PerformanceIQ · Case Study
Case Study · Analytics Dashboard · Enterprise · Multi-store Retail · GeoIQ

Designing the Dashboard That Tells an Area Manager Where to Look First

PerformanceIQ turns sales, staffing, inventory, store-operations and market signals — with compliance issues cutting across them — from dozens of live stores into one alert-first view for area managers, each flagged issue paired with a suggested action and a path into tracked work.

Role Lead product designer on PerformanceIQ, owning the alert-first overview, the five operational modules and their suggested-action pattern, the drill-down from alert to task, and the mobile-first interaction model area managers use in the field — working with engineering on the underlying alerting logic.
5 modules
Sales, Staff, Inventory, Store Ops, Market & competition
28 stores
in one area manager's view, shown here as an example
Alerts → tracked work
flagged issues that move into tracked tasks
01 / The job PerformanceIQ supports

An area manager isn't responsible for one store's numbers — they're responsible for whether dozens of stores, each with its own staff, inventory and compliance record, are on track at the same time. PerformanceIQ is the dashboard that job runs on: one place to see which stores need attention this week, not just how each one performed last month.

02 / Why that job is hard

No single domain tells you what to do first

Store performance spans several operational domains — sales, staffing, inventory, store operations, and market context — while compliance issues can cut across them. Each produces different signals on a different cadence. Looked at separately, none tells an area manager what needs attention first. A store can be hitting its sales target and still be about to fail a compliance check; a staffing shortage in one store is invisible next to a healthy attendance average across the whole area. The difficulty isn't a lack of data. It's that no single view shows which of dozens of stores actually needs attention right now.

03 / The reframe

Lead with what's wrong, not a neutral summary

The overview doesn't open on a clean report of numbers. It opens on Critical alerts — a store opening compliance issue, stores off-track on performance — ranked above the KPI rings themselves. The dashboard's job isn't to report performance. It's to tell a manager, in the first few seconds, exactly where to look first.

PerformanceIQ overview screen: total stores in the area, revenue-target and staff-attendance rings, and a Critical alerts feed listed above them, led by a store opening compliance issue.
Critical alerts, above the KPI rings
04 / The first design decision

Five owned modules, not one long mixed feed

Below the alerts, the dashboard is organized into five modules — Sales Performance, Staff attendance, Inventory & stock, Store operations, Market & competition — each scoped to a single operational domain. Every module opens the same way: a headline number, a trend, and a “See suggested actions” link, so moving from the overview into any one category, a manager already knows the shape of what they'll find.

Insights screen listing five modules — Sales Performance, Staff attendance, Inventory and stock, Store operations, Market and competition — plus a Compliance table below.
Sales Performance module expanded, showing a forecasted-revenue chart and a See suggested actions link.

05 / The strongest moment: a suggestion grounded in evidence

The suggested action isn't generic advice bolted onto a chart

In Inventory & stock, a flagged spike in replenishment time comes with a dated read of the underlying numbers — three hours to restock items after running low, two incidents that day — and one suggested action grounded in that read: reduce restocking time by optimizing the supply chain. The manager sees the evidence and the suggestion in the same view, not a report that arrives after the fact.

Inventory and stock module with inventory health at 92%, and an inventory-replenishment-time chart carrying a flagged callout: time taken to restock items after running low, replenishment time of 3 hours, 2 incidents today, and the suggested action 'Reduce restocking time by optimizing supply chain.'
Inventory & stock — the chart and the suggestion, in one view

06 / How complexity is handled

An alert doesn't dead-end at the overview

Tapping into Critical alerts opens the specific issue across affected stores; opening a store's Compliance issues shows exactly which checklist items are incomplete, with the store manager's contact one tap away; and opening a flagged task shows its full detail — description, attachments, deadline. Each level answers a more specific question without losing the thread back to where it started.

Overview screen showing the Critical alerts feed, the manager's entry point into the drill-down.
Critical alerts screen, last refreshed 2 minutes ago, listing store opening compliance issues, off-track performance and NPS issues by store.
Compliance issues screen for two stores, each showing incomplete checklist items, a performance percentage, and the store manager's contact options (name blurred for privacy).
Task detail screen for a Complete Store opening checklist task, with description, attachments and comments.
← scroll →
07 / From information to action

Flagged issues move directly into tracked work

“All tasks have been created for each store” — when an alert like this is confirmed, it produces a task for each affected store, and those tasks appear directly in the Operations Hub with priority, store and deadline attached where the alert supports it. The area manager isn't left to separately translate the finding into a to-do; the flagged issue already exists as trackable work.

Operations Hub Tasks tab listing pending tasks with priority, store, and deadline, plus an Add Task action.
Operations Hub — where every flagged issue lands as a task
08 / What changed

PerformanceIQ didn't just move existing reports onto a phone. It changed what a manager sees first — flagged issues instead of a full-store summary — and what happens after they see it: an alert becomes a task with an owner and a deadline, not a note to follow up on later. The system does the noticing; the manager still does the judgment.

09 / What I'd revisit

If I revisited this now, I'd want to understand how managers actually triage when several critical alerts land at once — right now they're ordered by recency, not by which one has the most at stake. A smarter ranking, or letting managers weight the categories that matter most for their own stores, feels like the natural next layer on top of what's here.