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Here’s what you need to look for in a North Star Metric: As close as possible to the core value experience ... Aggregate number, not a rate or ratio—We’re looking for a number that will sum up the value across the entire market and potentially grow up-and-to-right over time... Simple and memorable—No North Star Metric is perfect. Some messages sent via WhatsApp may be spam, some items purchased on eBay may not be fully satisfactory to the buyer. That’s fine as long as the number is still generally indicative of total value.
Evidence-Guided
Itamar Gilad
A good strategy has an essential logical structure that I call the kernel. The kernel of a strategy contains three elements: a diagnosis, a guiding policy, and coherent action. The guiding policy specifies the approach to dealing with the obstacles called out in the diagnosis. It is like a signpost, marking the direction forward but not defining the details of the trip. Coherent actions are feasible coordinated policies, resource commitments, and actions designed to carry out the guiding policy.
Good Strategy/Bad Strategy
Richard Rumelt
The leads of the product teams came together to organize the wish list of initiatives. They grouped the initiatives in terms of which themes each project supported and then stack-ranked them in terms of the contribution they believed each initiative would have—that is, they associated each initiative with the outcome they thought the work would create and showed how those outcomes would support the strategic goals expressed by leadership. They estimated head count for each initiative and sent the results to the finance experts, who correlated these plans with some of the major financial metrics they tracked and considered how the proposed work might impact results. When this was done, the plan was sent back up to the executives for review.
Sense and Respond
Jeff Gothelf, Josh Seiden
...catch up on these, and many more highlights
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