Today’s is a short post as I finish up some longer explorations of north star methodologies in the coming weeks.
Building a business is rarely “clean.” Plans change, we learn new things about our customers, our product changes, and we don’t always have the bandwidth to update our narrative or re-validate our assumptions. While our teams grow our product by incorporating this new information, old thinking accumulates in our analytics event models, our data reporting, and the way we message our service.
I call this phenomenon “process shear:” the activities that serve our business outpace the over-arching business strategy, potentially causing chaos when our product strategy hits a wall. We end up asking questions of our build teams based on stale information and receiving data and insights that seem less than relevant to our existing mental model. We must adapt to this new information in real time, re-align our strategy with our activities, and promise never to get misaligned again.
Healthy organizations recognize that this is bound to happen due to the number of spinning plates small teams must continually attend to. Updating strategy, metrics, and how we talk about our product should be a regular part of doing business. If we address potential misalignments say, quarterly, we reduce the risk of becoming misaligned to the point of dropping the proverbial plate. Most of these checkins become quick “still good? good.” conversations with occasional longer adjustments. Basically, we’re treating our strategy and communication as a product: we make regular bets on strategic realities and adjust as that reality is revealed to be slightly different over time.
All of this is made easier by having a clear, well-understood north star. If our business is built around an agreed-upon global indicator of success, iterative changes to our product strategy or adjustments to our key activities become trivial (or at least simpler to manage). A north star gives every team member the tool they need to adapt their thinking to the company’s prime directive.
Unfortunately, most companies do not take the time to define their north star in the early days. Startup mentality tells us to build our product, gather information about our customers and develop value for them as quickly as we can. We get comfortable skipping steps and making them future-problems as a way to build momentum and find product market fit. Critically, many companies choose to take shortcuts in the “learn” portion of the build/measure/learn lean loop, preferring local learnings related to product utilization and revenue potential over the global learnings that eventually become a solid north star.
The resulting process shear finds north-star-less companies on their back foot more often than not: without a simple way to evaluate the validity of our efforts we must spend more time re-litigating our reality. Spending this time ensures that our efforts are out of sync by the time we realign our strategy with our activities. We can see this at companies where build teams complain about changing priorities and a lack of clear product direction: the problem is in the stars.
Sam Gimbel is co-owner of honest., a product consultancy based in New York City. In a former life he advocated for north star creation as co-founder of Clark and VP of Product at Clover.