Join 📚 Felicity's Weekly Book Highlights
A batch of the best highlights from what Felicity's read, .
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
• **Feature Work -** Creating and capturing value by extending a product's functionality and market into incremental and adjacent areas.
• **Growth Work -** Creating and capturing value by accelerating adoption and usage by the existing market.
• **Scaling Work -** Focusing on bottlenecks to ensure the team can continue to move forward and take on new levels of feature, growth, and product-market fit expansion work.
• **Product-Market Fit Expansion -** Increasing the ceiling on product-market fit in a non-incremental way by expanding into an adjacent market, adjacent product, or both.
> *"One of the most common conflicts I've seen is when product leaders try to apply a single development process, measure of success, and strategy to all product work. For instance, while some of the steps can be similar, growth and feature work are fundamentally different and a lot of energy is wasted trying to make them all fit into the same process, success metric, and approach."* **-** **Fareed Mosavat**, **former Director of Product at Slack**
Product Work Beyond Product-Market Fit
Fareed Mosavat & Casey Winters
If you’re only responsible for a part of the user experience, and not the whole thing, then you should think through the core benefits you can offer users (i.e. the value proposition from JTBD), and how you can reinforce these benefits in ways that competitors will find difficult to replicate.
This can take the format:
*[Imagined feature] might offer [core customer benefit], whilst being difficult to copy because [hard-to-copy superpower].*
**Example**
**Smart locks** on home dramatically improve guest experience (never lose key) and host safety (change code for every stay). This is difficult for competitors to copy because integrating hardware and software at scale and cross-platform is a huge task.
How to Write a Product Strategy in 1 Day / 1 Week / 1 Month
Aakash Gupta
...catch up on these, and many more highlights
Readwise