2. Three steps
● Define the game you’re playing
● Identify North Star metrics that
drive business outcomes
● Choose input metrics that are
leading indicators
North Star
& metrics
Vision
How does analytics inform Product Strategy?
Impact
Strategy
3. What game are you playing?
attention transaction productivity
4. Break down the North Star into actionable Input Metrics
Breadth Depth Frequency Efficiencyf(Star) = x x x
How many active/returning users are taking this action?
What’s their depth of engagement?
How often does each user
engage?
How fast do
they succeed?
5. Break down Spotify’s North Star
Listener
growth
Content
engagement
Listening
frequency
f(Star) = x x
Time spent by
subscribers
listening to
music
# Trial users
# Premium
subscribers
# Hours per
session
# Sessions
per week
6. Actionable inputs: Efficiency
Breadth Depth Frequency Efficiencyx x x
# Items
within
Order
# Orders
Completed
% Items
Delivered
within time
ML Algorithm
Customer chat
Items
Received
Flash Sales
Notifications
Stock mgt
Recommendations
Shopping Lists
Discount Coupons
New Signups
Express Sub
Trials
Trial Conversion
# Users
Placing
Orders
Squads
7. North Star metric exercise
Imagine you are on the Product Team for Trello...take the next 20-
30 minutes working with your group to:
1. Understand the game you are playing
2. Define your overall business objectives
3. Determine your North Star Metric(s)
4. Break down the North Star(s) into actionable Input Metrics
5. Identify potential drivers of those metrics
...we’ll share takeaways and findings afterwards.
8. Important considerations
1. Does it represent a customer getting some unique value from Trello?
2. Is it a real driver of an outcome that the business’ success is measured on?
3. Can it be broken down into actionable input metrics using the product
analytics formula?
9. Leading North Star
Breadth Depth Frequency Efficiency
Business Outcome:
North Star Metric(s):
Input
Metric(s)
Features/Drivers
10. How do you bring a metrics-driven approach to your team?
1. Start small
2. Use our playbooks
3. Follow our blog
www.productanalyticsplaybook.com
Retention playbook available today
Engagement playbook coming soon!
www.amplitude.com/blog
Tons of content on identifying and building
towards a North Star
Interviews with industry-leading PMs
Build a strawman of your product’s North Star
Create your first hypothesis to drive an input metric
Kick off a new (small) project (or align a current one)
Test the hypothesis to see if you can move the metric!
Notas do Editor
Thank you everyone for joining us this morning! We are super excited to be here to work with you today.
For those of you that are not, familiar, Amplitude is a product analytics Company and we help companies build better products by helping Product teams understand what their users want, and understand the impact that their product changes have on the outcomes that matter.
And that’s what we’re going to focus on today. We’re going to focus on the first part of actually executing your strategy and that is aligning behind North Star and supporting metrics. The connective tissue between the business outcomes you’re trying to drive, and the work you do each day.
And to do so, there are three key steps that we’re going to walk through:
Define your type of product. Understand the game that you are playing.
Identify the leading indicators of success. What does it mean to win the game?
How do you break down those leading indicators. What are the “rules of the game”?
In product, there are generally three types of games that you can play, and we’ll talk about each of them in detail.
So what does it mean to break down the North Star metric? Well you do so using what we call the Product Analytics formula which is to say that your North Star is a function of Breadth, Depth, Frequency, and in some cases Efficiency as well.
Breadth: Is how many active/returning users there are performing your action of value.
Depth is the extent of their engagement
Frequency is how often the Users engage or perform the action of value
Efficiency is how quickly the Users are able to achieve the value
One of the benefits of having an understanding of your product analytics formula and the inputs to your north star, is that you can deploy groups of people, or teams within your Product org against these different contributing areas.
Here are some important things to keep in mind when identifying your north star metrics.