Every note in the archive that names North Star Metric: summaries, key takeaways and links to the original essays, episodes and posts. Ask a question below to get a cited answer from just these notes’ authors.
Jorge Mazal, former CPO of Duolingo, recounts how the company reversed a slide in daily active user growth and eventually grew DAU about 4.5x over four years. The journey began with failed attempts: a…
Lenny Rachitsky explains how mission, vision, strategy, goals, roadmap, and tasks connect, working from the top down and showing where to begin. He illustrates each layer with well-known company examples and uses a…
“This is just quick email to let you know I wrote a guest post for Future (a16z’s new media site) that I’m pretty excited about. It’s a guide for helping you choose your North Star Metric(s), based on a survey of current and past employees at over 40 of today’s most successful growth-stage companies. Check out the table below for a glimpse of what you’ll find. Your North Star Metric is your strategy, and your strategy is your North Star…”
Elena Verna argues that a founder's first growth hire is one of the most consequential hires a startup makes, and that many founders begin with avoidable mistakes. She proposes six rules: define a growth model before…
Lenny Rachitsky lays out the four metrics he considers most important for an early marketplace: fill rate, bookings growth, supply growth, and GMV growth. He explains why each matters, shares practitioner perspectives…
Lenny Rachitsky answers a reader's question about which metrics matter for a consumer app, arguing the right metrics depend on how the business makes money. He walks through five consumer models (trial-based…
Teresa Torres and Petra Wille argue that product practitioners should trace frameworks and best practices back to their original creators rather than relying on social-media summaries. Simplified takes often dilute the…
Teresa Torres uses her annual letter to reflect on a burnout-filled 2024, where she rediscovered joy in her work by reworking her community, launching a self-paced course, and tightening her email and webinar offerings…
Hila Qu, a growth advisor and former GitLab and Acorns growth leader, walks through how B2B companies can add a product-led growth (PLG) motion alongside sales. Her core argument is that PLG and sales are complementary…
Melissa Perri recounts how her consulting work began by sneaking product management into companies under buzzwords like agile and digital, since 'product management' itself got doors shut. Executives' stated reason for…
Lenny answers a reader question by unpacking how Airbnb built a strong experimentation culture, using its early data science hires, north-star metric, embedded data scientists, and trustworthy tooling as the core story…
A detailed playbook for acing analytical thinking PM interviews, structured as a five-step framework covering assumptions, product rationale, metric frameworks, goal-setting, and tradeoff evaluation, plus notes on…
A guest post from GiveDirectly's team, shared alongside a Giving Tuesday fundraising appeal, walks through the experiments that raised roughly $3 million more in donations per year. It covers winning tests like faster…