The SaaS CPO

checklist
To build engaging and scalable dashboard experiences

TOUCAN TOCO
Table of Contents
#1 Always start with your users’ decision-making needs

#2 Design outcome-oriented dashboards for your product

#3 Define & build the right supporting data architecture

#4 Build visualizations according to defined user needs & requirements

#5 Think beyond charts, deliver what your users need to take better

decisions

#6 Apply 0 bug policy, test coverage and CI/CD requirements

#7 Bonus: If you want your non-technical teams to set it up, use it, and

maintain it in full-autonomy, build a WYSIWYG interface

#8 You built your dashboards… now what?— get to future proofing!

TOUCAN TOCO THE SAAS CPO CHECKLIST 2

36 steps | Free template
The SaaS CPO
checklist to build
engaging & scalable
dashboard experiences
for your users
We packaged 8+ years of R&D experience and 100s of data
visualization projects in this comprehensive bootstrap
checklist. It provides a step-by-step plan and actionable
embedded analytics best practices for CPOs or product
managers. We hope it will help you frame your project
and reduce the uncertainty & complexity of building an
analytics experience for your users!

TOUCAN TOCO THE SAAS CPO CHECKLIST 3

#1
Always start
with your users’
decision-making
needs
ACTIONS RESSOURCES

✔ Carry-out user interviews with at least 5 Product Manager

customers for 1 to 4 weeks

• Only 45% of people with access to analytics actually

report using them. The most frequent reason they
cite— they’re too difficult to use.
• So before getting your hands dirty with crunching
the data or building the dashboards, it’s important to
identify different user groups and the problems they

TOUCAN TOCO THE SAAS CPO CHECKLIST 4

 need to solve. Which means figuring out their goals, the questions they want answered, and the
steps they take to make decisions.
• The best way to do that is in-person interviews or field visits, but if that’s not possible, calls are
great too!

✔ Define end-user personas and match their needs and skills to clear product re-
quirements

Different people make decisions differently and will require different outcomes. To make your dash-
boards relevant, you need to personalize the insights they show. Since personalizing them on a one-to-
one basis is nearly impossible, you need to identify end user personas, to determine which information
is most relevant to each user. With that context, you can align what you’re building with what they
need to achieve.

This could be broken down into:

• Role: C-level executives, business users, data analysts, IT users, etc.
• Pain points: what prevents them from doing their job? From making the best decisions?
• Outcomes and metrics: What business questions I’m trying to help them answer? What metrics do
I need to collect? How are those metrics defined? What are the relevant business dimensions and
time granularity?
• Technical expertise and skills: to define the degree of sophistication of your application. How
familiar are they with BI tools? Are they business users or BI analysts? Can they write or customize
SQL? Are they proficient in Excel?
• Data fluency: The analytics’ level of detail should match the users’ comfort zone and the degree
that they understand nuances in the data. How sophisticated are they with using data? Do they
enjoy digging into the numbers?
• Mobility: field workers or traveling executives may need access to data via smartphone or tablet,
others on the other hand, may mainly work from a desktop.

Understanding the complex needs of each persona is crucial and will have a substantial impact on
adoption and engagement.

TOUCAN TOCO THE SAAS CPO CHECKLIST 5

✔ Understand user workflows and how they
influence your project

• In order to build engaging dashboards, you need

to understand your users’ habits when it comes
to making decision based on your product data.
The format and information displayed inside your
analytics need to seamlessly fit their existing
workflows.
• Determine how your analytics will connect to their For more information
decisions, what information can they act-on? When
do they need it? Where in your product should you toucantoco.com/blog/en/
make it available (full dashboard pages vs single successful-data-projects-checklist
widgets at the point of decision-making).
docs.toucantoco.com/
concepteur/07-method.html

toucantoco.com/blog/en/how-to-
rock-a-kick-off-in-a-data-project

TOUCAN TOCO THE SAAS CPO CHECKLIST 6

#2
Design outcome-
oriented
dashboards for
your product
ACTIONS RESSOURCES

✔ Frame your project and set a solid Product Manager

foundation for 1 to 4 weeks

• Now that you’ve defined what your dashboards

should accomplish for your users, you have
to define how they will look and how they
will work. You need to think about big-picture
elements and building blocks for what you will
create.
• Conventionally, single-page dashboards are
the most common and conventional way of
building analytics. But there are many forms
to consider: Online portal or standalone app,
dashboard inside your product, visualizations
and widgets built in-context inside users’ usual
workflows, etc.

TOUCAN TOCO THE SAAS CPO CHECKLIST 7

Before deciding how you want to deliver your analytics, think about a few factors:

• Data detail & density: will it offer your users the ability to drill down to see more elements? And
how rich your views will be?
• Mobility: do your users need to access it on the go?
• Collaboration: is it important to be able to share the content of your analytics with other users?

✔ Identify core functionality and outline specific features

Some basic interactive features you should consider:

• Drill down: give your users the ability to deep dive and breakout the information you’re providing,
from high level metrics to smaller details.
• Filters: allow your users to define the scope of their data to reflect their needs. Filters can either be
global, meaning they refine the scope of your entire dashboard. They can also be local, meaning
they only impact individual charts, metrics, or views.
• Comparison: ability to see two or more data subsets side by side for comparison reasons.

✔ Define out-of-scope items

• It’s also important to decide where you draw the line on things that won’t be included in your ana-
lytics roadmap.
• Although it’s impossible to identify all out-of-bounds features in advance, at least try to create a set
of guidelines. For example, you might choose to deliver dashboards that users can customize by
resizing different components or moving them around, but not allowing them to build the visuali-
zations from scratch. Or, you may decide that you’ll provide a standardized set of analytics cover-
ing a variety of use cases you’ve identified, but you won’t build tailored, customer-specific, “one-off”
data models.

✔ Leverage the art of data storytelling

Think of your analytics as more than just charts in a grid. There is an entire art behind turning data
into insights in a clear pedagogical way, and it’s called Data Storytelling. It is the ability to tell a story
with data and to personalize it according to the audience.
If you’re choosing to build your own analytics, it’s up to your team to find the way to tell stories, and
thankfully, they’re not flying blind: at Toucan we live and breathe for data storytelling and are more
than happy to share with you what we learned: here are our top 10 design and data storytelling best
practices to build easy-to-use dashboards for untrained business users.

TOUCAN TOCO THE SAAS CPO CHECKLIST 8

✔ Choose the metrics you want to display
through your analytics

• Consolidate your users’ needs and the questions they’re

trying to answer into a core set of indicators and metrics.
This helps users focus on what really matters instead
of being distracted by useless or redundant metrics or
graphs.
• Find unique or specialized metrics that make the data
highly valuable in your industry.

✔ Pick the right visualizations to answer the

right questions

• Questions before visualizations: A single metric can

be displayed through different visualization methods.
For example, the metric “Revenue” can be displayed as
a single metric or as a line chart to show its evolution
over time, the difference between the two is the question
For more information
you’re trying to answer. Dataviz Dos & Don’ts
• Toucan has built extensive documentation with detailed
information on when to use which chart: head over to our
viz gallery for inspiration.

✔ Build a prototype for user feedback and design

iterations

• Don’t wait until you’re finished to show your users what

you built! Even a simple prototype of how the actual dash-
board would look and function shared with a few beta
testers can be a great way to kick off a feedback loop and
constantly iterate to make your new features even more
effective.Based on their response, you can build an initial
1st version, and proactively invite feedback from end-us-
ers to constantly improve until you get it right. For more information
This process can be extremely helpful to give you guid-
ance for your development efforts, it also gets users in- Design-first approach

trigued and encourages them to share valuable feedback.

• Platforms like InVision, Figma or even an interactive PPT
are sufficient. At Toucan, we even sometimes work with a
pen and paper approach on design books.

TOUCAN TOCO THE SAAS CPO CHECKLIST 9

#3
Define and
build the right
supporting data
architecture
ACTIONS RESSOURCES

✔ Find what data is available, and what it Data Architect +

looks like Senior Back-end Developer
• Once you’ve defined what metrics you want to display for 1 to 4 weeks
and how your analytics will look, it’s time to do the
dirty work: start looking for your data. 2 Back-end Developers +
• Data scoping can be tedious, but it’s important to find 1 Product Manager
all relevant data sets and most importantly assess if for 3 to 12 months +
what you have is able to support your project. 1 to 2 weeks of testing
• Deep dive into the structure and indicators of
all possible data systems to zero-in on the final
indicators.
• Define the aggregation / compute rules when needed
• If the data you need is not available, or not suitable to
answer the questions at the top of your list, you may
need to table some of your ideas until you can get the
data you need to answer them.

✔ Assess data volumes and define refresh

frequency

• Quantify the data you need and anticipate the impact

of your decisions on your project and your cost.
• Your chosen data pipeline and storage structure
needs to fit and support the volume of data and type
of analysis you’ll be offering: i.e. if you offer advanced
drill downs or even further, self-service capabilities,
your database should support high concurrency,
meaning it should be able to handle a large number

TOUCAN TOCO THE SAAS CPO CHECKLIST 10

of users accessing your analytics and running simultaneous queries. Determine storage cost and
querying & performance requirements. Define refresh intervals and query frequency.

✔ Historicize your data based on time intervals that make sense for your users
Make sure that your database structure allows temporal querying. i.e. if you’re building a visualization
to illustrate the evolution of a metric over the years or if you want your users to go back to data dated a
few years back, your database should be able to support this.

✔ Define granularity levels and operational views

During your research and scoping phase, you should have identified granularity levels needed for the
analytics you’re building. The level of granularity and aggregation has an impact on how you structure
your data (think Elasticsearch or MongoDB indexes for instance). During this step, you need to replicate
those decisions inside your data structure.

✔ Assess the impact of self-service capabilities on your data structure

• If you’ve identified during the research and scoping phase the need to offer your users with
self-service capabilities, this has an impact on your data structure.
• It’s time to define exactly what you mean by self-service functionalities and draw the line to deter-
mine what you’ll be doing and what’s out of scope: if you’re giving your users complete freedom to
query anything in your database, your data structure needs to be able to handle this.

✔ Build a future proof API

• You need to anticipate future possibilities to leverage the data structure you built to support new
use cases: i.e. Business Intelligence, Machine Learning.
• Anticipate multi-tenancy support: you need to consider security and user permissions.
• Multi endpoint support: if your data will be used for various formats and mediums, take that into
account when working on your data structure. i.e: data exports, PDF, Excel/CSV files, etc.

✔ Assess available market solutions

Don’t reinvent the wheel and choose a best-in-breed approach, here are a couple of solutions to
consider:
• Data connection & integration: Fivetran, Mulesoft, Bearer
• Data storage: Snowflake, Mongo Atlass, Redshift, etc.
• Authentication: open source (SAML2, OpenID Connect) or managed (Amazon Cognito, Azure Active
directory).

For more information

docs.toucantoco.com/concepteur

TOUCAN TOCO THE SAAS CPO CHECKLIST 11

#4
Build
visualizations
according to
defined user needs
and requirements
ACTIONS RESSOURCES

✔ Take into account responsiveness require- Solution design:

ments Architect / Senior Front-end
Developer
• If you’ve identified during your research and scop- for 1 to 4 weeks
ing phase that responsiveness and mobility is key to
address your target audience’s pains, then you need to Solution implementation:
take that into consideration when building your visual- 2 Front-end Developers
izations. + 1 Product Manager
• If responsiveness is not a requirement now, think for 2 to 6 months
about whether it would be required in the long run: it’s
better to anticipate future needs, since adding it as an Testing:
afterthought can be extremely painful, and you might 2 Front-end Developers
risk losing precious development time when the need + 1 Product Manager
manifests itself! for 2 to 4 weeks

TOUCAN TOCO THE SAAS CPO CHECKLIST 12

✔ Assess the need for interactivity to define
the requirements of your chart API

Depending on the form you chose for your analytics, they

need to be much more than charts on a static page to be
actionable and useful.
A couple of things to consider:
• Basic user filtering, cross filtering, master filtering
• Interactions between visualizations and the rest of
your product and vice versa

✔ Assess available solutions on the market

and select one

• There are many available solutions to make it easier

for your developers, from code libraries (vanilla JS,
d3.JS, highchart, vega) to chart vendors and on the
shelf BI products to specialized Embedded Analytics
vendors (like Toucan).
• If you’re mixing and matching different solutions in
your toolkit, make sure they fit with your existing
stack and data architecture
• Rely as much as possible on peer evaluations and
user communities.

TOUCAN TOCO THE SAAS CPO CHECKLIST 13

#5
Think beyond
charts, deliver
what your users
need to take better
decisions
ACTIONS RESSOURCES

✔ Provide explanation before information Depend on actions

you decide to take
• When building analytics features, you need to ensure
all users are on the same page when it comes to the
displayed data.
• Context and explanation are crucial to understanding
new and unfamiliar concepts, especially for business
users. Providing data without context is the difference
between a Japanese chef explaining the art of sushi
making and a fishmonger throwing a fish at your
head. If you just present raw data, users will have a
hard time uncovering the story behind the numbers
on their own.
• Phone calls and reporting requests to your success
& support team are often a result of lack of context,
misalignment in how a KPI was calculated or how it
is defined, or simply lack of cohesion.
• You can avoid this by adding a glossary to your
visualizations containing a definition of keywords
used on your graph to align everyone on a single
definition of the data.

TOUCAN TOCO THE SAAS CPO CHECKLIST 14

✔ Enable easy sharing and collaboration

Your users will want to share data, collaborate with colleagues, and distribute their findings.
Collaboration features make sure to keep your users engaged and centralizes exchanges inside your
product. Some features to consider:
• Data annotation: ability to highlight certain components in your visualizations and share them
with colleagues by adding a commentary to a specific number or chart. It’s the virtual equivalent of
writing notes in the margin of a paper.
• Comments: a chat area where users can share insights with their colleagues, ask questions and
interact.
• Call to action: users are more likely to act when explicitly guided towards next steps.

Resources:
• 2 Front-end Developers + 1 Product Manager for 1 months
• x 2-4 if you need end-user self-service

✔ Add alerting & push notifications

Alerts are a great way to keep your users engaged with your analytics and help them keep an eye on
critical business information in the quickest and most efficient possible way. The alert may be acti-
vated when a metric goes outside a particular threshold. For example, if stock levels of a critical item
falls below or rises above a certain level, a store manager can be automatically informed to take action
immediately. They can be based on:
• a set frequency: every hour / day / week
• certain event triggers: if metrics x condition, then email/ in-product notification/SMS, etc.

Resources
• 1 Front-end Developer, 1 Back-end Developer + 1 Product Manager for 1 month
• x 2-4 if you need end-user self-service alerts. For example, “as a user I can set up my own custom
alerts & notifications”

✔ Add CSV or Excel export options directly from charts

Excel or CSV files are the most basic formats to consider when it comes to export, but are also a must-
have. You should allow your users to pull information out of your app to give them more detailed infor-
mation of what’s behind the dashboards for further analysis.

Resources
1 Front-end Developer, 1 Back-end Developer + 1 Product Manager for 0,5 months per export type

TOUCAN TOCO THE SAAS CPO CHECKLIST 15

✔ Add PDF export option directly from the dashboard

PDF exports may sound simple, but they can be some of the trickiest parts of an analytics project. If
you want to become a key insights provider and answer your client organizations’ reporting needs,
then allowing your users to export PDF versions of your analytics is crucial. What you need to consider
when building PDF export features:
• Format: simple static PDFs or interactive PDFs on webpages to allow end users to drill through to
get more information.
• Pagination: each page needs to have a meaningful amount of data to avoid over-cluttering, it’s
important to decide how much information goes into a page and when it makes sense to start a
new page.
• Personalization: ability to be individually customized down to specific user types (c-level
executive, field manager, etc.) and data types (per country, channel, store, etc.)
• Report bursting or scheduled delivery: ability to schedule the delivery of customized reports for a
specific set of recipients run on a daily, weekly, monthly, or custom schedule.

Here are some tips for you:

• Ability to support small and large datasets, cross-browser compatibility, print quality,
customization per user.
• Think about your design: placement of logos, labels, images, text, legends, sources, etc. Precise
dimensions and placement per type of chart displayed. Maintain branding and overall look and feel
of your product. Rendering in both portrait and landscape orientation.
Resources:
• 1 Front-end Developer, 1 Back-end Developer + 1 Product Manager for 0,5 months per additional
export type
• x 2-4 if you need end-user self-service. i.e. “as an end user I can build my own PDF report”

✔ Link your analytics to PowerPoint directly from your dashboard

Today, when users want to present results, PowerPoint is still the preferred format for presentations
both internally (team meetings, retrospective reviews, follow-ups) or externally (investment decks,
board meetings, etc). Building a link from your analytics to PowerPoint to smoothen the transition for
your users is a great way to increase adoption and engagement and make your dashboards even more
useful and actionable.
Resources: 1 Front-end Developer, 1 Back-end Developer and 1 Product Manager for 1 month

✔ Add user group dynamic customization or parent-children templating

Different people consume data differently and need to take different decisions. In that context, you
need to allow data and view customization per user or user group.
Resources: 1 Front-end Developer, 1 Back-end developer and 1 Product Manager for 1 month
x 2-4 if you need end-user self-service. i.e. “AAEnd user I can add my favorite charts to my dashboard”

TOUCAN TOCO THE SAAS CPO CHECKLIST 16

#6 RESSOURCES

Apply 0 bug policy, • 1 to 2 months to build

your automated test

test coverage & CI/CD pipeline on data and

chart API

requirements • 1 day per release for

ACTIONS manual testing

✔ Test for cross-browser and cross-device support

As you’re building your analytics features, it’s your responsibility to make sure that not only your
features answer specific business needs and are useful to your users, but that they work for all of your
users, no matter what browser or device they’re using. They should provide the same interactivity and
user experience across all browsers and devices. You need to consider:
• Different browsers including older ones that some users might still be using which don’t support
the latest advances.
• Different devices with different sizes and capabilities: smartphones, tablets, big screens, small
computer screens, etc.

✔ Carry out a mix of automated and manual testing approaches

Manual testing and automated testing cover two vast areas. There are several methods within each
category. Some of them are better suited to manual testing, and some are best performed through
automation, this is why it’s recommended to carry out a mix of both methods for optimal performance.
For example, Toucan’s acceptance list is currently running on 120+ items.

✔ Organize test & support to minimize R&D perturbations

• Designate a rotating dedicated tech resource for support to keep your tech team focused
• Define beforehand what you will support and what you won’t. i.e. do you want to support legacy
browsers? iPad formats? What makes or breaks your releases? What continuous improvements are
acceptable as ongoing Kaizen?
• Build a framework to prioritize dashboarding linked bugs
• Keep an eye on your tech stack dependency
• Look out for security patches & depreciation
• Look out for continuous improvements offering new business opportunities. i.e. could this new re-
lease of d3.js allow you to reach one of our business goals at a reasonable dev cost? Would it power
new use cases?

TOUCAN TOCO THE SAAS CPO CHECKLIST 17

Bonus
If you want your
non-technical teams
to set it up, use it,
and maintain it
in full-autonomy,
build a WYSIWYG
interface
ACTIONS RESSOURCES

✔ Determine your non-technical teams’ data fluen- Depend on actions

cy and technical expertise you decide to take

It’s important to define who will do the bulk of the work when it
comes to building your dashboards. You’ll need to align the tools
they will use with their skills and level of understanding.
For example, if you want to keep your tech team focused on
your main offer and choose to let your CSMs build a part of your
dashboards or maintain them, you know that they’re not data
savvy and have limited technical skills. They will need easy to
use tools that don’t require advanced technical and SQL coding
skills.

TOUCAN TOCO THE SAAS CPO CHECKLIST 18

✔ Build a studio for your builders
Not everyone works with or responds to technology in the
same way. What looks like a piece of cake to some might
be a hair-pulling nightmare to others. This is why it’s
important for you to gauge how comfortable your teams
are with the tools you’re providing them with. While you
can’t expect CSMs or Product managers to write SQL
queries, here are a couple of stories you can choose from
to anticipate needs and resources:

• Let my PM or CSM build visualizations from curated

datasets: 1 Front-end Developer, 1 Back-end Developer
1 Product Manager for 2 to 4 months

• Allow my PM / CSM to handle dashboarding access

rights and roles (viewer, contributor, builder): 1 We open-sourced
Front-end Developer, 1 Back-end Developer 1 Product our connector module
Manager for 1 to 2 months at Toucan

• Allow my PM / CSM to customize graphic elements https://github.com/

for each customer (colors, logo, …): 1 Front-end ToucanToco/toucan-
Developer, 1 Back-end Developer 1 Product Manager connectors
for 2 weeks to 1 month

• Allow my PM / CSM to set up push notifications using

emails templates: 1 Front-end Developer, 1 Back-end
Developer 1 Product Manager for 1 to 2 months

• Allow my PM / CSM to build programmatic PDF/PPT

Assess available
reports: 1 Front-end Developer, 1 Back-end Developer, 1
market solutions
Product Manager for 1 to 2 months

Reuse our query builder

• Allow my PM / CSM to connect to new data sources:
interface weaverbird.
1 Back-end Developer, 1 Product Manager for 1 to 4
toucantoco.com
months

Explore what’s out there!

• Allow my PM / CSM to do data preparation (joins,
vistools.net, g2.com/
aggregations, reshaping, …) 1 front-end developer,
categories/embedded-
1 Back-end Developer, 1 Product Manager for 3 to 6
business-intelligence#grid
months.

TOUCAN TOCO THE SAAS CPO CHECKLIST 19

You built your dashboards…
now what?— get to future
proofing!

✔ Write the F****** manual! (RTFM!)

• We live in a world where we can no longer get by with siloed information. Best in class
organizations thrive by embracing a knowledge sharing culture, and when it comes to your
analytics, that is no exception.
• RTFM is a nod to geek culture. This is what developers tell each other when a question is asked and
the answer is already documented somewhere. We made it part of our core values, and you should
too! Imagine this, you built the first version of your analytics and shipped it to your customers,
everything is going well. A couple of years down the road, the key people involved in the project
have left your company, but you’ve decided to improve that first version.
• By making sure that every step of the process is well documented, it makes it easier for teams and
new recruits to learn from past mistakes, so they can move forward with an improved strategy. It
also allows them to follow in their previous coworkers’ footsteps, build upon what worked, so they
can scale success through a systematic approach.

✔ Brace for user requests

Once you’re done with the first batch of analytics functionalities, your job doesn’t end there. As your
users start putting your dashboards to good use, you will receive increased requests for new features,
better visualizations, or more seamless workflows. You need to build a feedback loop to stay ahead of
user requirements.

✔ Prepare for market evolution, and competitor innovations

“The Only Constant in Life Is Change.”- Heraclitus —Your users are not the only ones changing, the
market too. Whether it comes to innovations in the embedded analytics space made possible with AI
and ML technologies, or competitor products upping their analytics game, you’ll need to keep an eye on
both and adapt accordingly.

✔ Define what happens if you no longer have the resources to upgrade in-house
Scaling your product is extremely hard, especially if you need to work on your core product while
also managing a parallel analytics roadmap. Something to consider is partnering with an embedded
analytics vendor to scale and take your analytics to the next level.

TOUCAN TOCO THE SAAS CPO CHECKLIST 20

Want an alternative
to build-it-yourself
analytics?
Here at Toucan Toco, we’ve proven our ability to support
organizations on that exciting journey of exploring
the world of embedded analytics. In fact, we’re the
acknowledged #1 embedded analytics partner for
growing teams who want to add a dashboarding
experience inside their software or SaaS product.
And don’t just take our word for it: your peers have
spoken on G2.

If you’re looking to future proof your organization and

take your embedded analytics capabilities to the next
level, get in touch with Toucan today.

TOUCAN TOCO THE SAAS CPO CHECKLIST 21

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