Matt Putra’s client work, which he broke down on the 2X eCommerce Podcast, offers a powerful lesson in building useful team dashboards. He finds that most founders already have dashboards, often packed with pie charts and trend lines, but there's a huge problem. As he put it, most people can't look at a dashboard and know what to do. Often, only the owners or the absolute "best and brightest" can decipher what's actually going wrong from a sea of data visualizations. The rest of the team sees numbers, but they don't see clear direction or accountability. This is what he calls the "dashboard dilemma," and his solution is to scrap the complex dashboard in favor of a brutally simple "scorecard."
His scorecard idea is a radical departure from the typical analytics setup. Instead of a shared dashboard with dozens of metrics, each person on the team gets a scorecard with just one number on it, the single most important metric they are responsible for. It’s not about visualizing trends; it’s about absolute clarity and ownership. For example, the marketing manager's scorecard might just have the daily number of new customers. The head of retention might just have the churn rate. The number is either on target or it isn't. When Kunle Campbell, the host, asked him how this was different from a dashboard, Matt explained that the simplicity is what creates accountability. There's nowhere to hide. If a number is off, the person who owns that number is responsible for figuring out why and fixing it.
What’s most interesting is his advice on how to get started. Don’t get bogged down with data science teams or complex integrations. He advises founders to just get the numbers in, even if it means having an admin manually pull them and plug them into a simple spreadsheet each morning. The goal is to get the system running immediately so the team starts spotting problems and taking ownership. He argues you can have a functional scorecard system running in a week. Once it’s proven its value, then you can invest in automating it. He even shared this same core idea on The Seller's Edge, emphasizing how this simple approach cuts through the noise and helps owners make informed decisions with confidence. This focus on clarity is a core principle of effective Data-Driven Decision-Making.
For contrast, Johnny Russo from Lamour shared a slightly different but equally practical approach on an episode of Honest Ecommerce. His team uses dashboarding tools, but they have a simple system for acting on them. They focus on the "red" KPIs. If a number turns red for a few days in a row, it becomes a priority for the team to investigate and fix. This creates a clear, reactive workflow. It’s less about individual accountability for one number and more about a team-wide focus on putting out fires as they appear on the dashboard. It serves the same fundamental purpose: turning data into action. Meaghan Connell and AJ Yager echoed this on another episode, noting that every single KPI in a business, from marketing to operations, can benefit from this kind of visibility and analysis. The specific tool or format matters less than the team's discipline in using it. Choosing the right KPIs for Ecommerce is the first step, but building a system to act on them is what really drives growth.
