How to Make the KPI Slide [Practical Guide]
- Ink Narrates | The Presentation Design Agency
- 10 hours ago
- 7 min read
While working on a quarterly business review presentation for a client named Kevin, he asked a question that comes up more often than one might expect:
“How do we show KPIs without making it look like a spreadsheet dump?”
To which our Creative Director answered,
“Show the story, not the table.”
As a presentation design agency, dozens of QBRs, board decks, investor updates, and sales reviews cross our screens every year. And despite differences in teams, industries, and goals, the KPI slide tends to trigger the same set of reactions—confusion, frustration, or a last-minute design scramble.
Why? Because it sits at the intersection of data, storytelling, and design. Get one of those wrong, and the slide either drowns in numbers or floats aimlessly without meaning. Get all three aligned, and suddenly, it's the slide that leaders keep returning to during the meeting.
So, in this blog, let’s unpack the anatomy of a strong KPI slide. From how to choose what to show, to how to design for impact—this is not a theory guide. This is the playbook that’s been tested across high-stakes rooms, where attention is scarce and clarity wins.
Why the KPI Slide Deserves More Respect
The KPI slide is rarely treated like the headline act. More often, it gets squeezed somewhere in the middle of a deck, overloaded with charts, peppered with metrics, and buried under a layer of well-meaning but overwhelming detail. The assumption is that stakeholders want “everything.” But what they really want is insight.
Every leadership team, every board, every investor is asking the same question when they reach that slide: What are you measuring, and what does it say about the health of the business?
That’s it. The mistake most teams make is assuming the KPI slide’s job is to “report.” In reality, its job is to signal. It should do what great headlines do—trigger curiosity, focus attention, and make the audience care about what’s coming next.
This is especially true in decks where decisions are made—QBRs, strategic reviews, fundraising updates. The KPI slide isn’t just there to show results. It’s there to show direction. Is the business moving forward? Is the team focused on what matters? Are the signals aligned with the story the rest of the deck is trying to tell?
If there’s a disconnect between the story and the metrics, it’s not the audience that looks confused—it’s the team presenting.
The KPI slide is the moment of truth. That’s why it deserves more than a standard table and a couple of arrows. It deserves to be designed with as much intent as the narrative around it.
How to Make the KPI Slide That Actually Moves the Room
It starts with a hard truth: not every number belongs on the KPI slide.
The most common pitfall? Turning it into a performance dump. When that happens, the audience stops reading. Worse, they stop listening. The slide that was meant to build credibility ends up diluting it. So, before diving into design, there’s a brutal but necessary step:
1. Decide What Not to Show
The KPI slide is not a dashboard. It’s a high-context communication tool. And the first rule of high-context communication is this: edit with intent.
Here’s a framework that helps filter what earns its place:
Is this metric tied to a strategic objective?
Does it influence a key decision the audience is about to make?
Will its movement (up or down) change what the team does next?
If the answer to any of these is no, it doesn’t belong on the slide.
Teams often resist this. There's always pressure to prove effort—show more, cover everything, avoid leaving out any detail that might raise a question. But clarity lives on the other side of restraint. The most effective KPI slides are edited, not overloaded.
Focus on 3 to 5 metrics. That’s usually enough to show strategic alignment, performance trajectory, and operational health. Any more, and the slide becomes a scan instead of a read.
2. Group KPIs by Storyline, Not Department
Another trap: organizing metrics by function. Sales here. Marketing there. Product somewhere in the middle. That structure feels neat—but it buries the narrative.
The KPI slide is a storytelling tool. And every story needs a structure. So instead of arranging KPIs by team, arrange them by theme.
Examples:
If the story is about growth, group metrics that demonstrate market traction—monthly recurring revenue, customer acquisition cost, lead velocity, net retention.
If the story is about operational turnaround, show KPIs that reflect efficiency—cost per acquisition, churn rate, burn multiple, sales cycle duration.
If the story is about readiness for scale, group metrics that prove system maturity—onboarding time, support tickets per user, infrastructure uptime.
What matters is not who owns the metric. What matters is whether the metric advances the narrative the team is trying to tell.
Think of the KPI slide as a sequence, not a summary.
3. Don’t Just Show the Metric—Frame It
Raw numbers are cold. Framed numbers move people.
Take this example:
Churn Rate: 6.4%
That’s a statistic. Now watch what happens when it’s framed:
Churn Rate dropped from 9.2% to 6.4% after switching onboarding tools—saving an estimated $82K in ARR this quarter.
Suddenly, that KPI becomes a proof point. It’s no longer just data—it’s a cause-and-effect story. And stories stick.
Every KPI should be paired with a quick framing line. A phrase that answers two questions:
What happened?
Why does it matter?
This small addition transforms the slide from a report into a result.
Framing can be added visually (as a caption or subhead), or verbally (spoken during the presentation). But one way or another, it needs to be there.
Without framing, the audience is forced to interpret. With framing, they follow the logic of the presenter—and that’s where persuasion lives.
4. Use Visual Hierarchy to Show What Matters Most
Design is not decoration. Design is decision-making made visible.
The layout of a KPI slide communicates priority, even before a single word is read. So if everything looks the same—same size, same color, same weight—the message being sent is: everything matters equally.
And that’s rarely true.
Use scale to guide attention. The most important metric should be the largest. Use color intentionally. Green for above-target, red for underperforming—but only if there’s a clear action tied to that status. Avoid coloring just for effect. It becomes noise.
Use spacing to separate themes. Use labels that are readable from across a room. And if charts are used (sparingly), strip them to the essentials. A clean line graph or simple bar chart outperforms a gradient-filled, axis-heavy data mess every time.
Remember—this slide is often shown on a projector or screen-share. The real estate is limited. Clarity beats cleverness.
5. Avoid the “Time Travel” Mistake
Many KPI slides suffer from a subtle time-travel problem.
The presenter starts talking about last quarter’s performance while the slide shows YTD numbers. Or speaks about weekly patterns while the chart displays monthly aggregates. The audience is now in three different timeframes, and the message loses its grip.
This happens more than most teams realize.
The fix? Align metric timeframes with the narrative window.
If the meeting is about this quarter, show quarterly data.
If the update is monthly, use trailing 30-day metrics.
If the story is about improvement over time, use a before-after comparison (with labels).
Temporal consistency makes a KPI slide feel tighter, more thoughtful, and easier to follow. And it eliminates the mental tax of context switching.
6. Build In a Signal of “What’s Next”
Here’s what separates a good KPI slide from a great one: forward intent.
A good KPI slide shows what’s true. A great one shows what’s next.
That doesn’t mean forecasting. It means building a subtle bridge between the metric and the decision it supports.
Let’s say the burn multiple has improved significantly. The follow-through might be:
Burn multiple improved to 1.5, opening room for renewed hiring across Sales and Customer Success.
Now the audience isn’t just seeing a performance metric—they’re seeing what the leadership intends to do with it.
That’s strategy. And that’s why this slide matters.
If this signal isn’t built into the slide, the presenter has to insert it manually. That’s fine—but only if done with consistency and clarity.
When done well, this approach makes the KPI slide a pivot point in the conversation. One that naturally leads into plans, opportunities, and action.
7. Kill the Grid. Design the Conversation.
Spreadsheets are built in grids. Conversations are not.
One of the fastest ways to dehumanize a KPI slide is to drop a screenshot of an Excel table and call it done. Rows, columns, tiny fonts, 15 metrics crammed into a grid.
It’s not a KPI slide. It’s a hiding place.
Instead, design a slide that can hold the room. Each metric needs space to breathe. Each visual needs enough weight to carry meaning. Each theme needs just enough structure to guide the eye without exhausting it.
Think of it like a well-designed product homepage. Every element exists to drive clarity. Every section earns attention.
That’s the mindset shift: treat the KPI slide as the homepage of your strategy.The audience doesn’t need to scroll forever. They need to understand what matters and why—fast.
Why Hire Us to Build your Presentation?
If you're reading this, you're probably working on a presentation right now. You could do it all yourself. But the reality is - that’s not going to give you the high-impact presentation you need. It’s a lot of guesswork, a lot of trial and error. And at the end of the day, you’ll be left with a presentation that’s “good enough,” not one that gets results. On the other hand, we’ve spent years crafting thousands of presentations, mastering both storytelling and design. Let us handle this for you, so you can focus on what you do best.