North Star Playbook
The guide to discovering your product’s North Star
Why should you read this playbook?
Product managers, designers, and developers all work tirelessly to create the best, most profitable products. They want to design digital experiences that acquire, engage, and create customers for life. But despite their best efforts, many struggle to create the clarity, alignment, and accountability needed to realize their goals.
Take Tia. Tia was feeling burned out. When we met her at a North Star workshop in New York City, she’d already been a product designer and product manager at an enterprise business-to-business (B2B) software-as-a-service (SaaS) company for four years.
She did everything a product person should do: She researched her market, advocated for the humans using the product, emphasized outcomes over outputs, and made the case, over and over, for more focus and fewer distractions.
Co-workers—managers, teammates, executives—all agreed: Tia’s product-led approach made sense. But still, the company struggled to put all these great concepts into action.
Her company seemed caught in a perpetual cycle of shiny objects, success theater, and false starts. Just when they’d hit their stride, something would change. It felt like they were always talking past each other.
Tia’s co-workers were experienced and creative, but still they struggled.
“Everyone I worked with was smart and persuasive,” Tia said, ”they brought data to our strategy and priority discussions. But a week or two later, we’d be back to business as usual.”
Enter the North Star Metric and framework
The North Star framework helped Tia break the cycle of frustrations she’d been experiencing. She realized her team had been speaking three languages:
- The language of the customer—needs, goals, experiences, delight
- The language of the product—features, workflows, releases
- The language of the business—vision, differentiation, revenue, growth
“There was nothing to really tie those things together,” she observed. “And I think this is why we were going in circles. That seems to be the key benefit of the North Star Framework: connecting those different perspectives.”
Though there are no silver bullets to success, defining and uniting your teams behind a clear North Star Metric can be the key to unlocking improved outcomes.
If you’re 1) interested in new frameworks, tools, and systems to improve how you manage and build products, 2) hungry for a greater sense of impact and a more focused, coherent, and proactive way of working, or 3) eager to stop churning out features and want to align your team’s efforts to address customer problems based on data, then this playbook is for you.
With this playbook you’ll learn:
- The purpose and value of the North Star Framework.
- Understand the elements of the North Star Framework.
- How to define and name a North Star Metric (and related inputs) for your company.
- When to change your North Star Metric.
- How to integrate the North Star Framework with your development process.
- Prepare you to facilitate an internal North Star workshop.
As for Tia, she’s still using the skills and tools she learned at that North Star workshop. Her career has progressed, and she introduced the framework at a new company, where she successfully adapted it to a new product, team, and development process. She’s having better conversations, working with more alignment, and making more impact.
That’s what we want for you. Now, let’s get started.
“If anyone in your organization can’t come into work and articulate how the work they’re doing is connected to a sustainable growth strategy, then either you don’t have a strategy, there’s a messy middle problem where we’re not explaining it right, or you’re working on the wrong thing.
Bringing coherence to the work of everyone in your organization is what it’s all about—and that’s what the North Star Framework helps you do.”