Behind the Scenes of a North Star Workshop

Mention the North Star workshop to Ted Clark, and his eyes immediately light up. As a senior customer success architect at Amplitude, Ted helps Amplitude customers establish the core principles, cultural mindset, and technical integrations they need to transition to a data-driven, product-led growth organization and realize the benefits of digital analytics.

One of his favorite parts of his job is helping them define a North Star Metric and align their teams behind a common metric and way of working via North Star workshops. “I love what I do as a customer success architect, but getting to do North Star workshops is the cherry on top,” he explains.

Though a North Star workshop doesn’t need to be overly complex—heck, you can facilitate one yourself in less than two hours! But the best facilitators invest a little thought and effort beforehand to experience the best results. Let’s get the inside scoop on why Ted and so many others love the North Star workshop and some behind-the-scenes tips on preparing for and delivering a great one.

What is a North Star workshop?

Before exploring North Star workshop best practices, we should cover some key terms related to all things North Star.

• North Star Metric: A single critical rate, count, or ratio that represents your product strategy and best captures the value customers derive from your product.
• North Star Framework: A product management model based on your North Star Metric In addition to the metric, the North Star Framework includes a set of critical inputs that collectively act as factors that produce the metric.
• North Star workshop: A focused, collaborative session where colleagues from different parts of your organization come together and participate in generative activities to define your North Star Metric and inputs and align teams.

Most North Star Metrics aren’t ready for primetime after just one workshop. Most teams go through subsequent rounds and conduct additional workshop sessions to gather additional perspectives, align the North Star to their existing development processes, and pressure test ideas. Nonetheless, a North Star workshop is the best place to start your North Star journey.

What makes the North Star workshop unique?

Whether you’re conversing with Ted, another Ampliteer, or a customer who’s participated in a North Star workshop, words like magic, electric, powerful, and fun are peppered in there. What is it that people love so much about the North Star workshop?

“My favorite part is the electricity that goes around the room when a group of people from different functional groups suddenly realize that the North Star is going to help them move in the same direction and stop being constantly at odds with one another,” explains Ted. “It’s a beautiful aha moment, and it happens every time.”

He also likens the North Star workshop to organizational or cross-functional therapy. “Even if teams don’t leave with the North Star defined, everyone leaves the meeting much more aligned—aligned in a way that they didn’t even know they were misaligned before.”

But of course, you get out what you put in. North Star workshops aren’t powerful by default. Having facilitated many workshops, Ted shares top tips and best practices.

Assemble an all-star cast

Just as a dinner party is only as good as its guests, a North Star workshop is only as good as the participants. When creating your list of who should be involved in your North Star workshop, Ted’s top two recommendations include 1) representatives from specific functions and 2) stakeholders who are invested in the idea.

“North Stars are most actionable by product and marketing, and you need engineering and development in there,” he explains. “Because at the end of the day, we actualize the North Star not just by identifying it but by instrumenting and collecting the behavioral data.” He emphasizes the importance of involving strong participants from those three groups because they will have competing priorities—and aligning them is critical.

“Let’s say product and marketing define this perfect North Star. They’re aligned and understand how it will benefit the entire company. But then they reach out to engineering, and they say, ‘We already have a roadmap! We’ll get to that next month, quarter, or year.’ It takes all the air and momentum out of the initiative.”

It’s also important to ensure participants are invested in the idea of the North Star Metric and its potential benefit. “You want people to participate because they believe in it,” Ted explains, “not because they’re forced to be there.”

Other vital tips to keep in mind as you assemble your all-star cast include:

• Keep your group as small as possible: Though you want diverse representation, only include a few people in your initial North Star workshop. Eventually, you will build a broader network of advocates, but for now, you’re selecting key contributors to help you get the North Star off the ground.
• Appoint a skilled facilitator: The team needs at least one unbiased facilitator for the workshop. The facilitator will set the agenda, lead discussions, and guide the team through activities. The best facilitators have at least some positional authority to help move things through end-to-end—a bonus: a dynamic personality that likes to have fun and motivate people to participate.
• Strike a balance of messy and analytical thinkers: Left-brained or right-brained, lateral or linear, messy or analytical—however you want to call it, it’s essential to have a diverse set of thinkers in your workshop. Lateral, messy thinkers will help the team bounce between ideas instead of going in a straight line of thinking between ideas and outcomes. However, you also need highly analytical people to drive the process forward, get practical, and challenge your messy thinkers to think about the measurement.

Lay the groundwork for the workshop

“Whether you’re the facilitator or a participant, you don’t want to know everything or over-prepare for your North Star workshop,” Ted explains. “Otherwise, you’ll find yourself steering the conversation.”

However, you don’t want people walking in completely cold, either. His top recommendations to prepare include:

• Develop a baseline understanding of the North Star metric and framework. Ted recommends being familiar enough with the North Star concepts so that you can guide the conversation without dominating it. He explains that the workshop is an experience for everyone to discover what’s important to your users. It’s best when everyone goes through that together rather than individuals steering the group in a preconceived direction.
• Familiarize yourself with the exercises in the workshop. The workshop is full of hands-on interactive activities. Think through which exercises you want to take your team through during the workshop and how that might look ahead of time so you can help be successful.
• Gather and organize the right tools to facilitate an effective workshop. The workshop is very collaborative, so he recommends having lots of Post-it notes and pens on hand. If you’re conducting a virtual workshop, get a Miro board or other collaboration tool set up that participants can easily log into and use. Better yet, make sure they can access it before the workshop.
• Do a quick review of your data. This may or may not be feasible, depending on your current digital analytics setup (or lack thereof). However, if possible, Ted recommends taking a quick look at what sort of reports your teams are currently querying to get a rough idea of what metrics people currently track and perceive as important to the business.

After the workshop

As mentioned above, the North Star is only the start of your journey. Most teams won’t be fully aligned on their North Star at the end of the workshop. The important thing is to keep the momentum and enthusiasm to bring things to the finish line.

• Schedule follow-up workshops sooner rather than later. Ted recommends having one or two refinement sessions within a week and a half of your workshop to ensure people don’t lose their train of thought.

“These sessions help teams sharpen the points they’re making, continue the momentum, expand the base if they need to bring in more people to make the North Star a reality, and go into detail on the next steps.”

• Ensure that different stakeholders are clear about their action items. Action items might include socializing ideas from the first workshop within their teams, pulling relevant data, or completing homework assignments.

“Typical homework might include brainstorming a list of example inputs for your identified North Star Metric or thinking through who else needs to be involved to ensure you have the tools and resources to move those inputs.”

• Identify relevant leave-behind materials. Nobody remembers everything the first time they hear it. After the workshop, participants need access to reference materials to refresh their memories on key points and what they’re doing. Ted recommends giving every participant a copy of Amplitude’s North Star Playbook.

“You can learn the whole thing by yourself in the plane in an hour by reading the Amplitude North Star Playbook. So when folks have follow-up questions, or they’re trying to expand things afterward, it’s a great resource for them to dive deeper into the concept.”

Reap the benefits of a North Star workshop

Ted has seen teams walk out of North Star workshops with a renewed lease on (work)life—better alignment, clearer prioritization, and less wasted work. These workshops give your teams a safe place to 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.

Ready to implement the North Star Framework in your organization?

• Dive deeper with our North Star Playbook and see more blogs and resources in our full North Star series
• Use our How-to Guide: Running Your North Star Workshop to start planning your own.
• Work with one of Amplitude’s seasoned professional services experts, like Ted, to facilitate your North Star workshop.