North Star Playbook
The guide to discovering your product’s North Star
Get specific: defining your North Star
As teams converge on a North Star Metric, there is often a dance of uncertainty. Your team might bounce through a cycle of doubt:
As the idea solidifies, your discussion will slowly turn to how you can define the metric. Though doubt is a normal part of the process, a word of caution: Try not to get paralyzed by thinking that your North Star needs to be perfect.
The goal is for your team to precisely define your North Star, but it will likely change and evolve as you learn more. The key is to build a North Star that’s directionally accurate and then adapt as you learn.
“You’re trying to elicit a hypothesis. A lot of people don’t realize that their first pass at the North Star is literally a hypothesis about the levers of growth for their company. So uncertainty is normal.”
Early-stage startups and companies new to the framework might modify their North Star Metric every six to 12 months. However, more established organizations usually don’t need to change their North Star Metric as frequently—every one to three years is more typical.
North Star name and definition
A North Star Metric and each of its inputs should have both a name and a definition. Though the name and definition are important for your metric and inputs alike, pay particular attention to the name and definition of the metric.
Your North Star Metric’s name should be engaging and descriptive—something pithy and punchy that inspires your organization—and your definition should be precise and clear, explaining exactly how you’ll measure it.
When you define the metric, you complete this template:
Our North Star Metric is called X, which we define as Y.
Silicon Valley investor, entrepreneur, and writer Andrew Chen emphasizes the importance of branding your North Star: “You have to be able to explain it to other people,” writes Chen. “So make it dead simple to talk about, repeat it over and over, and generally simplify it to the point where a lot of your growth product roadmap is focused on moving the metric up.”
For example, this North Star is too vague:
- Our North Star Metric tracks subscribers who share our content
This alternative would be a much better choice:
- Our North Star Metric: Frequent Content Sharers (FCS)
- Definition: The number of unique subscribers who share an average of two or more articles per week during the previous 12-week period
The best metric definitions cover your product’s current market, functionality, performance, and its potential future. There will always be healthy tension between what you are—the current state of your product—and what you want to be—some new reality you want to enable with your product.
For a first pass, brainstorm actual behaviors that might align with the concept behind your North Star Metric and inputs. For example, if your product is designed to encourage regular meditation, you might observe prolonged streaks of daily meditation sessions.
When converging on your North Star Metric and inputs, consider the following questions:
- How will changes in this metric impact your decision-making? What decisions are you hoping to inform? If you have historical data, “try on” the various changes in the metric over the months or years.
- What doesn’t this metric tell you? Are any of those questions or uncertainties more important to address?
- Assume that all product development activities stopped. Would the metric increase? For how long, and why?
- How does your chosen metric account for bias towards visitors who’ll tolerate the experience you’re delivering? (For more context, check out “Performance… It’s for People!,” Web Performance Consultant Andy Davies.)
- Will you be able to generate this metric continuously or frequently with minimal effort?
- How is the metric affected by seasonality, day-of-the-week, and day-of-the-month effects?
- Is it possible (and helpful) to compare this metric across various account and user cohorts? Ideally, there is value in viewing it in isolation and across cohorts.
- What will be your signal to revisit this metric? Assuming you revisit it periodically, what tests will you run to determine that it is still useful?
Focus on progress over perfection
“Powerful ideas imperfectly measured are better than perfect measures for less powerful ideas.”
Some teams get stuck believing that only a rigorous, statistically refined model will suffice for their North Star Metric, or that not having one points to an irreparable flaw in their business model.
But that’s not true!
For most products, the relationship between the metric and long-term impact are rarely clear cut. Asymmetric opportunities often lurk in uncertainty.
For example, at one point in time, Amplitude’s North Star Metric was Weekly Learning Users (WLUs), defined as the count of active Amplitude users who have shared a learning that is consumed by at least two other people in the previous seven days.
You might wonder how we came up with exactly two or more users. Did we just pull that out of thin air? Or did we have a bullet-proof case for those precise numbers?
The reality is that these numbers aren’t magic. Learning consumed by two other people is great; three is even better; one is better than zero. We’re more confident about some things and less confident about others.
The important thing is to identify thresholds that are both aspirational and achievable. Once you’ve done that, don’t get too worried about whether you’ve selected the perfect threshold. The goal isn’t the exact number, but the combination of customer behaviors that our North Star represents. It’s consistent with our strategy, and we’re open about our uncertainty.
Getting your inputs right
Inputs are the handful of factors that, together, produce the North Star Metric. They are as important to the North Star Framework as your metric.
Amplitude Vice President of Product Ibrahim Bashir explains why inputs are so important.
"Though a good North Star Metric (NSM) correlates to a top-level business outcome, it can be difficult for a team to move it directly given the multitude of inputs and time it takes to see results. For these reasons, product teams are better served trying to move one component of a NSM that ladders up to the larger metric but is more of a leading indicator of impact."
For example, if your North Star Metric is "digital transactions per user," your product team might find it easier to focus on moving metrics like "number of clicks on product details" or "number of coupon codes used."
Just like the North Star Metric, your inputs should have both a name and a definition.
The following fill-in-the-blank template can help you determine the inputs:
Mind mapping is a helpful technique for identifying inputs and metrics. Start by noting your North Star Metric—or even just a candidate for it—on a whiteboard. Then collaboratively note relationships and concepts in clusters.
Your mind map will undoubtedly start out somewhat messy, like this example for a financial institution:
Then, refine the map by combining related concepts, eliminating extraneous information, and reinforcing the relationships between elements, like this:
Spend time editing and clarifying the concepts in your mind map so that your metric is at its heart and the contributing factors are all neatly named and defined at a high level, like this:
Once you have your inputs defined at a high level, it’ll be much easier to define exact metrics for each Input.
Testing your inputs and North Star
If your inputs are too broad or lagging, you might struggle to focus your efforts and measure impact. On the other hand, if they're too specific and prescriptive, you might struggle to identify innovative solutions to address them.
For example, an input like “satisfied customers” may be too broad but an input like “positive reviews on social media” may be too narrow.
Here are a couple ways to test these inputs:
Input test 1: the greenfield test
For this test, forget about current roadmaps, missions, or other restrictions. Instead, focus on generating new ideas. Pose this question to the team:
“How many opportunities can you come up with in two minutes to influence this input?”
You can use this format:
If your team quickly runs out of ideas, then you might need higher level inputs. If they’re swimming in ideas—many of which are overly broad—then you should get more specific.
Input test 2: the roadmap check
For this test, do consider your current roadmap or work in progress. Make a list of current initiatives and discuss how they could influence the inputs you’ve chosen.
In many cases, you’ll see a clear link. Sometimes, the link is implicit and contains a host of assumptions worth chatting about. Have these discussions!
In some cases, you can’t see the link between the roadmap item and the Input. This is a good sign that your set of inputs is missing some factor of your North Star—or that you’re working on something that isn’t actually valuable.
Feel like you’re going in circles? That’s OK!
Defining your metric and its inputs isn’t a linear process, so you might experience a lot of back and forth in these steps.
“Be willing to just try on a North Star for size,” John recommends. “When you get one that’s halfway decent, throw it in there. Pick one, work on inputs, and then you can go back and iterate.”
For example, you might converge on a metric, but then struggle to define it. So you go back to the metric and adapt it a bit. But then you add inputs and realize that you’ve gotten too specific or too broad, so you refine the metric again. Don’t be alarmed or frustrated—it’s perfectly normal and even healthy.
“If you want to come up with a powerful North Star, it needs to withstand introspection. A lot of times your first pass is vague and has some ambiguity, and then you pressure test the idea,” he says.
Sharing your work
You’ve got a trove of material now: background research and data, decisions about the game you’re playing, notes from your workshop, and most notably, your North Star Metric and its inputs. To clarify the decisions you’ve made and discussions you’ve had, share your work with colleagues.
A simple way to share is to present your North Star work at an all-company meeting. But beyond that, we suggest you socialize your North Star repeatedly in all sorts of forums, both formally and informally—and encourage your colleagues to share it as well.
Organizing the work you’ve done, presenting it to colleagues, and discussing the North Star across your company will help you prepare for your next challenge: putting your North Star into action.
Take time to celebrate
At this point, you and your team have defined a North Star, including both a metric and its inputs. Congratulations! This is a good time to do something to thank your co-workers for their contributions and publicly celebrate your progress. We recommend cheese.