Wei Z.
Sample Exactly what a manager needs
I am not an analyst, but I now understand and can question the numbers my team reports.
Business metrics and KPIs: build dashboards people trust
Choose the right KPIs, define them precisely, clean the data behind them and design dashboards your team actually uses every week
Created by Meera Pillai
- Updated August 2026
- English
- Beginner
What you will learn
- Explain the difference between metrics, KPIs and targets
- Build a KPI tree that links team metrics to company goals
- Write precise metric definitions in a shared dictionary
- Spot and fix common data quality problems
- Choose charts and layouts that make dashboards easy to read
- Calculate core business metrics such as MRR, churn and CAC
- Run a weekly review that explains changes in the numbers
Course content
Metrics that mean something
Getting the data right
- Article: Where business data comes from 9 min
- Article: Cleaning and joining data in spreadsheets 12 min
- Article: Common data quality problems 9 min
- Article: One source of truth 8 min
- Article: Metric ownership and documentation 7 min
Designing dashboards people use
- Article: Designing for an audience 8 min
- Article: Choosing the right chart 10 min
- Article: Layout and hierarchy 9 min
- Article: Colour, labels and context 8 min
- Article: Avoiding misleading charts 8 min
Core business metrics
- Article: Revenue metrics: MRR and ARR 10 min
- Article: Churn and retention 11 min
- Article: Acquisition costs and payback 10 min
- Article: Funnels and conversion rates 9 min
- Article: Operational metrics 8 min
Using dashboards to decide
- Article: Running a weekly business review 9 min
- Article: Explaining why a number moved 10 min
- Article: Alerts and unusual changes 7 min
- Article: Presenting numbers clearly 8 min
- Quiz: Final check 6 min
Requirements
- Basic spreadsheet skills such as sorting, filtering and simple formulas
- A Google account or Excel for the exercises
Description
Most companies have more dashboards than they can use. Many are opened once and forgotten, because the numbers are unclear, the definitions are disputed or nobody knows what decision they support. This course teaches you to build a small set of metrics and dashboards that people trust and use.
What you will learn
We work with a realistic dataset from a fictional subscription software company: sign ups, subscriptions, invoices, support tickets and marketing spend. Step by step, you will turn it into a weekly business dashboard.
- The difference between metrics, KPIs and targets
- Building a KPI tree that connects daily work to company goals
- Defining each metric precisely so everyone calculates it the same way
- Fixing common data quality problems before they reach a chart
- Choosing charts, layout and labels that make dashboards readable
- Core metrics such as MRR, churn, CAC and conversion rates
- Using dashboards in weekly reviews and explaining changes
Tools
The concepts work in any tool. Exercises use Google Sheets or Excel for data preparation and show dashboard examples in Looker Studio, with notes for Power BI and Tableau users. No coding or SQL is required, although the course mentions where SQL helps if your data lives in a database.
Who it is for
Managers, founders, operations and marketing staff who need to report on performance, and early career analysts who want a solid foundation in business metrics. By the end you will have a metric dictionary, a KPI tree and a dashboard template you can adapt to your own company.
Who this course is for
- Managers and founders who report on performance
- Operations, marketing and sales staff who own numbers
- Junior analysts building their first business dashboards
Instructor
Meera Pillai
Business analyst teaching metrics, dashboards and experiments for people who make decisions
- 4.4 instructor rating
- 23 reviews
- 9,950 students
- 3 courses
- Sample
I am a business analyst who has spent years building reporting for sales, marketing and operations teams. Most of that work is less about clever charts and more about agreeing on definitions, cleaning data and making a dashboard that people open every Monday.
I teach analytics for business people and early career analysts: how to choose metrics, build a KPI tree, design honest dashboards in tools like Looker Studio, and run A/B tests without fooling yourself with the statistics.
I avoid jargon where I can and explain the maths where it matters. You will work with realistic sample datasets and leave with reports and templates you can adapt to your own team.
Student reviews
Martina R.
Sample Our numbers finally agree
The metric dictionary ended a long argument between sales and finance. Same numbers in every meeting now.
Linnea J.
Sample Dashboard design section is excellent
I cut our leadership dashboard from 30 charts to 9. People actually look at it now.
Kenneth O.
Sample KPI tree changed our reviews
Walking down the tree to explain changes made our Monday meeting much more useful.
Esther A.
Sample Honest about LTV
Refreshing to hear caution about lifetime value estimates. Payback period is now our main acquisition metric.
Ines B.
Sample Practical and beginner friendly
No jargon, clear examples and realistic messy data. The cleaning lesson was longer than expected but valuable.
Rohan M.
Sample Great on SaaS metrics
MRR movements and retention cohorts explained clearly. I wanted a bit more on ecommerce style metrics.
Gustavo P.
Sample Slow start for analysts
If you already work as an analyst, the first section is basic. The later sections are worth it though.
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