North Star Metric Jam Session with Dan Schmidt
The CDK Global team joined Dan Schmidt to find their product's North Star Metric. Watch as this trio take on a challenging B2B2C use case, all in front of a live audience
The People
Dan is the CEO and cofounder of DoubleLoop. His mission is to operationalize the North Star Framework and other valuable product frameworks and playbooks, destroy vanity metrics, and enable teams to do work that matters.
See a sample North Star map .
Raven is a design, research, and analytics operations manager for CDK Global. Her work centers on supporting strategy development, design and research craft and defining metrics for user experience outcomes.
Andrew is a Senior Product Manager at CDK Global. He owns service products for automotive software. Andrew's focus is helping customers leverage their own data to satisfy a diverse groups of audiences within a complex B2B2C use case.
🧐 Mini-Questions Guide
During the discovery process for your North Star Metric, ask yourself these questions:
- What does your North Star Metric reflect about user value?
- Why does your product exist? And how do you monetize off of it?
- When you look at your map and list of bets, what is work that should not be happening?
- Look back at previous activities, are there any surprises? What did not go according to plan? What were the blind spots that might still be in your map?
- What are your best customers doing in your product?
- What are the riskiest assumptions in your map?
▶️ Session play-by-play
- (02:45) What is the problem that the NSF solves? (messy middle image)
- (03:30) About our customer use case: What is the problem CDK Global trying to solve?
- (07:58) The value of building a map for your North Star Metric (plus an example)
- (12:23) Why it's better to create model vs finding the perfect metric 14:55 Where to start when drawing your North Star map
- (16:00) Mapping the work behind your growth bets
- (20:53) The two layers to your map: bets vs input metrics
- (24:00) How to identify blind spots
- (29:58) Using customer behavior to tease out your North Star Metric
- (34:23) How to test whether your North Star Metric is predictive of business outcomes
- (36:12) Is your model fragile? What are the riskiest assumptions?
- (46:22) How often should you revise your North Star Metric
- (52:54) Things to avoid when getting started with the North Star Framework