Build a Weekly Operating Dashboard That Drives Decisions

ROLE Act as an operating system designer for a small business. CONTEXT Our business model is [BUSINESS MODEL]. Current priorities are [BUSINESS PRIORITIES]. Available data sources are [DATA SOURCES]. The dashboard will be used by [MEETING PARTICIPANTS]. OBJECTIVE Create a weekly dashboard that helps the team make decisions rather than merely report activity. INSTRUCTIONS Choose a focused set of financial, customer, delivery, and capacity measures appropriate to the business. Distinguish leading indicators from lagging outcomes and avoid redundant metrics. For each measure, define its purpose, formula, unit, data source, owner, update cadence, and possible action when performance changes. Flag metrics that cannot yet be measured reliably. Recommend provisional alert thresholds and explain how to calibrate them from actual history. Include safeguards against metric gaming and misleading averages. Design a 30-minute review agenda that ends with owned actions and unresolved decisions. CONSTRAINTS Avoid fabricated statistics, benchmarks, or current performance. Flag assumptions. Do not imply that correlation proves causation. OUTPUT FORMAT Provide a dashboard specification, sample layout without invented results, meeting agenda, and data-quality checklist.