The timeline is the high-level overview of growth at your company. You can plan the coming quarter, check in on what’s live at the moment, or scan through past projects. Use it to figure out what a product area looked like last year, or what the impact of a recent holiday has been on core business metrics. We think of it as the view from 30,000 feet — and you can easily zoom in on the details, whenever you want to.

There are three basic components to your timeline: projects, metrics, and footnotes. We’ll give a brief overview of each one here, to help you get started.

The timeline lets you see the chronological order of your past, present, and future projects. This helps with planning and scheduling, as you can see potential conflicts and easily make changes to the dates you’re hoping to start a project. It also helps with analysis, which we’ll get to in a moment. Check out our other articles for details on adding projects and scheduling projects.

To see your team’s “North Star” metrics — like your activation rate or self-service ARR — on your timeline, you can configure one or more metrics in Panobi as a time series visualization. This will sync your daily metric data with the cadence of your experimentation, allowing you to see how the ups and downs of these important numbers relate to and reflect your team’s work.

Metrics instances in Panobi are single SQL queries that you can set up via your connected data source (you’ll integrate your data via our integrations for Snowflake, Redshift, or BigQuery, or using our Metrics SDK for in-house data). Once configured, your timeline will always be up-to-date and you’ll be able to visually track changes in product analytics and business metrics with either shipped projects or events outside of the product.

We know that, despite our best efforts, growth teams cannot control every variable. 😅 For better or worse, sometimes key business metrics will shift due to outside forces like holiday weekends, PR efforts like articles or conferences, or even disruptive weather patterns.

Footnotes let you capture and track notable events that are outside the purview of your team’s work. When you’re on your timeline page, look to the Footnotes section at the bottom of the screen, and click on the plus icon (+) to the right of that section to add a new footnote. With your chosen dates and a quick explanation, you can give context to any shift in metrics, while linking to projects, metrics, or insights to provide more detail.

If you use a mouse or trackpad and you want to adjust the relative sizes of each of the timeline components, you can click on the six closely-spaced dots centered between the sections, and drag up or down to resize.
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If you use a screenreader, you can use arrow keys to adjust position of the timeline blocks when you're focused on the resizer affordance between the sections. Resizing can help you see more projects (or footnotes!) in one view or, alternately, to observe more fine-grained changes to your metrics.

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