back with a “5 minute Friday” audio edition
today’s episode is a companion to the recent South Star Metrics, Revisited post
key concepts I cover in this snippet:
meta questions to pressure-test your north star metrics before they go south
time horizon: would we be proud of the behavior this metric is driving in 18 months?
value connection: can the team explain in one sentence how this metric makes a customer’s life better?
full picture: if you put every team’s north star on one page, do any of them compete with each other?
stress test: what happens if we 10x this metric - would that actually be incredible…or terrible?
I’d love to hear from listeners about your own metrics war stories and whether these questions surface anything interesting in your next review. Drop a comment below👇 or join the chat via the Substack app.
And if you enjoyed this post, please share / subscribe.
further reading / references
this episode is a companion to the full written post: South Star Metrics, Revisited, which names 7 anti-patterns and provides a diagnostics approach for each
the original South Star Metrics post from 2020 that started it all
I’ve written about the tension between quant dashboards and qual signals in Data vs. Intuition
on connecting product work to business outcomes: Connecting B2B Products to Revenue and From Daily Decisions to Bottom Line
the idea of auditing your strategy and metrics regularly connects to Strategy Spirals
on knowing when to pull the plug: Andon Cords: When to Cancel a Product Launch
childish drawing / interpretation
