Hellooo 👋 So happy to have you here. I’m Kevan. I have spent 15+ years as a head of marketing for some cool tech startups. Now I’ve co-founded a brand storytelling business called Bonfire. We do coaching, advisory, and content. If you identify with creativity and marketing, we’d love for you to join us.
Steal this dashboard!
I cannot seem to escape marketing dashboards.
Obviously, reporting was a significant part of my role as VP Marketing for a series of SaaS startups. Execs love dashboards. Turns out clients like dashboards, too! So now that we’re working with clients at Bonfire, spreadsheets have found me again. I tried real hard to hide, but 🤷♂️
This week, I had spreadsheets on the brain, filling out multiple ones at work and reading about others in substack. Carilu Deitrich shared the following dashboard artifact from Segment’s marketing team:
What I like about Carilu’s spreadsheet is the same thing I strive for in dashboards of mine: simplicity and clarity and color-coding.
I’ve written before about some of my favorite spreadsheets, all of which hopefully are simple and clear and definitely are colorful.
This week, I wanted to highlight one in particular that I keep returning to: the andon chart — or, more plainly — the stoplights scoreboard, with its color coded cells for on track (green), at risk (yellow), or off track (red).
(Intrepid newsletter readers might remember this one from over a year ago, buried in a newsletter about scoreboarding.)
Get a copy of this in Sheets →
Green-yellow-red is a rather universal color scheme to describe how something is going. The team culture app Kona works by asking every teammate for a quick check in of how you’re feeling, rated green, yellow, or red (or you could respond with any custom emoji - a favorite of ours used to be the “hanging-in-there sloth”).
Weekly metrics don’t need any more complicated signaling than the basics: on track (green), at risk (yellow), or off track (red). Given this, it’s easy to conditionally format your spreadsheets to show off these colors based on how your metrics are going.
How do you use color and clarity in your marketing dashboards?
If you end up borrowing a copy of the stoplights scoreboard linked above, here are some guidelines for how I’ve found it most useful:
When I build this type of scoreboard, I like to group metrics by their place in the customer journey (awareness, acquisition, revenue, retention) and then list them in order of their importance (most important to the left).
It’s useful for showing your 12-16 most important metrics. But you can also do it with waaaaay fewer. Twelve to sixteen is a LOT!
If you’re reporting on each week’s performance but setting quarterly OKRs, you will need to break down your OKRs into weekly targets. For instance, if you need to drive 1,000 leads in a quarter, then you can divide 1,000 by 12 weeks and arrive at a weekly target of 83.
If you’re reporting on quarterly progress toward your big OKR numbers, then you’ll want to switch to a forecast/pacing metric and report on the new projection each week. For instance, if you have a goal for 1,000 leads in a quarter and at the end of week five you have driven 504 leads so far, then you would figure out your weekly average (~101) and multiply it by the total number of weeks in the quarter (12) to arrive at 1,212, which puts you well ahead of your 1,000 goal. Congrats!
About this newsletter …
Hi, I’m Kevan, a marketing exec based in Boise, Idaho, who specializes in startup marketing and brand-building. I previously built brands at Oyster, Buffer, and Vox. Now I am cofounder at Bonfire, a brand storytelling company.
Each week on this substack, I share playbooks, case studies, stories, and links from inside the startup marketing world. Not yet subscribed? No worries. You can check out the archive, or sign up below:
Thank you for being here! 🙇♂️
I’m lucky to count folks from great brands like these (and many more) as part of this newsletter community.