Stop 11 · Business Acumen & Domain KnowledgeTopics · 3/8

KPIs vs Metrics vs Dimensions

In short

People mix up these three words in every meeting. Get them straight and your dashboards, queries and conversations instantly become clearer.

A metric is any measurable number, a KPI is a metric a team has explicitly agreed matters most right now, and a dimension is a way of slicing a metric (by region, by device, by segment).

The jaadu holds a big blank scoreboard panel above its head on a cricket pitch, a bat resting beside it.

Think of it like this

The cricket scoreboard

Runs, wickets and balls bowled are metrics: things you count. Batsman, over and venue are dimensions: ways to slice those counts. The required run rate to win the chase is the KPI: the one number the captain watches to know if the team is on track.

Watch it happen

Sorting a food delivery app's data

Orders data

Metrics

Dimensions

Orders

Delivery mins

KPI: on-time %

City

Day of week

Restaurant

1/5Start with a table of orders. Every row is one order with numbers and labels.

The big ideas

What you need to know

Metric: a number you measure

Anything countable or averageable: sessions, orders, revenue, minutes. A company can have hundreds.

Dimension: a way to slice

Text or category columns like city, device or plan. They go in GROUP BY, not inside SUM.

KPI: a metric with a job

A Key Performance Indicator is tied to a goal and a target. Teams usually have only a handful.

Not every metric is a KPI

If nobody would change a decision when the number moves, it's a metric to monitor, not a KPI.

See it in code

Walk through the code

sql

1SELECT2  city,                                   -- dimension3  COUNT(*) AS orders,                     -- metric4  AVG(delivery_minutes) AS avg_minutes,   -- metric5  AVG(CASE WHEN delivery_minutes <= 306           THEN 1.0 ELSE 0 END) AS on_time_rate   -- KPI7FROM orders8WHERE order_date >= '2026-10-01'9GROUP BY city10ORDER BY on_time_rate;

1/4City is the dimension, so it appears in SELECT and in GROUP BY.

Dimensions go in GROUP BY. Metrics are aggregated. The KPI is the metric your team has a target for.

Save yourself the pain

Common mistakes

Oops

Calling every number on the dashboard a KPI.

Do this instead

Pick three to five KPIs tied to goals. Keep the rest as supporting metrics further down.

Oops

Summing a dimension like pincode or customer ID because it happens to be stored as a number.

Do this instead

Ask if adding the values makes sense. If not, it's a dimension, whatever its data type.

Your mission

Label a real dashboard

~15 min

Quick check

Which of these is a dimension?

Go deeper

1Take a dashboard you've built and label each field as metric, KPI, or dimension.
2Learn why not every metric deserves to be a KPI — KPIs should be few and deliberate.
3Practice proposing a KPI for a hypothetical team and defending why it's the right one.