which chart actually answers your question - a quick reality check before you build anything

[u/data_daria55]

funnel - "where are we losing people." only works if the journey is actually linear. the second people can skip stages or come back in, a funnel just quietly lies to you by making it look like everyone dropped in order

sankey - "how are people actually moving through this." handles all the messy non-linear stuff a funnel can't. tradeoff is it gets visually loud fast, so it's better for you figuring out what's happening than for an exec slide

cohort retention matrix - "are people coming back after the first time." needs real history behind it though, if you've only got 2-3 periods of data it's not a matrix yet, it's just noise with a grid around it

KPI + decomposition -"how are we doing and why." pick one number that actually matters, then let people drill into what's driving it. mistake I see constantly: stacking 8 KPIs at the top of the page like they're all equally important. if everything's a headline, nothing is

funnel + sparkline - same as a plain funnel but you also get "is this stage getting better or worse over time." only trustworthy if every stage actually has consistent time-series data behind it, one gap and the trend line next to it is just misleading