Requirements for Measurement Dashboards and Their Benefits: A Study of Start-ups in an Emerging Ecosystem

Metrics, often visualized with dashboards, are considered crucial to help software start-ups focus on the right aspects during the first years. However, earlier research indicates, metric choices in emerging ecosystems are not necessarily the same as in literature, which mostly focuses on developed countries. More knowledge is required to provide dashboards that suite East African software startups. The aim of this study is to identify key requirements for measurement dashboards for early software start-ups that can be used to monitor the daily health of a start-up and how these dashboards are expected to benefit the start-ups. We performed semi-structured interviews with 36 software start-ups in Uganda and Kenya to identify and categorize requirements for measurement dashboards as well as hopes associated with the use of such dashboards. Our results show that most start-ups want measurements dashboards to visualise performance.

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