North Star dashboards
📖 3 min readUpdated 2026-04-19
Your most important dashboard shows North Star Metric + supporting indicators. Everyone sees it; everyone aligns to it.
Components
- North Star value (current)
- 7-day and 30-day trend
- Supporting leading indicators (what drives it)
- Segment breakdowns
Keep it simple
10 tiles max. More than that and no one reads it.
Display publicly
Team room display or always-open tab builds shared awareness.
What to do with this
- Build a dashboard around the North Star + its 3-4 inputs, dashboards with 30 metrics are ignored within a month
- Display the dashboard publicly (TV in office, pinned tab, Slack digest), hidden dashboards stop working in 3 weeks
- Add alerts for significant changes (up or down), the dashboard should pull you in when something shifts, not require you to visit
- Review the dashboard as a team Monday morning, without a review ritual the dashboard becomes wallpaper
- Attach an action log, dashboards that show numbers without the "what we did" story lose their power to drive behavior