Guide · Layer 5

Internal Dashboard

Written for: seed / Series A scientist-founder

Before the number goes to anyone outside, give it a home inside the model: one tab — a dashboard — that captures the headline metrics and the few graphs that matter, pulled straight from the sheets behind them. It’s the first communication artifact, and the only one that stays in-house. Build it and the team reads off one consistent set of numbers instead of three slightly different ones.

Put the headline metrics in one place

The dashboard is where the outputs of Layer 4 come to rest and get shown — not re-derived. A workable set:

• The headline figure, with its band and basis — ~$800/t (±~30%), and the boundary, capacity factor, and cost year it sits on. The basis travels with the number, so nobody quotes it bare
• The two or three drivers — straight from the tornado, so the team always knows what the answer actually rides on
• The handful of scenarios — base / optimistic / conservative, read side by side, each labeled for which case it is
• A cost breakdown — where the dollars go, at a glance

Wire it, don’t type it: every cell references the model, so when an input moves the dashboard moves with it. A number hand-typed onto the dashboard is stale the moment the model changes, and a stale dashboard is worse than none.

🧭 Coach’s Read

The quiet value here is one source of truth. When everyone — you, a co-founder, an advisor — reads the same wired number, the “wait, which figure is current?” conversation stops happening, and you can answer “what’s the cost today?” without a fire drill. Two habits make it earn its place. Keep every figure labeled for which case it is — gross vs. net, base vs. upside — because this is the sheet the deck and the shareable model are both built from, so a mislabel here propagates everywhere. And design it to be read: a dashboard nobody opens isn’t communication, it’s storage.