KPI examples by department you can lift into a first draft

Pick the department you are building a board for and read its list. Choose five to seven rows, weighted toward the leading ones, and give each an owner and a goal in the same sitting. Goals here are rules of thumb from small companies rather than benchmarks: yours should reflect a good week as your team runs today.

Two rows measuring the same outcome at different stages is the most common way these lists get bloated. Keep the earlier one, the one you can still act on, and let the later one sit in a monthly review.

The owner named against each row is a role rather than a rule. In a company of twenty, one person holds four of these titles, and the point of naming a role at all is to stop a number being owned by the leadership team in general, which means nobody.

The leadership list is a summary of the company, not a merge of every department board. Cash against the 13-week forecast, quarterly priorities on track, pipeline coverage and a couple of results rows are usually enough. If a number would not change a decision this leadership team makes, it belongs on somebody else's board.

Sales is the easiest department to measure early, because almost everything that produces revenue is an activity somebody controls this week. Count what was held rather than booked, keep one row for money so the activity stays honest, and set goals at what a good week looks like now rather than what you wish it looked like.

Marketing rows split into work you control and results you wait for. Publishing, sending and testing happen on your schedule. Leads, cost per lead and sourced revenue arrive later and are worth reviewing monthly. Put the controllable work on the weekly board so a quiet month is visible while there is still time to fix it.

Operations numbers should answer one question every week: did the work go out on time, and at what quality. On-time delivery, capacity booked ahead and rework hours cover most of it. Reported near misses belong here too, because a week with none reported usually means nobody is reporting rather than nothing happened.

Finance owns the numbers everyone assumes are lagging, and several of them are not. Cash on hand, invoices sent on time, receivables over 60 days and collection calls all move weekly and all respond to effort. Keep margin, profit and days sales outstanding on a monthly review where the accounting close can support them.

Hiring and retention both fail early and show up late, so the weekly rows are about process: candidates in the pipeline for every open seat, interviews held, scheduled one-on-ones actually held, new hires with a written plan. Turnover and engagement scores stay monthly, as the proof that the weekly habits are working.

Customer success is the department where a slow leak stays invisible for a quarter. Weekly rows should surface risk while it is still cheap: onboarding milestones on time, check-in calls held, accounts flagged at risk, escalations left open. Retention and revenue retention then confirm monthly whether the early warnings were being acted on.

A handful of the measures above cause more definition arguments than all the others put together, usually because two people in the room are calculating them differently and neither has said so. Each entry below gives the formula in words, says where the number belongs in the meeting rhythm, and names the way it most often gets gamed.