Pendo Dashboards: Numbers and Stories in One Place

Before Deliberate Signals, I was Director of Product Ops and Customer Insights at Foreground, the company behind ShootProof and Táve Studio Manager. Our product team was not short on data. That was most of the problem. We moved the work into Pendo dashboards, and the reason it stuck was simple: the numbers and the stories sat in one view, so a chart and the customer comments behind it were never more than one click apart.

If your reaction is “we already have dashboards,” I believe you. Almost everyone does. The question worth asking is whether anyone opens them on a Tuesday afternoon with a real decision in front of them. Ours mostly got opened when someone asked me to pull something, and a request queue is not the same thing as a dashboard.

Every question cost a person. Someone wanted to know how a segment used a feature, so I pulled a report. Someone wanted survey comments sitting next to that usage, so I pulled two sources and stitched them together by hand. None of it was hard work. It was slow, and it put me in the middle of every question, which quietly meant fewer questions got asked at all.

What changed at ShootProof, with the numbers

Pendo wrote up the original version of this story as a customer case study, and I presented the dashboard approach at Pendomonium with Pendo’s product team. Here is what the work looked like in practice, from the flash reports I sent the company at the time:

• Onboarding guides built on the same dashboards moved new-account activation up 36%.
• A gallery-first experiment, where new desktop signups landed on the gallery page instead of the dashboard, raised photos uploaded by 51.3% in the test group. The hypothesis, the result, and the next step all lived on one dashboard.
• Profile questions asked through Pendo guides collected genre, business age, and revenue band from new signups, and an existing-user survey drew just over 37,000 responses. That profile data is what let us put usage and sentiment side by side by segment.
• A later survey program brought in 1,411 open-text responses, which became the qualitative half of the view.

None of those numbers came from a special tool. They came from asking one question per dashboard and putting both halves of the answer on it. What follows is what I would tell you to copy.

Step 1: What question does this dashboard answer?

Ask it out loud before you build anything. If the answer takes you more than a sentence, you are not ready to build yet.

A dashboard with no question behind it turns into a wall of charts that everyone scrolls past. Put the question in the title. “Which accounts slowed down last month” is a dashboard. “Product Metrics” is a filing cabinet. If you cannot name the question, you are building a report, not a dashboard.

Step 2: Can someone see the story next to the number?

Look at your current setup and ask where the qualitative data lives. If the answer is a different tool, or a spreadsheet somebody maintains, you have found the gap.

Usage data on its own is a smoke alarm. It tells you something is happening, not what is burning. A drop in a feature could be a bug, a confusing change, or a seasonal pattern that means nothing at all. The verbatim comment sitting next to that chart is usually what tells you which one it is. In Pendo, survey and poll responses can be added to a dashboard with the Add to dashboard control, and dashboard-level date filters apply to most widgets at once, so the comments and the usage chart move together when you change the window. Pendo’s Dashboards article covers the mechanics.

Putting both in one view changed what our team could see. Differences between personas stopped being something you argued about from anecdotes and became something you could point at. If you are building the qualitative half of this, I wrote separately about putting a Voice of Customer report together.

Step 3: Who opens this without being asked?

Name that person before you build. Not a team, a person.

A dashboard whose only visitor is the person who built it has not been adopted, it has been tolerated. The signal that ours had landed was not a usage stat. It was marketing pulling from it on their own to shape targeting, without routing the request through me first. That is the bar. Somebody outside the team that built it uses it to make a decision.

This is the same pattern behind why customer success teams ignore Pendo. Access was never the blocker. Nobody had built them a view that answered a question they actually had.

The three Pendo dashboards worth building first

The three principles I presented at Pendomonium were: craft the story for the audience, build for the questions, and favor transparency over holding the keys. Here is how that turns into a first set of dashboards. Pendo dashboards are private by default, so the last column matters.

The part that is easy to get wrong

Accessible does not mean everyone gets everything. It is tempting to read “make data accessible to the whole org” as opening the doors and calling it done. What it actually takes is giving each group one view they can act on, and being willing to delete the rest.

And none of this holds up if the foundation underneath is shaky. If visitor and account IDs are unreliable or tagging has drifted, a centralized dashboard just centralizes the error and gives it a nicer frame. That is worth fixing before you build anything on top of it, and it is most of what our Pendo analytics and reporting work starts with.

Questions people ask

What should go on a Pendo dashboard?

One question’s worth of data, and both halves of it. Pair the usage numbers with the qualitative feedback that explains them rather than splitting them across two tools. If a widget would not change what someone does this week, it is decoration.

How do I get people to actually use a Pendo dashboard?

Name the specific person who should open it before you build it, and put the question it answers in the title. Share it on purpose, because Pendo dashboards are private by default. Adoption shows up when someone outside the team that built it uses it to make a decision without asking for help first.

Can Pendo combine quantitative and qualitative data on one dashboard?

Yes. Usage widgets tell you what happened, and survey, poll, and NPS response widgets tell you why. Holding them in one view, with one date filter applied to both, is what stops teams from arguing over anecdotes.

If your product data is scattered across tools and someone on your team is the human API holding it together, I am happy to talk through what centralizing it would look like. The free Pendo strategy session is 30 minutes, no pitch, just a working conversation about your setup and where the quickest wins are.