I won the travel project! Exciting stuff.

The creative presentation for the confectionery brand I’ve been working on went really well; I’m so excited about where we got to. It will be launching in September, so watch this space.

I’ve been trying to pull together a dashboard for Honest Umami that balances our small size with our growing complexity.

Our small size means that several of the functions of a dashboard aren’t that necessary. The three of us are all immersed in most details of the business; this isn’t about elevating low-level operational detail up to the C-suite.

But there is one crucial thing that I think dashboards do which are important even at the size we’re at: they allow you to develop a “fingertip feel”¹ for the business. What does a good day on Shopify look like? How many new customers is normal? Wait a minute, that number looks off, why is that?

Doing that means understanding the variation in the underlying numbers. It’s no good to say “sales this week are £X, which is 5% up from last week”. You need to understand whether that “5% up” represents normal variation, or something unexpected that you need to understand and act on.

That means charts, not just simple tables. Creating the dashboard reminded me of this wonderful blog post from 2017, which I don’t need much of an excuse to link to again: Eugene Wei’s Remove the Legend to Become One. Wei was the first analyst hired into Amazon’s strategic planning department, way back in 1997, and in this lovely post he explains how Amazon’s Analytics Package was pulled together and channels his inner Edward Tufte to explain what makes for a readable chart.

Another challenge with dashboards is that not everyone thinks in this way: one person’s “data-driven” is another’s “you can prove anything with facts”.

There’s a stereotype that startup founders have to be instinctive, to go with their guts. I think that stereotype has a grain of truth in it. You certainly have to make lots of decisions quickly, and often don’t have very much historical precedent to go on.

But I would contend that, in order to make gut decisions, you need to train your gut. Only by developing that fingertip-feel for the causal reality of your business can you make instinctive decisions that are any good; otherwise, you’re just taking a punt.