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The North Star Metric:
Delivering high value to your market is not just a matter of altruism; it’s genuinely the best thing you can do for your business. It’s far easier to acquire and retain customers with high-value products, you can charge more for them, and they keep competitors at bay. Many modern product companies understand this and consider growing value-to-customer their most important goal. That’s where the North Star Metric comes in. A North Star Metric (NSM) is a number that sums up the core value we deliver to the market. In the words of growth expert Sean Ellis, it’s your value footprint.
Evidence-Guided
Itamar Gilad
Four key Strategy takeaways
1. It’s a set of choices
2. You work backwards from a client-centric problem
3. It’s fundamentally creative
4. You seek to influence, but recognize you don’t control the Outcome
Planning
Planning, by contrast, is a fundamentally analytical and internal-centric approach to laying out a series of activities.
Planning involves sequencing how you will bring certain internal organizational resources (people, time, software, knowledge, money) to bear in ways you hope will accomplish a seemingly-sensible set of “initiatives.”
Outputs
The result of these planning activities are known as “Outputs” — lines of software code written, interfaces designed, software upgrades implemented, platforms “lifted and shifted.”
The important contrast with Strategy is to recognize *Planning is always within your control*. Perhaps this is what makes it preferred by many in business — there’s a great sense of comfort in focusing on only that which you can control.
If you have a Product Manager title, yet spend all your time in meetings with stakeholders, planning activities, and creating Roadmaps and budgets, you’re really a Project Manager.
Four key Planning takeaways:
1. It’s a sequence of activities
2. It’s Internal-centric
3. It’s fundamentally analytical
4. You are in full control the Outputs you create
Boost Your Product Management Skills Through Strategy, Planning, and OKRs
Michael Goitein
In product development, avoiding these pitfalls requires not only defining the right metrics but also maintaining a willingness to revisit and refine them. Metrics should not be static; they must evolve as the context and the goals change. Moreover, leaders must remain vigilant to ensure that the pursuit of those metrics does not lead to a loss of purpose or values. Sometimes it means slowing down, adding friction, or choosing a less profitable path because it’s the right one.
Unintended Consequences - by Mike Fisher
Unintended Consequences
Mike Fisher
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