Planting The Flag for Digital Products
This story was originally published as part of The Growth Weekly.
If there’s one thing I have learned during my relatively short career, it’s this:
Before anything else, preparation is the key to success.
— Alexander Graham Bell
No matter what challenge you’re facing, the biggest difference in performance is in how efficiently and thoroughly you have prepared yourself for it.
That’s why the end of the year is the moment you can rip yourself loose from the competition.
To do so, I organized a Plant The Flag session with one of our best clients at In The Pocket.
In the session we decided on our focus for the coming year by defining three things:
- North Star Metric
- Objectives & Key Results
- Roadmap Initiatives
North Star Metric
Eat the frog. We started off with the hardest part. Decide which one single metric will tell you that this year was a good year.
This is not an easy exercise. Every aspect of your user and business goals has to be represented in this metric. So expect a lot of discussion and boil it down to one metric.
Objectives & Key Results
One North Star Metric (NSM) will never be actionable. You have just agreed on direction. Now you’ll have to decide on how you’re going to walk the talk.
To do this, you’ll set 2–4 objectives: Things you want to achieve in order to move your NSM. Something like ‘Make our product part of the users’ weekly routine.’ would be an example of this.
To make sure your objectives are measurable, add 2–3 key results that will prove you’ve achieved this goal. Be ambitious and specific:
‘Have 38% of new users come back in Week 4 after sign-up.’
Roadmap Initiatives
This is were it all comes together. Now you’ll have all the key results you want to achieve, match them with initiatives you’re going to take to move the needle.
Not an exhaustive list, but some main pointers and a few must-do activities. You’ll groom the roadmap and backlog later.
If you’ve excelled at the previous exercises, this one come very fluently. And more so, this will remain valuable for the rest of the year in your ideation sessions.
A clear vision, an aligned team, and lots of ideas to be experimenting with on the roadmap. Is there anything else you need for your growth team to start the new year?
If you’ve enjoyed this issue, please take the time to share it on LinkedIn or Twitter!
Of course, I haven’t invented these exercises myself. They are a combination of altered exercises from these great sources. Enjoy:
What’s your North Star Metric?
Let me know in the comments below! 👇🏻
