"We built a sales dashboard, but looking at it doesn't tell us what to do next." This is the most common complaint I hear from ecommerce operators. I've felt it myself — staring at a 12-metric dashboard, ranking the movements in my head, and only then starting to think about action. By the time I had a hypothesis, the meeting was over.

The fix wasn't a fancier visualization. It was deletion. I cut the dashboard down to 5 metrics, and decisions started fitting into one minute.

Here's the design I landed on, and the reasoning behind each cut.

TL;DR

A revenue dashboard needs only 5 KPIs : Revenue / CVR / AOV / RPS / ROAS. They fall out of the revenue formula Revenue = Sessions × CVR × AOV . Anything outside that formula needs an explicit justification to earn a spot on the screen.

Information density doesn't speed up decisions — it slows them. GoodData's BI usage research shows the median time-to-decision for dashboards is around 42 seconds.…