement piece is so important. Sometimes it is better just to do powerpoints if that's what people look at. It's cool there's a tool like Rollstack to connect Looker to PowerPoint.

Thinking of the audience first, and gathering insights over the time span leading up to the report is great too.

[ArkadyZagdan]

@paulmrau 
Really hard to addres as each audience is somewhat different.

In Bigglo we have create quite a few Monthly and Quarterly business reviews and what we have learned from customers feedback so far is:

1.Make simple one pager summarizing top 8 to 10 metrics at first glance.

• You can include here things like trendline, MoM/QoQ dynamics, and actuals vs targets vs estimates.
  It should only  show most important data on area level with a quick ability to jump into detailed pages by clicking on an arrow for example.
• Try to avoid tiny sparklines, not much of a trend can be spotted there in most cases.
• Do big scorecards - make data clearly visible at a first glance
• Use proper coloring. Use red and green for negatives and positives.
• Add tooltips to your metadata if sharing and not presenting - thhis will make sure everyone is on theh same page when it comes to understadning methhodology of computation and definition of your data.

The goal of this snapshot is to highlight what is hapenning on a general level. Another pages of the dashboard should allow deeper dive into selected area of the business.

For example, if you see traffic decrease you want to click on the arrow of the snapshot and jump into detailed section. This part should be more detailed and allows user to answer as many questions as possiblle, preferably on the one page. Here is a list of what have worked for our Clients:

• Use tables, for many businenss people they are best to analyze and compare detailed data. 
• Allow interactions and actually inform users that they can interact witth data in other ways than just drop-downs. ( a lot opf business people are not BI savvy and still surprised by functionalities)
• Use dynamic dimensions and metrics - this should save you a lot of space and allow user to analyze multiple dimensions and metrics on a single chart making it 10X more useful than just static one.

Example with one chart with an ability to toglle between metrics and dimensions.

I am using a Looker Studio here, and in Looker you can do more fancy things 🙂
I hope you have found it useful. If you are starting your dashhboard development role you can find my medium post useful where I am sharing things to consider when creating a dashboards.

Regards
Arkady Zagdan - Bigglo

[ArkadyZagdan]

Btw
Here is an URL to working preview o Monthly Snapshot done in Looker Studio:

https://lookerstudio.google.com/reporting/0eb9fcbd-b0c8-4bfe-8e9a-19ec57bbe482/page/p_215hy7gfid

Unfortunately it is done based on GA 4 data so you may not find it too relevant but I think it still shows the general idea 🙂

[nateceee]

This is fabulous, I really like the principles of the design, I am thinking more about Looker and not Looker studio, but great structure overall! Thank you. 

[katietee12]

This is a great framework -- do you do both one pagers and longer reports. Do you ever have to convert these dashboards to PowerPoints, Slides, or PDFs?

[ArkadyZagdan]

@katietee12 
That's a great question. Above is example of analytical dashboard serving as a Quarterly or monthly summary. It's horizontal layout is made purely for better UX when filtering and analyzing the data.

For static reports with intention for a print as PDF its different and more pivotal A4 page alike aproach. Those can be printed down and read as classic reports not dashboards. Think quarterly financial report. With a lot of similar charts and different data points and simple comparisons QoQ, LTM, YoY. Definitely more text and adnotations. But its totally different apraoch. More of a reporting summary. Which of course is useful but in my opinion leave users with more questions than answers due to lack of an ability of drilling down to detailed data.

Presentations are another concepts. With Looker Studio ability to present they can be more slides alike. Here you can go fancy and create a power point alike pages with shapes and texts.

Really broad topic 🙂 Heavily dependant on the charachter of the audience, their needs and their habits. 

One  super important thhing in my opinion- make sure final users (board memebrs, managers) are involved in the development process and request constant feedback from them on a mock-uping phase....before you dive too deep into development of a final version...which they may find useless.

Arkady Zagdan
Bigglo.pl

[nateceee]

You last couple points are so important. Knowing the audience and collaborating on the quarterly report it cricital.