Designed for the producer, not the audience
Built by analysts, for analysts
Most MI packs are built by the people who produce them, for the people who produce them. The metrics are detailed, the analysis is thorough, the technical quality is high — and the audience can’t use any of it. The operations director needed five minutes; the analyst built thirty. The CFO wanted one slide; the pack has twelve. The TL wanted to know what was changing for their team; the pack tells them about the operation in aggregate. The mismatch is consistent, expensive, and almost never named.
The four audiences and what each needs
Executive / operations director. Five minutes, top of the pack. Three to five trends in headline form, the named risks for the coming month, the decisions they need to make. Anything else gets skimmed at best and forgotten at worst.
Finance. Five to ten minutes, focused on cost. Variance against budget, cost-per-contact trend, attrition and ramp-up costs, EBITDA impact of operational changes. Detail beyond this lives in an appendix or in a separate finance-specific output.
Team leaders. Five minutes, team-specific. Their team’s metrics this week vs last, outliers (good and bad), and what’s changing in the operation that affects them. Aggregate operation metrics are useful context; team-level is what they act on.
Planning and analytics. The whole pack. The drill-down detail. The methodology notes. The audience that built the pack and is comfortable with all of it. Crucially: the smallest audience by headcount and the one whose needs most MI packs are accidentally optimised for.
Audience-led design
The fix is to design backward from the audience need, not forward from the available data. The discipline:
For each audience, name the decisions they make. Not what they want to know — what they have to decide. The ops director decides headcount, scope of investment, where to spend management attention. Finance decides budget allocation, variance flags, capex prioritisation. The TL decides who to coach, who to recognise, what to communicate to the team. The decisions are the brief for what the audience-specific section of the MI should contain.
Strip each section to the decision-supporting content. If a metric doesn’t help one of the named decisions, it doesn’t belong in that audience’s section. The metric still exists in the full pack — it just isn’t in the section the ops director reads.
Test it. Take the prototype to the audience. Walk them through it. Watch where they engage and where they skim. The first version is almost always wrong; the third is usually close.
The structure that consistently works
Most successful MI packs have a layered structure. Page one: the operations-director one-pager. Page two: the finance summary. Pages three to four: the TL view (with team breakdowns). Pages five onwards: the appendix the full audience occasionally needs. Each audience reads only what’s relevant to them; each audience can drill deeper if they want.
This is different from the “everyone reads the same pack” model that most operations default to. The layered model means the pack can be longer (the appendix exists) without burdening any individual audience (each reads only their section). The producer’s instinct to put everything in front of everyone — usually driven by completeness rather than audience need — is the failure to correct.
The discipline of cutting metrics nobody uses
Audience-led design produces a smaller, sharper headline section. The metrics that don’t make the cut are the ones that have been in the pack for years and never produced an action. Cutting them is harder than it sounds — somebody once asked for that metric, somebody might miss it, the producer feels uncomfortable. The political work is real and the payoff is large: the sections that remain become readable, the audience starts using the pack, and the function’s credibility lifts. This is the subject of the upcoming MI nobody acts on piece in this series.
The TL section that’s usually missing
Most MI packs serve the executive and finance audiences reasonably well and serve TLs poorly or not at all. The result is that TLs — the largest audience, the people most likely to act on MI in the short term — either don’t see the pack or skim it and find nothing useful. Operations that add a TL-specific section find their team-leader engagement with MI lifts materially within a quarter, and the planning function becomes a more useful partner to the floor.
The TL section is structurally different. It needs to be team-specific (each TL sees their team’s data, not the operation’s). It needs to highlight outliers rather than averages. And it needs to surface what’s changing — the new policy, the schedule adjustment, the system release — alongside the metric movement, because the TL can’t interpret a metric move without context.
Conclusion
Designing for the producer rather than the audience is the most common MI failure and the easiest to fix. The work is editorial: decide what each audience actually needs, design each section against that need, strip the rest into an appendix. The work isn’t technical — it’s the cultural shift from “here is everything we know” to “here is what you need.” Operations that make that shift find their MI function becomes one of the most useful outputs the operation produces; operations that don’t produce technically excellent packs that nobody outside the producing team reads.
Next in the series: The metric you track is downstream of the metric that matters.
Pair this with designing meaningful MI, the one-page MI pack, and MI for different audiences.