As a PM, I spend a lot of time looking at charts. Data is how we understand what’s going on day to day and how we track progress towards goals over time.
The choices we make in how to present data are powerful levers for driving a team’s performance toward a goal. Bad charts can cause confusion and (worse) apathy. But well-designed charts can get a team rallied around a problem and empower people to work on the right things.
All too often, I see charts that are hard to decode and require you to have (or lookup) additional context to understand the story they’re telling you. This is bad: if two people look at the same chart and come away with a different understanding then, well, what’s the point of data?
Over the years I’ve developed a few simple rules for how to make charts awesome. I’ve applied these again and again on product after product and they’re highly effective in getting across maximum information, with minimum context. Together these rules make up The Perfect Chart.
Let’s start with the kind of thing people throw on a dashboard all the time.
OK, we have some sweet sweet data. But how do we interpret this? It’s gently wiggling around with no spikes (that’s probably good). Let’s imagine this metric represents our team’s primary goal. OK, but now I have to go look elsewhere to understand what the target for this metric is. Wouldn’t it be better if we just displayed the goal on the chart?
Yay! OK great, this dotted orange line represents our numerical goal. (I personally prefer metrics in blue and goal lines in orange — it’s what Meta’s internal tools default to and I’ve got used to it.)
But the x-axis of this chart ends on the most recent data point: today. Let’s assume we want to get the wiggly blue line above the dotted orange line (more on that assumption at the end of this post), how long have we got? Were we supposed to hit that goal last week? Or have we got more time? It’s unclear.
Good news, we can make it clearer just by extending the X-axis out to the end of the reporting period like so:
Sweet. Our team plans in half-yearly cycles, so by extending the x-axis out to the end of June, we can see we’ve got three months left to hit the goal — no need to panic (yet).
But there’s still so many questions this chart doesn’t answer:
- When did we set this goal? Is it something we’ve been working on since the start of the half or longer? Are we 50% of the way through our goaling period, or 75% of the way through?
- Is the team on track to his the goal or not? Will we be successful if we keep doing what we’re doing or do we need to change things up? You can kinda squint and see the trend, but two people might see that differently.
- Is the aim to get the blue line above the dotted orange line, or is it to keep it below it? (Not everything is supposed to go up and to the right — perhaps this is fraud rate, and the ai
