A founder showed me a dashboard recently.
It was beautiful.
Revenue numbers.
Sales pipeline.
Utilisation.
Project status.
Margins.
Collections.
Everything was there.
Then I asked him a simple question.
“What has changed in the business because of these KPIs?”
The room went quiet.
Hi, I’m Tabish Bibikar, and I coach and mentor founders of software companies to build scale in their business fast.
And this is something I see all the time in growing software companies.
The founder invests weeks building dashboards.
The leadership team spends hours discussing metrics.
Everyone agrees the numbers are important.
But six months later, performance hasn’t really improved.
The KPIs exist.
The behaviour hasn’t changed.
I was working with a software services company that tracked almost everything.
Lead generation.
Proposal conversions.
Project profitability.
Employee utilisation.
Client satisfaction.
Yet the same problems kept appearing month after month.
The issue wasn’t the KPIs.
The issue was that nobody owned the outcome behind the KPI.
People reviewed numbers.
But they weren’t responsible for changing them.
And that’s a huge difference.
This reminds me of something John Doerr talks about in Measure What Matters.
He popularised OKRs, but one of the most important ideas in the book is that measurement by itself doesn’t drive performance.
People need clarity about what they’re trying to achieve and accountability for achieving it.
And that’s where many software companies struggle.
A KPI is not a report.
A KPI is a responsibility.
For example, if proposal conversion rates are dropping, who owns fixing it?
If utilisation falls below target, who owns improving it?
If project margins are shrinking, who owns the outcome?
Because if everyone discusses it but nobody owns it, the KPI becomes interesting information instead of a management tool.
I’ve also noticed another pattern.
Many founders review KPIs every week.
But then they make all the decisions themselves.
Think about what that teaches the organisation.
The metric belongs to the team.
The action belongs to the founder.
That’s not accountability.
That’s dependency.
The best leadership teams I’ve seen use KPIs very differently.
They don’t use them to create reports.
They use them to create ownership.
The KPI tells us where we are.
The owner tells us what happens next.
That’s when numbers start driving performance.
So if your KPIs aren’t creating the results you expected, don’t start by changing the dashboard.
Start by asking a much simpler question.
Who actually owns this number?
Because every KPI without an owner is just data.
I’d love to hear your experience.
What’s the one KPI your company tracks every month but never seems to improve?
Send me a DM and tell me your story. I personally read and respond to every single message. And if we’re not connected yet, send me a connection request on LinkedIn. I’d love to hear what’s happening in your business.
