Jenny Chang

Workshop

Bridging the Business/Experience Divide with the North Star Framework

How can UX bridge the language of "the business" and sustainable, human-centered, outcome-oriented product design? How can we lead the conversation around metrics, instead of being relegated to the sidelines?

To tackle this puzzle, we (Jenny, a designer, and John a former UX researcher and product manager) are excited to be facilitating a workshop on the North Star Framework.

The North Star Framework is a model for managing products by identifying a single, crucial metric (the North Star Metric) that captures the core value that your product delivers to your customers. In addition to the metric, the North Star Framework includes a set of key inputs that collectively act as factors that produce the metric. Product teams teams can directly influence these inputs with their day-to-day work.

This combination of metric and inputs serves three critical purposes in any company:

• It helps prioritize and accelerate informed but decentralized decision-making.
• It helps teams align and communicate.
• It enables teams to focus on impact and sustainable, product-led growth.

Who is this for? Anyone interested in:

• A greater sense of impact and coherence in your work.
• Context and inspiration to improve your current tools and metrics, like OKRs, roadmaps, and KPIs.
• More autonomy, with more flexibility to solve problems, while ensuring your work aligns with the bigger picture.
• To be data-informed instead of letting the data drive you in circles.
• Shared language and common understanding about vision, strategy, and value.

By the end of the workshop, our goal is for you to:

• Understand the purpose and value of the North Star Framework.
• Understand the elements of the North Star Framework.
• Be able to run an internal North Star workshop.
• Be able to define and name a North Star Metric (and related Inputs) for your company.
• Be able to identify and address common traps.
• Know when to change your North Star Metric.