Feature Factory to Fine-tuned Machine: A North Star Journey

We’ve talked a lot about the power of a good North Star Metric (NSM): its potential to drive better alignment, clearer prioritization, less wasted work, and improved business outcomes. Easy peasy, overnight success, right?

Not quite. Once your leadership team believes in the value of a North Star Metric, the question shifts from “why” to “how.” How do you transform it from words on paper to a living, breathing principle by which every person in your organization makes business decisions?

A common misconception is that you’ll have the perfect North Star, and everyone will start using it right out of the gate. But the reality is that it’s a journey and can take months to make it part of your company’s DNA.

The good news is that loads of companies have successfully woven the North Star Metric into the fabric of their culture and experienced incredible results—and they’ve shared some of the best practices with us in our North Star Playbook.

Let’s explore a few of those best practices here and hear how Amplitude customer Anghami has successfully rallied their organization around the North Star Framework

Making the North Star Framework stick in your organization

1. Incorporating your North Star into your culture

Often, teams view workshops or corporate initiatives as a one-and-done activity or a “flavor of the week.” So, how do you ensure that doesn’t happen with your North Star? By deeply ingraining it into your culture.

The teams who’ve seen the most success implementing—and sticking to—the North Star Framework have:

• A sponsor with both influence and authority
• Leadership buy-in
• Communication and change management processes to socialize the concept and get employees across all organizations aligned behind your North Star
• Onboarding process to educate team members and incorporate the North Star Framework into existing ways of working

2. Avoiding a set-it-and-forget-it mentality

Your North Star Metric should be a living, breathing part of your organization. So it’s no surprise that when your business goals and strategy change, your North Star Metric should, too.

Recognizing this and taking action to change it requires insight, transparency, humility, and communication. But too often, companies get too attached. Continuously evaluate your North Star Metric to ensure it’s indeed a leading indicator of revenue and within your control.

For example, Amplitude changes its North Star whenever the company makes a significant strategy shift. When Amplitude changed our strategy to focus more on growing usage within teams versus building features for individual analysts, we shifted our North Star to measure collaboration in our product.

Avoiding a set-it-and-forget-it mentality will ensure that your North Star remains relevant, impactful, and motivating to your teams—rather than another passing fad.

3. Keeping your momentum

Your North Star journey is a continuous evolution with no “end,” and it can be hard to keep enthusiasm and momentum when you’re running a race you’ll never finish.

Teams that successfully implement the North Star Framework are always learning and grappling with uncertainty. The real muscle to develop is continuously checking to see whether your North Star Metric and inputs represent your current beliefs, product vision, and product strategy—then refining accordingly.

To keep momentum, challenge your teams to adopt “present thinking,” focusing on current successes rather than a far-off future endpoint. Present thinking asks: “Where are we? What do I need now? How do I improve the current way of working?”

Anghami’s success in creating a North Star culture

In a recent Amplitude Cohort Community Event, Anghami’s VP of Product, Mohammed Al Ogaily, shared candid, real-life examples of how they used the North Star Framework to transform from a feature factory to a fine-tuned machine focused on customer value and metrics.

A couple of things were clear:

• Defining and implementing their North Star Metric didn’t happen overnight—it was a journey.
• They keep the North Star top of mind in all they do.
• Aligning their teams behind a North Star Metric has created more clarity and focus—and improved business results

North Star journey: Digging deeper to define inputs

From the start, the Anghami team had a key goal for their North Star Metric: keep it as straightforward as possible—and it is. However, through trial and error—and hearing success stories and best practices from other Amplitude customers and peers—their North Star Metric has evolved.

“In the beginning, the simplest North Star Metric we could think of was playing music,” says Mohammed. “For a music streaming service, what could be more straightforward for measuring success than that!”

However, the team learned that getting more people to play music was a tricky metric to move. So, they got more focused and precise. Realizing that the product team could have the biggest impact on user engagement, they sought to understand how they could best measure and reflect that via their North Star.

The result? “Our new North Star became month-on-month retention, which measures how many users who played music last month also played music this month,” shares Mohammed. “Playing music remained an important component, but this new NSM was more measurable and impactable.”

But guess what? This North Star Metric alone still wasn’t actionable enough for the product team. The team needed proxy metrics—or what the North Star Framework refers to as inputs—that they believed they could more directly influence and, in doing so, impact the North Star Metric.

For example, they believed that increasing personalization would increase month-on-month retention, so an input became “increasing the percentage of users that play more than X number of songs from recommendations.”

The product managers would then break that down even further to a very simple metric they could impact via feature changes, like changing a button or testing alternative copy.

Keeping the North Star top of mind

At Anghami, keeping the North Star Metric top of mind starts at the top—with their leadership. Executive leadership believes in the North Star Metric’s power and partners with Mohammed to ensure it trickles throughout the organization.

Their leadership holds weekly business review meetings to check business status and make strategic plans. By adopting the North Star approach and making metrics central to their culture, they’ve shifted from having gut- and feeling-driven conversations to fact-based discussions, making it easier to align on a path forward.

Additionally, Mohammed explains that their North Star Metric is always visible, acting as the lens through which they assess success and make strategic decisions.

“We say, ‘OK, what did we do this quarter? Did it impact the metric? Did the metric go up? If not, should we do more of the same next quarter, or should we do something that will impact the input we hypothesized about?’”

Clarity, focus, and big business results

Pre-North Star, Mohammed would describe the product team as a feature factory. They’d build features, ship them, and move on to the next batch.

“We’d say we were data-driven, but we actually weren’t,” says Mohammed. “Yes, we measured stickiness and how many users engaged with a feature, but we built features because someone in the business told us to—not because the numbers told us to.”

However, now, data empowers the team with clarity and focus to determine what they should build and why. Before they start building anything, the team is now required to provide a data-based justification and how they will measure success in Amplitude.

Mohammed’s guiding direction to his teams: “Tell me what you’re trying to impact, why you think you’ll be able to impact it, and how you’ll measure it.” Adopting this approach and constantly looking at the North Star Metric has gradually made the organization more metric-driven and, in turn, more growth-driven.

Example: Improving day zero retention

One North Star success Anghami experienced was related to making their new user journey easy and simple. They knew that improving new user retention would help drive month-one retention, and then month-on-month retention.

Their data showed that a new user coming back on Day 1 had a significant impact on them coming back any day in the future. “So, we said, ‘forget Day 30, let’s just focus on Day 1 and get them back on Day 2,’” explains Mohammed.

However, digging into Amplitude funnels, they discovered that to get a new user to return on Day 1, they had to play at least one song on Day 0. And digging even deeper, they realized it wasn’t even about Day 0—it was about the first 30 minutes! A user who doesn’t play a song in their first 30 minutes has a low chance of playing a song on Day 0 or returning anytime after that.

So, the product team focused on making the first moments of a new user’s journey as simple and easy as possible. Some of their improvements were related to the amount of data they asked from a new user upfront before playing a song, the copy related to the data request, and how quickly they could show them value.

By making copy changes and eliminating most of those upfront data request fields, the team experienced a significant improvement in the number of users who played a song within the first 30 minutes—and month-on-month retention.

Put your North Star into action with Amplitude

If you’re like most product managers or designers, you work tirelessly to create amazing products and great digital experiences—but something is missing. Is it a lack of clarity, alignment, or accountability? Are you operating as a feature factory?

The North Star Framework can help.

Brimming with expert insights and real-life examples, Amplitude’s North Star Playbook dives deep into:

• The purpose, value, and elements of the North Star Framework.
• How to define and name a North Star Metric and inputs.
• Tips on how and when to change your North Star Metric.
• More best practices for making the North Star Framework “stick” to your culture and processes.