North Star Metric: How a Top SaaS Provider Set Retention Records

This post was written anonymously by an Amplitude customer.

In the B2B space, it’s easy to focus on the short term. We look at short-term revenue, short-term KPIs, and the most recent customer feedback. All of those metrics matter, but they don’t tell a fully fleshed-out story. If your business has goals beyond the next quarter, you need more.

That line of thinking is how I made my mark at my company, a B2B SaaS provider that engages more than 25 million employees across 6,500 companies. Our solutions empower companies of all sizes and industries to transform employee engagement, develop high-performing teams, and retain talent. Our most noteworthy products are our anonymous employee survey tools, which allow companies to survey employees, compare the results to industry standards, target specific engagement results, and make better-informed business decisions.

I joined the company during a period of rapid growth, but things really took off when we changed our approach to data. We had a lofty goal to amplify our customer experiences and impact over 100 million people at work. To get us there, I set on developing our North Star metric, aptly named our Weekly Builders (WB) goal.

Rallying everyone around a single metric

Before WB, our product decisions were largely based on qualitative insights. While these insights could sometimes be spot-on, their subjective nature made it tough for customer-facing and product teams to unify around the same strategy and goals. We needed a more data-driven approach with a single quantitative measure of success.

WB is an aggregate of a few metrics—actions like the number of performance cycles launched, how many managers and individual contributors are having 1-on-1s, building and launching surveys, etc. This gives us a single metric that illustrates our customers using our product to make their companies better on a weekly basis.

The “Builders” part of the name was meant to convey that too. At our company, we like to recognize employees we call Builders—those who build our company into a better place to work for themselves, their teams, and the entire organization. Likewise, our Weekly Builder metric would be a builder for our company.

But with dozens of products, combining our customer data into a single metric was easier said than done. Every product team had developed differently with different code bases, and their complex dissimilarities made it incredibly hard both to find the right metrics for WB and to get buy-in from the teams. We needed a proper analytics platform in the backend to show our teams efficiently how their individual metrics tied into our new North Star.

Finding the right platform to unify the company

Luckily, we already had an analytics platform in place: Amplitude. We were only using it lightly, but I knew we could do more. I had crossed paths with Amplitude in previous roles and was excited to use it to build our North Star essentially from scratch.

Amplitude could help us clean, manage, and visualize data all in one place, and that simplicity and efficiency would be essential for the WB. Before Amplitude, one analyst might have taken data from a database and put it into a SQL server. Another would have taken a CSV and spent a month analyzing it. However, a unified platform like Amplitude would allow both analysts to use the same tool, supporting consistency and helping us move quickly. These gains in efficiency were important to highlight in the early days as we tried to get executive-level buy-in for WB. And even after that initial buy-in, Amplitude’s efficiency would power the company-wide connections that made our North Star metric work.

A culture of experimentation

As a quick aside, I want to call out how Amplitude Experiment in particular has also created a hugely productive culture of product experimentation at the company. I can think of many tests we literally couldn’t have run without Experiment. After a bit of work integrating Experiment with our feature flag system, it became incredibly easy for anyone to run A/B tests. In fact, the simplicity took our product managers from thinking that small changes weren’t worth testing to wondering why they wouldn’t test them.

For example, with our 1-on-1 meeting product, our product team wanted to experiment with how the layout of the template page would impact weekly user retention. They had a hypothesis that changing a particular part of the layout would improve retention, and it seemed like a no-brainer. In the past, they wouldn’t have even tested. But since testing became so easy within Experiment, they did. To their surprise, they found that the control group (i.e., the original layout) performed the best. The team would have decreased retention without even knowing it had they not tested. Instead, our original layout actually improved retention by 5–7% to reach 30% at week 12—a stat nearly unheard of for a B2B product.

Another experiment we ran with a high-focus product saw its week-four user retention improve to 20%. And experimenting with one of our other products saw its weekly usage double YoY. By continually running tests and tracking the results, our teams are finally able to drive product decisions based on data and not gut feelings—and that cultural shift has also made them much more receptive to our North Star metric.

Measuring success against company goals

When implementing the WB framework, we used Amplitude’s SDK for consistent event tracking. Every data analytics professional knows the saying: Garbage in, garbage out. Having a consistent way to track product usage and manage the schema is a huge deal because it removes the layer of cleaning and transforming the data, meaning we can trust our results with fewer headaches.

All our WB charts, dashboards, and insights reside in Amplitude. Our Amplitude data is also delivered to our data warehouse, which enables traditional BI tools and customer-facing SaaS platforms to consume and interrogate WB-related data.

A user-friendly platform like Amplitude enables product teams to make better decisions by giving them data at their fingertips. A recent example is with one of our newest products, which allows users to give kudos to other employees, fostering a culture of continuous feedback. A product like this, where employees across organizations constantly interact with it, also has the potential to drive up our WB metric by a lot.

But without Amplitude, the team wouldn’t know how their success drove up WB without talking to an analyst or writing SQL. Launching a new feature and then immediately going into Amplitude to see how it drives activation or retention allows that product team to know if they’re on the right path or need to course-correct.

Having all of our data in one place also allows us to see where to prioritize our efforts. Amplitude makes it easy to measure retention—it’s three or four button clicks. This means we can compare our products to each other. We can then know if we increased user retention in a particular product and how much of an impact that would have on WB. This allows teams to do the highest-impact work.

Achieving quantitative and qualitative results

Overall, through a more focused approach, we’ve increased our WB metric by 50% YoY. This has also resulted in our company’s biggest increase in product usage in recent years. We’ve even seen an increase in product activation by 10–15% in several of our products over the past year. The longtail effect is that our focus on the WB is inspiring our customers to drive that culture change within their own companies.

This whole experience has reaffirmed my belief in the need to embed analytics into product teams to drive growth and impact. A North Star metric is a great way to do that because it helps teams understand the value of tracking their data well—the time and effort to track data results in a clear measure of success, while if they aren’t tracking data, they won’t know if they’re succeeding. And Amplitude has been essential for getting the self-serve or analyst-assisted insights our product leadership—from PMs to CPO—needs to drive product decisions toward increasing WB.

Our North Star metric has also created a rallying cry across the organization. Originally, we created WB as something the product side of the company would be excited about, as it meant focusing on a single, clear metric instead of several smaller ones spread over various products. But we’ve seen the rest of the teams get behind WB too. It has brought together customer-facing and product teams around a common framework. Everyone can measure how their work directly impacts our North Star metric, driving better alignment across the company.

When the language is consistent, and there’s a quantifiable metric everyone works towards, it’s easy for your teams to get behind that message. Everyone can develop the long-term thinking that helps drive the organization towards its goals, no matter how lofty.