Design practice

Build Your Impact Dashboard

Define and track the metrics that demonstrate your design impact

Start the exercise

01 / Prepare

What you’ll
work on.

Create a personal impact dashboard that tracks the metrics and outcomes from your design work. This is both a career development tool (evidence for promotion conversations) and a practice in connecting design decisions to business outcomes.

Before you begin

  • Access to product analytics (Amplitude, Mixpanel, GA, or team dashboards)
  • At least one shipped feature you can measure
  • Familiarity with product metrics and the goals of your design work

02 / Practice

The work,
step by step.

Work through these 4 parts at your own pace. Keep your notes and work together so you can review them when you finish.

  1. Identify What to Track

    60 min

    1. Usability metrics — Task success rate, time on task, error rate

    2. Business metrics — Conversion, retention, revenue impact (if applicable)

    3. User satisfaction — NPS, CSAT, SUS score, qualitative feedback

    4. Efficiency metrics — Design-to-ship time, QA defects, developer questions during implementation

    5. Adoption metrics — Feature adoption rate, repeat usage

    6. Pick 3–5 metrics that are meaningful for your work (not all categories will apply)

  2. Establish Baselines

    30 min

    1. What was the value before your design work? (If you don't have a baseline, note that — this is a learning moment about measuring before you start)

    2. What is the current value?

    3. What's the delta?

  3. Build the Dashboard

    60 min

    1. Create a simple tracking document (Notion, Google Sheets, or similar)

    2. One row per project/feature

    3. Columns: project name, date shipped, metrics (3–5), qualitative notes

    4. Update cadence: monthly or per-project

  4. Write the Narrative

    60 min

    1. Write a 200-word impact summary for one project

    2. What you designed and why

    3. What the metrics show

    4. What you'd do differently

    5. This format is directly usable in performance reviews and case studies

03 / Review

Look at what
you’ve made.

Gather your deliverables, then use the criteria to find what worked and what you would change. They also give a peer something specific to respond to.

What to bring together

  • Impact dashboard template (spreadsheet or Notion page)
  • Baseline + current values for one shipped project
  • 200-word impact narrative for one project

How to assess your work

Metric selection
Metrics are meaningful and connected to user/business outcomes, not vanity
Baseline discipline
Baselines established (or gap acknowledged)
Narrative quality
Connects design decisions to outcomes honestly
Sustainability
Dashboard is simple enough to actually maintain

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