PM Wargame: Design a dashboard for Spotify’s C-suite
The board
The C-suite at Spotify has, against all odds, failed to create a dashboard so far. Crazy, I know.
You're put in charge of creating their dashboard, including figuring out which metrics should be represented.
In ‘PM Wargames’, I take on a hypothetical PM challenge and attempt to unpack the strategic & tactical approaches I would take to solve it. Unless sources are specifically cited, all information (including the challenge itself) is purely for illustrative purposes.
Game plan
Alright, this should be an easy one.
As with all my PM wargames, I want to start with the customer and their goals. For this one, the customer is simple: my C-suite. The big dogs.
What does the C-suite really care about? How do I give them this information in as quick and efficient a format as possible?
I assume the bosses care about three areas, in this order:
The profitability of the business (finance)
The stability of the business (marketing)
The impact of the business (product)
I want to keep my dashboard nice and straightforward. My 'customers' are busy; less is more.
Financial metrics
I want to put financial metrics at the very top of my dashboard. Why? Because they're likely at the very top of the boss' mind. It is likely all they care about: are we making money?
In the interest of simplicity, I will place the three obvious financial metrics at the top:
Revenue
Net profit
Gross margin
For now, I will avoid more granular metrics like revenue per employee or burn rate, even though they're fair metrics to keep an eye on. We might iterate on this dashboard later on.
Since Spotify is a publicly traded company, I will also add some public market metrics.
This might be a mistake. Some public company executives may see public markets as completely detached from their business. I'm fine taking this gamble in the interest of delivering a full-picture dashboard.
I will add a public market health section with the following metrics:
Share price
Market cap
Outstanding shares
These six metrics will give my C-suite a good indication of the financial health of their business.
Marketing metrics
Next, my bosses will want to start looking forward to the future. Is the company generating demand and converting it into stone-cold cash?
While I can't give them a magic 8-ball, I can use marketing metrics as leading indicators.
I will want to represent these metrics in a trailing twelve month (TTM) format. This will allow the execs to see the wider trends.
Here are the metrics I will add to the dashboard:
Net new users
Cost per acquisition (CAC)
Total paid users
Revenue per user
Marketing ROI
Churn rate
Product metrics
Finally, I will allocate the third section of my dashboard to product metrics. I want to make sure they can monitor the health of the product; y'a know, the thing we sell around here.
There are a million product metrics they could look at. Spotify has been around for a long time and I'm sure lots of granular actions are tracked.
Again, this is a C-suite dashboard. It should be helpful at a glance and simple to understand. Here are the metrics I would display:
Monthly active users (free vs. paid)
Frequency (how often users return within a month)
Uptime (or time-to-recovery)
These three metrics will give the C-suite a bird's eye view of the health of the app, both in usage, frequency, and accessibility.
There we have it. Nice and simple dashboard. 15 metrics, 3 of which are market-related and could be cut.
This is my game plan. What do you think of this approach? How would you play this PM wargame?