KPI tree to understand profit

Tom Okamoto
3 min readApr 20, 2020

Everyone in business definitely wants to increase profit. They make a desperate effort to think about how to boost sales amounts every day. However, will you be conscious of how your current action gets closer to your goal?

You will confront numerous tasks such as developing new functions, distribute campaign email to your customer and so on. Each division, furthermore each person deals with the problem in a different way even they are in the same company.

Are you going the long way round if you don’t grab the relationship between the task and KPI obviously? You might not see the wood for the trees. You have to understand that before you concentrate on the task in your presence.

You can tidy up your way to succeed in utilizing the KPI tree at that time. This framework can help you to show the big picture and what indicators you should follow to reach your big goals like a map.

KPI is an acronym of Key Performance Indicator as you may know. The business environment changes rapidly these days, that’s why your team probably makes a decision to update the KPI frequently. You should bring the map of the KPI tree not to lose your way of being engaged in taxing work.

The below figure is a sample KPI tree for a web service.

To be honest, I’m sure you can design this diagram easier than you expected. You must proceed with the making suddenly if you never make this one because there’s a big gap between comprehension instinctively each person and sharing the picture visually. For example, you can refer to the following website explains how to build KPI trees.

The point that I want to emphasize on this post is how to manage the KPI tree after you prepare that. I’m pretty sure almost all of the business used to make that but I assume numerous teams seldom update and share the picture visually frequently.

If you have a regular meeting weekly or monthly, you’re able to discuss the place where you are now and destination with all members together. In the discussion, you can check whether to update those indicators is necessary to optimize them.

In addition, you store the information in a common folder for all members to access that by themselves anytime. Don’t forget setup the file type with reading only, otherwise, there are possibilities KPI unexpected changes by chance before you even realized it.

Anyway, you have to start running with a tentative KPI tree even though the bare necessities because we all can’t operate it perfectly from the beginning.

The discussion on the KPI tree helps to build a good team reducing miscommunication and raise the quality of the discussion in your team. Because you can obviously share and confirm the way to achieve a big purpose with each other. This framework shows that’s a true value when you not only create at one time but also keep updating and sharing with your colleagues regularly. Let’s go on a business adventure with the map.

Keep changing, keep going.

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Tom Okamoto

Communication designer. Asia Journal / Marketing / Technology Keep changing, Keep going.