Systems of action are so hot right now
Your dashboard tells you what happened. A system of action tells you what to do about it.
Dashboards don’t drive anything. Alerts that fire when the good or bad signals happen are what kick off the work.
This morning I pulled up the new dashboards the team’s been building in beta. They look good. They surface the right data. Then I sat there for a minute and realized that the dashboards aren’t the point. The alerts, the actions, the outcomes are the point.
I’ve known that for a while, but it landed when I started building the dashboards myself.
We built Accoil to move product analytics from a system of record to a system of action. The distinction sounds clean in a pitch. Living inside your own product makes it concrete. A dashboard can give the appearance of understanding. You open it, you see numbers, you feel informed. But feeling informed and acting on a signal are two different things.
What dashboards vs signals actually looks like
One of our top-three accounts quietly disengaged over about a month. Usage dropped and a power user who’d been active three days a week went quiet. Nothing dramatic – no cancellation, no support ticket, no angry reply to a check-in email. Just a slow cooling.
If all I had was a dashboard, I’d have to remember to look closely, compare week over week, notice the trend. That sort of stuff is easy to miss. What’s cool is that the alert caught it. It got the data to us in a way that we could act on it – reach out, understand what changed, get ahead of churn instead of chasing it.
The flip side matters just as much.
Another account came roaring back, doubling its active users over two weeks. That’s a signal to pounce on now, not discover late. An expansion conversation, a case study ask, a referral introduction – all of those land better when you catch the momentum live, not in a quarterly review that most customers don’t really want to do anyway.
The work isn’t in the dashboard. It’s in the signal, the alert, the action.
A number you have to remember to go look at is a number that’s already too late
Dashboards are necessary. You need them to orient, to understand your business, to know what normal looks like so you can recognize abnormal. But they’re not enough.
A dashboard you check on a good Monday morning doesn’t find the account that cooled last Wednesday. Tools should work for you, not demand you work in them.
What if the signal came to you?
Putting it into practice
Pick one customer segment – your top accounts, your recently onboarded cohort, your highest-growth users. Pick two or three signals: cooling (feature drop-off, login frequency down, power user goes quiet) and heating (usage spike, new users added, breadth of feature adoption up). Wire them to Slack. Bing bong.
Or if you want to go further, run them through Claude via MCP with a cron job and bring the summary into your daily standup.
The point isn’t the tool. The point is that the signal reaches you where you already work, so it becomes impossible to miss.
A system of record tells you what happened. A system of action finds the signal in the noise and puts it in front of you before it’s too late to do anything about it.
Build more systems of action.
Peter