A Growth Dashboard That Explains Its Own Numbers
Built a growth dashboard where every metric carries the benchmark, the current value, the cause, and the move. Two of the headline numbers were actively misleading without it.
- Product
- Consumer entertainment subscription app
- Model
- Consumer subscription, monthly and annual
- Timeframe
- 4 months
The situation
The team had metrics and no read on them, so the numbers that mattered most were the ones being misinterpreted.
The approach
- Gave every metric four fields instead of one: the benchmark, the current value, what is driving it, and the opportunity
- Benchmarked against the right access model
- The paywall sat inside signup with a dismissible exit, so the number had to be read as a subscription product with a leaking gate rather than as a free product
- Picking the wrong comparison set moved expected conversion by several multiples in either direction
- Named the two metrics that mislead without context
- Blended cost per install, because broken attribution hides paid installs inside the organic number
- Retention, which reads as a product failure but is a funnel failure, because it counts users who never reached the core against the product
- Found a paywall offering change that had quietly halved trial conversion on the same SKU
- Reduced it to five plain-language insights an exec could act on without a translation layer
Most growth dashboards answer what happened and stop, which leaves the reading to whoever opens it first. That is where "paid is dead, organic is booming" comes from, when the truth was that paid installs were hiding inside the organic number because attribution in this category is broken. Every metric here carries our read of the cause, so the dashboard argues rather than just reports. The most valuable thing it surfaced was not a new opportunity, it was a change that had already happened and gone unnoticed.
We help consumer apps and products reach their next phase of growth.
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