PLAYBOOK

North Star Playbook

The guide to discovering your product’s North Star

Table of Contents
                    CHAPTER 7

                    Reap the benefits of the North Star Framework

                    The Amplitude team has seen the North Star Framework offer many benefits to teams and businesses—better alignment, clearer prioritization, and less wasted work.

                    However, what we like most about the North Star Framework is how it inspires valuable conversations. To identify, design, and implement their North Star, teams step away from screens, Jira tickets, and status updates, and spend time deeply engaged with one another—sharing ideas and learning.

                    Yes, the framework and workshop are intentionally oversimplified. Yes, unpacking your product strategy is hard. And yes, you will leave the room with nagging disagreements.

                    But through this work, you’ll have meaningful conversations about beliefs and assumptions, strategy and value exchanges, users and customers, inputs and outputs, leading and lagging, your game and your bets.

                    These conversations will reveal what matters to teammates, customers, and your business—and as a result, you’ll build better products that fuel business growth.

                    The quality of your conversations is the real secret to the North Star—the North Star of the North Star.

                    Think of all the decisions your team makes weekly and imagine improving those decisions—big and small—even incrementally. You’ll see better results for you, your team, your company, and your customers.

                    American cyclist Greg Lemond, two-time world champion and three-time Tour de France winner, famously remarked that, “Cycling never gets easier, you just go faster.” Think about this quote as it relates to our products. We shouldn’t expect product work to get easier, but we can find ways to make it better, to focus on meaningful, impactful hard work—the true work.

                    Stop feeling frustrated—start feeling empowered

                    Recently, we spoke with a frustrated senior engineer. Let’s call her Jane.

                    Jane’s team was in the middle of quarterly planning, and her manager, the vice president of product, spent their last meeting talking about empowerment, OKRs, and the importance of goal setting. She described her frustration:

                    “It feels like they equate empowerment to just letting us do what we want, and then getting nervous—or angry even—when what we do isn’t what they would have done. That’s not how I view real empowerment. We’re just spinning our wheels at the moment.”

                    Jane went on to describe her view of real empowerment as containing context, a well thought-out strategy, and no sugar coating. She didn’t want work to be easier; rather, she wanted her work to have more impact.

                    This is the perfect scenario for the North Star Framework.

                    We arranged a short session with Jane, the VP of product, the product manager on the team, a designer, and a data scientist from a different product team within the company—because a neutral third party can be a welcome addition. Within 30 minutes they were exploring some foundational company bets—things they all knew about but that they hadn’t really discussed:

                    • The VP of product was a natural at this kind of strategy gymnastics, but had never had the opportunity to share that skill.
                    • The data scientist talked them out of getting too theoretical (“As much as I want to dig into this…”).
                    • The designer challenged some assumptions about their chosen value exchanges (“We don’t know that, and need to do more research”).

                    In 60 minutes, they had a couple of North Star Metric candidates on the table. We skipped around the workshop format—trying inputs, tweaking the North Star Metric, arguing about the game, and tweaking the formula.

                    They were on their way.

                    When we checked in with Jane months later, things weren’t perfect, but they were better. She didn’t “feel like [the team] was making stuff up anymore.”

                    Though some features they shipped didn’t have the intended impact, the team learned important insights about what customers valued, and Jane shared that it “was pretty valuable information, because those were kind of sacred cows.” She was starting to feel “real empowerment.”

                    To reframe Lemond: Product work never gets easier, you’ll just have more impact—and maybe a bit more sanity, flow, and satisfaction.

                    Start your North Star journey with Amplitude

                    “The North Star is absolutely fundamental to what we do at Amplitude because it all comes back to behavioral data. Companies need to have that basic underlying understanding of what their North Star—whether they call it that or not—to derive real value from their behavioral data.

                    Ted Clark, Senior Customer Success Architect, Amplitude

                    So, are you ready? We think you are—and the Amplitude team can help. In addition to this playbook, we’ve prepared a How-to Guide: Running your North Star Workshop.

                    Complete with an agenda, instructions to facilitate session discussions, and printable worksheets, this guide will ensure your team is set up for North Star success.

                    Amplitude’s seasoned professional services team is also chock full of folks with lots of North Star workshops under their belts to help answer your questions as you prepare—and can even facilitate your North Star workshop.


                    You can do this.