Regular Business Reporting
Also known as Rhythm Of the Business (RoB)
An essential part of running a business is to have regular updates on how the business is doing and trending, week over week, month over month.
This typically involves a collection of charts that show the main metrics over time, and their change compared to last week/month/year.
Having extra tools and processes in place helps both anticipate what the results will be like (before they hit the charts), and also quickly investigate the root causes for the changes.
A change in the Metrics
- Goal: “What’s going on with the business?, is it trending up or down? and if it changed direction: why is that?”
- Every insight statement needs to be proven. Imagine that every statement will get questioned with: “What makes you say that? It could be a number of things… have you considered XYZ”.
- Thus each of the statements need to include a chart/view, that gives high confidence on statement, a proof.
How to prove it?
Good thing is, a change of trends, can only be (typically) a handful of things:
*Seasonality Charts like https://research.fb.com/prophet-forecasting-at-scale/ tells us expected seasonality over a year/month/week upfront, thus is very straightforward to tell what seasonality effect is coming up next.
Other items to take into consideration:
- Were there significant Marketing campaigns that might create a spike in influx of users ?Or a pause in them creating a sudden drop
- Fraud Activities change
What to Report
Besides the regular charts of trends, consider also including other potentially insightful views, like the Customer lifecycle funnel that helps to quickly pinpoint the leaking bucket in the customer journey: