What is a Product North Star?
A product north star, or north star metric, is essentially the gold standard by which the product team is judged within an organization. It’s a broad-brush approach, no doubt, but it gives key stakeholders a fast and simple means by which to assess and monitor a product’s success and its alignment with company objectives.
Smart leaders make New Year resolutions and set quarterly milestones, charting progress against ambitious plans and goals. Wise leaders, however, take a different approach: they root themselves in a noble purpose, align it with a compelling vision, and then take action — not just for that year, but for the rest of their lives. That noble purpose becomes a North Star, giving direction when the path ahead is hazy, humility when arrogance announces false victory, and inspiration when the outlook seems bleak.
Dr. Govindappa Venkataswamy (also known as “Dr. V”), an ophthalmologist with crippled fingers started the Aravind Eye Care System in 1976 — with no business plan, money, or resources. Aravind now sees 2.7 million patients every year, and even more impressively, treats the majority of them for free. Aravind has become a business example of compassion, as well as proof that wise leaders can radically change the world by following their North Star.
We have a choice in creating the life that we desire. With our judgment, choices, and actions we take, we change the course of our future and steer our destiny, moment by moment. Wisdom is not about focusing on the future, but rather about acting in the present, aligned with our North Star.
North Stars align our energy, emotions, and actions in the service of our vision. Though it is not always simple to find one’s North Star, once it appears, its guidance helps simplify one’s choices. As paradoxical as it may seem, wise leaders are, first and foremost, wise followers. Once they become clear about their North Star, it becomes their calling, and they serve that calling willingly, happily, and infectiously.
Dr. V’s story also flouts many conventional rules of business. Wise leadership does not fit the strict patterns of smart analysis, but instead taps into an intuitive part of who you are at the core, unearthing counterintuitive principles:
In order to identify and then follow your own North Star, you have to ask powerful questions of yourself. Those questions will yield new insights for you and help you find inspiration in the most unthinkable places.
For Dr. V, inspiration struck when he learned about McDonald’s. Due to his experience as a government doctor with rural camps, he knew that he had to develop highly efficient, scalable, repeatable processes to treat the masses that came. McDonald’s, he saw that throughout the world McDonald’s franchises had similar quality meals for low prices. “If McDonald’s can do it for hamburgers, why can’t we do it for eye care?” And sure enough, he developed systems that allow Aravind surgeons to do more than five times the number of cataract surgeries done by the average Indian doctor (and ten times that of an average US physician).
Benefits of North Star
Implementing the North Star strategy may lead to benefits for your company, including
Understand your customers
Depending on the metric you choose as your North Star, you may develop a deeper understanding of your customers. Their behaviors, perceptions of the product, and needs may become more evident as you gather more data using the North Star. A developed understanding of your customers may guide your approach to marketing and production to maximize the value they receive from your product.
Understand workplace challenges
Using the North Star strategy may help companies better understand the challenges that exist within the workplace. Whether there are issues with marketing or manufacturing, the North Star metric can reveal areas of improvement. Then, a company makes the necessary changes within the workplace to improve and maximize its product delivery.
Implement organizational promises
If your organization or business has clear promises for customers, a North Star strategy may reveal how effectively you adhere to those promises. For example, imagine that your business has a 100% return policy, and your North Star metric measures the number of customers who make a return. If you have a high rate of return, you might determine that your company adheres to its promise of accepting 100% of all returns.
Align your team
A team can align effectively when each member focuses on the same metric and outcome. Using the North Star strategy may increase communication between team members by highlighting the most important metric within the team's work. When a team aligns, they can focus on other important elements of work, such as how to best impact customers or develop the product.
What is the North Star Model/Framework?
The north star model, sometimes known as the north star framework, is a means of visualizing how a product north star is decided upon. It is effectively a hierarchy of metrics and KPIs with the product north star, quite appropriately, sitting right at the top.
It’s easy to confuse a KPI, which can be quite generic — more downloads, more users, more orders — with a north star, so the framework visualization can bring clarity. Key KPIs are always important, but they should serve a greater purpose — and that’s the north star.
Perhaps the best way to understand how a product north star operates in practice is with a real-world example.
Let’s imagine you’ve built an app that helps users get discounts on their online shopping. In this case, you might have key KPIs which include: