Running a business means keeping track of so many moving parts at once. You’ve got sales numbers, customer happiness scores, operational costs, employee satisfaction—the list goes on. We’ve watched countless executives flip through dashboard after dashboard, trying to piece together whether their company is actually doing well or just looks good in certain areas.
That’s where Performance Wheel comes in. Think of it as a radar chart that actually makes sense to everyone in the room. We built this custom Power BI visual because we kept seeing the same problem: businesses had all this data, but no easy way to see the big picture. Instead of squinting at multiple bar charts, you get one clean visual that shows exactly where you’re winning and where you need help.
The wheel plots your key metrics around a circle, creating a shape that tells your performance story instantly. When everything’s balanced, you get a nice, even circle. When something’s off, the shape gets lopsided—and trust me, you’ll spot it right away.
Challenges
Here’s what we kept hearing from our clients before we built this visual:
- Everything lives in separate worlds. Sales data sits in one report, customer feedback in another, and operational metrics somewhere else entirely. Good luck trying to connect the dots during a Monday morning meeting.
- Mental gymnastics required. Ever tried to look at six different bar charts and figure out your overall performance? Your brain wasn’t designed for that kind of multitasking. By the time you’ve processed the third chart, you’ve forgotten what the first one said.
- The million-dollar question nobody could answer quickly. “Are we actually balanced, or are we just really good at one thing?” Simple question, but it used to take hours of analysis to get a straight answer.
- We realized the need for something that could answer “How are we really doing?” in about three seconds.
Solution
The approach was pretty straightforward: take all that complicated data and turn it into something your grandmother could understand. We focused on making the Performance Wheel do three things really well: show clear information, let people interact with it naturally, and look however they wanted it to look.
Key Features
- Room for everything that matters. You can plot up to 10 different metrics around the wheel—revenue growth, customer retention, operational costs, whatever keeps you up at night. Each one gets its own spoke on the wheel.
- Smart sizing. The wheel automatically adjusts based on your data, so you’re always using the full visual space. No more squashed charts or wasted white space.
- Details on demand. Hover over any point and get the exact numbers plus whatever extra context you’ve set up. No more guessing what that data point actually represents.
- Plays well with others. Click on any part of the wheel and watch your other charts update to match. It’s fully wired into Power BI’s filtering system, so everything stays connected.
- Make it yours. Colors, line thickness, backgrounds—customize everything to match your company’s style. We’ve seen some gorgeous wheels that perfectly matched corporate branding.
This thing really shines when you’re building balanced scorecards or need to track how different departments are performing against their targets.
Results
Once our clients started using the Performance Wheel, something interesting happened. Instead of spending the first 20 minutes of every meeting explaining what all the numbers meant, they could jump straight to the important stuff—figuring out what to do next.
- Spot problems instantly. When your wheel looks more like a flat tire than a circle, you know exactly which area needs attention. No analysis paralysis, just clear direction.
- Watch your progress unfold. Connect the wheel to a time filter and you can literally watch your company’s “performance shape” change over months or years. It’s surprisingly motivating to see that the lopsided wheel gradually becomes more balanced.
- Get your point across faster. We’ve had executives tell us they can now explain their quarterly results in half the time. The wheel does the heavy lifting—they just need to point at the shape
Want to learn how to build dashboards that actually get used? Check out our practical tips for creating interactive dashboards or find out why more companies are choosing Microsoft Power BI for their analytics Tips and Tricks to create an Interactive Dashboard , 7reasons to use Microsoft Power BI .