North Star Playbook

Some teams converge on a North Star Metric and its inputs after a short workshop session and a bit of follow-up, while others require more facilitation, collaboration, and troubleshooting. Either way, you want your North Star to reflect the heart of your product strategy and your value to customers—so it’s worth taking time to resolve misunderstandings and ensure alignment.

The difficulties teams experience often fall into one of the two categories below. We will cover each in depth.

Before facilitating a North Star workshop, we recommend reading this chapter to prepare for potential misunderstandings or challenges. With these actionable tips, you can cut through conflict and align your team.

Creating shared understanding

Often, when teams struggle to converge on a North Star, it’s because teammates aren't aligned on their product’s purpose or what customers value. If your team is struggling with shared understanding, we suggest you dig into beliefs, your product vision, and key value exchanges.

1. Surfacing beliefs

Every person approaches a business problem or product opportunity with beliefs and biases. These often describe:

• Assumptions about what your customers value
• Assumptions about causation or results of actions
• Theories about where the market is going
• Predictions about technology trends
• Conjecture about competitors’ strategy or position
• Opinions about the value you provide to your market

We’ve found that identifying these beliefs can help you define and implement an effective North Star.

If you fail to uncover your colleagues’ beliefs, you may leave unresolved tensions within a team, miss opportunities to align, and overlook unique perspectives about your product.

The following are examples of statements that contain beliefs.

• “I’m sure customers can’t use our product successfully without the advice of our implementation services. We need to increase our investment in implementation services to stay ahead of our competitors.”
• “Machine learning is the next big thing in this industry. We need to have a chatbot driven by machine learning to keep up.”
• “This kind of technology will become a commodity in three to five years, rendering our efforts to build this in-house obsolete.”
• “Customers leave us because we can’t easily integrate with their third-party systems.”
• “If we don’t improve our mobile app to the level of our competition, we’ll never take market share from them.”
• “After the next election, the regulatory environment affecting our product will change.”

How to identify beliefs that inform a North Star

One simple way to identify beliefs: Ask your North Star team to spend a few minutes independently filling in one or more of these templates. The goal at this point is to cast a wide net that catches biases and assumptions—remind your team that there are no wrong answers.

2. Connecting the North Star to your product vision

Your business may have already done the important work of crafting a product vision statement. These existing statements can be great catalysts to teasing out a good North Star.

As your team defines your North Star, review your product vision statement. Ask yourself:

What does this statement say that is distinct or foundational? What can we learn about our product’s value from this statement?

Examples of product vision statements that can inform a North Star

Note how these hypothetical vision statements contain insights about a fictional product’s value that might help define a good North Star.

Some teams find that their vision is too broad to inform their North Star—or maybe the vision doesn’t exist at all. These teams should consider revisiting their beliefs and collaboratively defining their product vision.

There are many models for writing a vision statement. One simple template was popularized by Geoffrey Moore in Crossing the Chasm:

3. Understanding key value exchanges

Even with complex products, you can typically isolate a handful of three to six essential actions or events where customers derive value from the product. These key value exchanges demonstrate the true essence and intent of your product. If possible, they should be reflected in your North Star.

To identify key value exchanges, visualize your top journeys across customer touchpoint. As you do, note those critical moments where your product solves a problem for the customer or enhances a customer’s ability to accomplish a goal.

These moments—where the customer’s investment in time, attention, energy, and money is rewarded with meeting their needs—are your key value exchanges.

To jump-start your North Star process, capture your shared understanding of your customer experience across the various linear and nonlinear touchpoints they have with your company. It’s even better to include existing research or to follow up with additional research to understand what your users really value.

For many products, some key value exchanges happen outside the actual product—for example, the concert-goer arriving at their chosen seat is a key value exchange for a ticketing app. Don’t exclude these important stories just because they don’t occur within the product itself.

You may also find yourself guessing about your customer journeys, or using an idealized, one-size-fits-all version of the journey. This is a good signal to either do a bit more research, or to make those assumptions explicit (e.g. “We’re not exactly sure if this is what our customers are doing, but this is our best guess at the moment”).

Examples of key value exchanges:

• The delivery arrives intact outside your apartment in less than 30 minutes.
• Monthly account reconciliation was successful.
• A collaborator makes their first comment on your design.
• “Wow. This music recommendation is actually pretty decent.”
• Based on the logging, it looks like the SDK is working.
• Your significant other says, “Yes!”
• Your medication arrives before you need to call for a refill.

Avoiding and resolving common traps

Has your team struggled to converge on a North Star? First of all, that’s normal—and valuable. If you’re struggling, spend some time digging into potential causes of this disagreement and divergence.

We’ve noticed several challenges that teams sometimes experience.

1. Jumping immediately to “Can we measure that?”

Though “measurable” is a characteristic of a good North Star, avoid getting too concerned too soon with how you’ll calculate the metric or its inputs. This pitfall is especially common for companies with a long history of struggling to predict customer success. They disregard promising concepts because they aren’t yet sure how to measure them.

It’s important to focus on important decisions and on reducing uncertainty, as Douglas W. Hubbard’s book How to Measure Anything: Finding the Value of “Intangibles” in Business reminds us.

• Myth: When you have a lot of uncertainty, you need a lot of data to tell you something useful.
• Fact: If you have a lot of uncertainty now, you don’t need much data to reduce uncertainty significantly. When you have a lot of certainty already, then you need a lot of data to reduce uncertainty significantly. In other words—if you know almost nothing, almost anything will tell you something.

For example, say you’re converging on the idea of project health as a North Star Metric. You agree that project health is a hallmark of your product strategy, and your sales team already pitches project health to the market.

However, you aren’t yet measuring project health—you don’t even know how you would measure it. Don’t disregard the metric. Instead, identify how you might measure it, even if it’s imperfect. After all, you need to start somewhere. If you could simply reduce uncertainty regarding your claims and focus, imagine what that might be worth.

2. Focusing solely on your North Star Metric, not the inputs

Even after teams review the product formula and examples of the combined effect of a North Star Metric and inputs, it can be difficult to shift focus from driving the metric to driving the inputs. By design, the North Star Metric is not immediately actionable—the inputs are.

If you find yourself thinking only about your metric, revisit your inputs. Do some brainstorming or group mind-mapping about the formula of inputs that produces the metric and vice versa. Try the depth, breadth, frequency, and efficiency heuristic, asking the team how it translates to your product and business.

3. Insisting you need more than one North Star Metric

Workshop participants often insist their company needs more than one North Star. Certainly, when a company has distinct lines of business with different customer bases, this might be true—but these are the exception, not the norm.

“We see it in almost every workshop,” chuckles Ted. “Especially when we bring different product leaders together. They say, ‘We can’t possibly have one North Star because we’re delivering apples and they’re delivering pants.’”

So how does Ted help teams work through their initial insistence and unify their efforts?

“I walk them through the fundamentals of the North Star again, explaining that it’s going to be a proof test as they make decisions on where to make investments in product, messaging—across teams,” he explains. “They have to be able to universally say, ‘Is that going to advance the North Star or one of its inputs?’ and take action accordingly. But if teams don’t have the same North Star, they will end up with the same in-fighting and resource battles they have today.”

Here’s an example. A large bank has dozens of consumer banking products (savings accounts, checking accounts, investment accounts, etc.). From a balance sheet and organizational chart perspective, it makes sense to call each of these things products.

But do customers view these as distinct products? Or do they view the bank as a single product: A trustworthy partner in their quest for financial independence? In this case, a single North Star for all consumer banking products would be appropriate.

Challenge the need for multiple North Star Metrics. Look for real boundaries in terms of users, their needs, and the strategy to meet those needs. Note where products are actually “packages” or add-ons.

4. Letting current dysfunction overwhelm your ability to improve

We often observe a moment in workshops when the real world catches up to a team. They start with enthusiasm, but then realize their company has so many problems and fear they can’t ever change. It’s the classic “it’ll never work here” syndrome, exacerbated by the lack of a common framework.

Your company may currently have many imperfections. You focus on vanity metrics, chase short-term revenue, run a feature factory, crank out features to close deals, organize around the tech stack (not value streams), or routinely abuse metrics and KPIs.

This is normal—and shouldn’t prevent you from progressing toward the North Star Framework.

There are two strategies that can be especially effective: