North Star Playbook
The guide to discovering your product’s North Star
Making the North Star Framework stick and changing your North Star
Over time, your North Star should improve business performance and happier customers—emphasis on the words “over time.”
“A common misconception is thinking you’ll have a perfect North Star and everything you need after just one workshop,” shares John. “It can take a couple weeks—or months—to get it right.”
Regardless of timing, though, you will start observing positive changes within your company.
The following are some signals that the North Star Framework is working for your organization and your product:
- Team members can explain how their day-to-day work connects to the North Star Metric.
- You are more confident about the impact of your work and the quality of your decisions.
- Team members report improved morale and cohesion.
- You hear and can say “no” more easily and with more evidence.
- The “battle of ideas” shifts to discussions about impact and experimentation.
- You notice more productive collaboration.
- People use similar language.
- More people can coherently describe your product strategy.
- Non-product team members start to use language like “inputs” or “our North Star.”
- The North Star Metric is mentioned at large company meetings.
Incorporating your North Star into your culture
Often teams view workshops or corporate initiatives as a one-and-done activity or a “flavor of the week.” So how do you make sure that doesn’t happen with your North Star? By deeply ingraining it into your culture.
“Your North Star is not a proclamation you nail to the wall and magically every starts to follow,” explains Ted. “Instead, you need to have systems in place to drive it forward.”
The teams who’ve seen the most success implementing—and sticking to—the North Star Framework have:
- A sponsor with both influence and authority
- Leadership buy-in
- Communication and change management processes to socialize the concept and get employees across all organizations aligned behind your North Star
- Onboarding process to educate team members and incorporate the North Star Framework into existing ways of working (see Chapter 6 on tips)
- Approval processes
Amplitude’s diverse, geographically dispersed functional teams all have one thing in common: the North Star. Amplitude Senior Director of Product Management, Abbie Kouzmanoff, shares how leadership teams make the North Star a cornerstone of Amplitude’s culture.
“Our North Star is top of mind in everything we do. We report on it weekly within the product and leadership teams and share progress quarterly in company All Hands right alongside metrics like pipeline and revenue.
Customer Success Managers report on it as a measure of customer health in quarterly business reviews (QBRs), and we even incorporate it into our usage reports feature, so customers can self-serve and see how their own team is adopting Amplitude. This means our product team, GTM team, and even our customers align to our North Star as a measure of value.”
When to change your North Star
At some point, your business may recognize that your North Star is no longer effective. Maybe your market has changed, your business is at a different stage, or you’ve realized that the metric you defined isn’t something you can control.
“A good North Star will be a leading indicator of revenue,“ explains Ted. “If your North Star is flat, then expect your revenue to be flat. But if at any point your North Star isn’t directionally indicating where your revenue is going, then it’s time to revise it.”
Recognizing this and changing requires insight, transparency, humility, and communication. However, John shares that changing their North Star is often one of the hardest things for companies: “They get too attached to it.”
“Amplitude changes its North Star whenever the company makes a significant shift in strategy.” shares Abbie.
North Stars should be a leading indicator of revenue, but they should also successfully measure your strategic success.
“For example, when Amplitude changed our strategy to focus more on growing usage within teams versus building features for individual analysts, we shifted our North Star to measure collaboration in our product.”
The key point: North Stars can change.
“We went back to the drawing board on our North Star when we realized that how people were using the product was changing, when we were going upmarket into the enterprise, and wanted to invest more into a team-focused strategy.”
These shifts should also change what bets you prioritize and create clarity for the team. Teams should be able to justify new product features and capabilities based on how they impact the NSM. When the strategy shifts, so should the bets teams take on and the metrics they measure success by.
Keeping your momentum
Sometimes organizations trying to implement the North Star Framework succumb to what product development expert Jabe Bloom describes as gap thinking, causing them to lose momentum and revert to old patterns.
In a gap-thinking model, teams examine the current condition, envision a future state, and attempt to define and close the gap between the two.
The major problem with gap thinking is that teams become vested in a fixed endpoint that never materializes—inadvertently devaluing the present. There’s a lot of long-term planning and execution and long feedback cycles. When they don’t achieve the future—and close the gap—they lose steam and give up.
If you find that your efforts to identify and implement a North Star for your product are losing momentum, you might be guilty of too much gap thinking.
Bloom contrasts gap thinking with present thinking. In present thinking, you recognize the reality of the present and work to change it. Present thinking asks, “Where are we? What do I need now? How do I improve the current way of working?”
Teams that successfully implement frameworks like the North Star Framework are never “done.” They’re always learning and grappling with uncertainty. The real muscle to develop is continuously checking to see whether your North Star Metric and inputs represent your current beliefs, product vision, and product strategy—then refine accordingly.
To make the shift to present thinking, consider Jabe Bloom’s present thinking questions:
- Where are we?
- What do I need now?
- How do I improve my current way of working?
Applied to the North Star Framework, the present thinking questions look like this:
- Can we align our current efforts more closely with our chosen inputs?
- What decisions do we need to make today and in the near future? Is the framework supporting those decisions? If not, how can we adapt it?
- Can every team member trace current work to the North Star Metric? If not, what new context might we provide to help make the connection?
- Has our confidence level in our chosen inputs and North Star Metric increased or decreased in the last couple weeks? Why?
- What have we learned recently? Let’s revisit our beliefs, value exchanges, etc. to see what needs tweaking.