I totally agree with the sentiment in the blog post. As someone who has built and now compulsively checks a real time dashboard however, I'll enumerate one case where I've found real time really valuable.
I'm the product owner of a social game, and we are blessed with:
1) high traffic
2) tools that make it easy to test sales, promotions, contests in real time
3) a team that is capable of doing multiple meaningful releases a week reliably
The result of this is that we end up making meaningful changes to our product on a daily basis. With our high traffic, I can reliably tell you within one hour (on the outside) whether a promotion, contest or feature is having its intended impact, especially once I:
1) Benchmark against recent averages (and take into account the volatility in the metric I'm measuring... everything is framed as how many standard deviations above or below recent averages)
2) Compare against recent trends.
3) Compare against my expectations/hypothesis. After a couple years of looking at realtime KPIs move in response to changes, I've gotten pretty good at forecasting results.
Obviously, I also look at metrics at a daily level and track weekly cohorted metrics out for months to make sure strategically we're maximizing for a global maxima and not a local one. But there are a lot of pretty realtime businesses where tactics are extremely important that could really benefit from realtime dashboards.
I'm the product owner of a social game, and we are blessed with:
1) high traffic
2) tools that make it easy to test sales, promotions, contests in real time
3) a team that is capable of doing multiple meaningful releases a week reliably
The result of this is that we end up making meaningful changes to our product on a daily basis. With our high traffic, I can reliably tell you within one hour (on the outside) whether a promotion, contest or feature is having its intended impact, especially once I:
1) Benchmark against recent averages (and take into account the volatility in the metric I'm measuring... everything is framed as how many standard deviations above or below recent averages)
2) Compare against recent trends.
3) Compare against my expectations/hypothesis. After a couple years of looking at realtime KPIs move in response to changes, I've gotten pretty good at forecasting results.
Obviously, I also look at metrics at a daily level and track weekly cohorted metrics out for months to make sure strategically we're maximizing for a global maxima and not a local one. But there are a lot of pretty realtime businesses where tactics are extremely important that could really benefit from realtime dashboards.