Dashboard Builder

This drill creates PostHog dashboards tailored to each GTM motion so your team has real-time visibility into what is working and what is not. Good dashboards surface the signal; great dashboards drive action.

Prerequisites

• PostHog with events flowing from active plays and drills (run posthog-gtm-events first)
• At least 2 weeks of event data for meaningful trends
• Clarity on who will use each dashboard and what decisions they make

Steps

1. Define dashboard audiences

Different roles need different dashboards. Plan:

• Founder/CEO dashboard: High-level metrics across all motions. Updated weekly. Answers: "Are we growing and is our growth efficient?"
• Marketing dashboard: Campaign-level metrics for outreach, content, paid, and events. Updated daily. Answers: "Which channels are producing pipeline?"
• Product dashboard: Activation, retention, feature adoption, and NPS. Updated daily. Answers: "Are users getting value and staying?"
• Sales dashboard: Pipeline, deal velocity, conversion rates by stage. Updated daily. Answers: "Will we hit our number?"

Build one dashboard at a time, starting with the one your team checks most often.

2. Choose the right metrics per dashboard

Using posthog-custom-events, select metrics that drive action. For each metric, define: what it measures, how it is calculated, what "good" looks like, and what action to take when it changes.

Founder dashboard: MRR, new customers this month, blended CAC, activation rate, net revenue retention, burn rate vs. revenue growth.

Marketing dashboard: Leads generated by channel, cost per lead by channel, email open and reply rates, content traffic and conversions, ad spend and ROAS.

Product dashboard: Daily/weekly active users, activation rate by cohort, feature adoption rates, churn rate, NPS score, time to value.

3. Build the visualizations

Using posthog-funnels, create funnel charts for conversion flows. Use trend lines for metrics that should go up over time (revenue, users) or down (churn, CAC). Use tables for comparative data (channel performance side by side). Use cohort charts for retention analysis.

Design principles:

• Put the most important metric in the top-left (where eyes go first)
• Use consistent time ranges (default to last 30 days, with options for 7, 30, 90)
• Add comparison to previous period so trends are immediately visible
• Color-code: green for on-track, red for below threshold, yellow for watch

4. Add threshold indicators

Connect your dashboards to the threshold-engine drill. For each metric, display the target threshold alongside the actual value. If your cold email play's Baseline threshold is 10% reply rate and current is 7%, the dashboard should show this gap clearly. This turns a dashboard from informational into actionable.

5. Set up alerts

Using posthog-cohorts, create cohort-based alerts for critical changes:

• Activation rate drops below threshold for 3 consecutive days
• Churn rate spikes above 2x normal
• A campaign's CPA exceeds 150% of target
• Website traffic drops 30%+ week over week

Route alerts to the person who owns that metric. Alerts without owners get ignored.

6. Review and prune monthly

Dashboards rot. Metrics that nobody looks at create noise. Every month, review each dashboard: which panels did the team actually use to make a decision? Remove or replace panels that were never referenced. Add panels for new plays or metrics that emerged. A dashboard with 6 actionable panels beats one with 20 panels that nobody reads.