Clarity of Purpose made easy with The North Star Framework
Getting Clarity of Purpose by figuring out why you’re building what you’re building is essential. Most teams need to understand why they’re building what they are building.
Getting Clarity of Purpose by figuring out why you’re building what you’re building is essential. Most teams need to understand why they’re building what they are building. Sometimes, somebody else knows. But it’s not the team.
You need Clarity of Purpose to succeed
It’s interesting to look at the models for creating great software, like the British Design Council and the Double Diamond. On the left is discovery, and on the right is delivery. We always talk about delivery and obsess over it, but we very rarely do product or discovery well. A good product is really about discovery.
One person who has nailed it is Melissa Perri. In her book, ‘Escaping the Build Trap‘, she talks about people unquestioningly building—and building backlogs. I’m sure you are also familiar with that problem.
It happens everywhere. Teams feel comfortable doing this when they are in their groove. They knock out another widget, ticket, or feature without thinking about the impact on who it’s actually for or if it makes a difference.
As Melissa articulates in her book, you fall into the build trap. Close the JIRA tickets, complete the storage, complete the sprint, and move on!
But in today’s world, everyone is looking for more purpose and meaning in their work. That means going back to discovery and understanding the impactful things you can do.
Build the thing right, build the right thing, build it quickly
There are a lot of frameworks out there that people need to be made aware of. The move from project to product was supposed to fix this. But I don’t think it has. Because product managers have people building things like ‘billyo’. But often, they need to build the right thing.
A great saying is:
Build the thing right, build the right thing, build it quickly
We’re good at building quickly and doing things right, but we’re not very good at building the right thing. And that’s what breaks companies. Building the wrong thing can be expensive.
We’ve been streamlining development processes for several years and building high-performance teams. But we fall into that trap with the patterns and automation you can leverage. Just hit that button. You need to step back and ask, what’s it for? And who is it for?
What does Clarity of Purpose mean?
If you need help understanding the impact you’re trying to have, how can you build the right thing? How do you know what success looks like? What conversations are you having on potential approaches and ways to achieve that success?
It all ties back to data, metrics, and understanding the problem you’re trying to solve. If you’re not doing that, it dilutes the good intent of good teams and engineers. How can they build the right thing if they need help understanding success or the problem they’re trying to solve? And what are the options? The frameworks help you think correctly and lead you to what you need to solve.
We lean heavily on team activity. It’s not something handed down to you: “Here’s your purpose or Northstar ”. You need to make it into a facilitated collaborative endeavour. So that everyone is a stakeholder and you listen to everyone’s opinion. And all have a shared understanding of the purpose.
Here’s why Clarity of Purpose is important
With remote working, it’s easy to get everyone on a Zoom call, fire up a Miro board, and work together to figure out our Northstar, our purpose, who our users are, and their needs. That’s powerful because it gets everyone on the same page and helps them understand what they’re doing.
It’s a leadership thing, too. If you can represent your work in numbers and the impact that you’re having, you can’t help but make good decisions. You know your Northstar measure and how it ties to the medium—or long-term business goals and the impact it’s having. You are able to track back to what you’re doing from a work perspective. It makes things way easier and takes the guessing away.
When experimenting with rapid delivery and moving fast, you can only do that when you know the game you’re in and the game you’re playing in. That’s part of the playbook. For me, it’s a leadership quality. It helps you prioritise the right things, and that helps you make good decisions.
The Value Flywheel Effect and North Star Framework
In ‘The Value Flywheel Effect’ book, the first phase of the value flywheel is ‘Clarity of Purpose’. We identify a leader persona, like the CEO, who needs to drive the purpose.
The next helpful thing we find is the North Star Framework from Amplitude. We discovered it a few years ago, and it collectively blew our minds. We have used it ever since.
It’s a simple framework that people can learn in an hour-long session. Your teams can share and collaborate, and online collaboration tools have made this a lot easier. We tailor it a little bit with pre-Wardley mapping tools on ‘What’s your scope and what’s your purpose?’
Your users and their needs set the context for Northstar. It gets everybody back on the same page if they have forgotten about a user. Or if they have forgotten that they do something for a set of people and their needs. So it helps to get them on the same page for setting the context and situational awareness.
A strong sense of purpose fuels your motivation.
One big thing we’ve noticed about the Northstar Framework and Wardley Mapping is that they invite challenges. Using these frameworks does not challenge a person or team; you’re starting a conversation about North Star metrics, KPIs, and the work aligned with those. It provides a safe space for the proper challenge to happen.
The playbook is well-written. If you’re experienced in software or working on a product, you’ll pick it up quickly. I like the lag and lead measures concept. The exercise helps you come up with lead measures and how to influence the lag measure.
Development teams keep themselves busy sometimes, chasing vanity metrics. And gamifying vanity metrics is fun. But in fact, what you need are lead measures. What are the things that impact business success? They are the lagging measures. It’s worth a read, and it’s rapid to get through.
The North Star Framework is a collaboration.
There are lots of ways to run it, and you can adapt it to almost anything. We love Northstar’s traceability. You can go from business metrics back to your work, or you can go from your work to the business metrics. That’s the real power behind it.
You can cascade into teams as well. Each team can have their own Northstar aligned to the broader organisational Northstar.
What we like about the framework are the hints about what makes a good metric—story points are not good. There is guidance on transactional, activation, and user metrics and what value means. Quantifying value will be second nature for good product people, but it can be hard for anyone else. It requires you to think deeply.
You need to tailor it for engineering teams. They need to be product-facing, like actual product teams. So, you need to tailor some of the conversations and steer them in that direction. I know some product people will have a Miro board with 300 stickies, and all of a sudden, people go super deep.
The Northstar is a collaboration exercise and a mindset shift. It’s a good way to discuss your priorities and to understand what you’re trying to achieve and accomplish. That’s the Northstar, first and foremost.
Align your thoughts and actions to your purpose.
The Northstar Framework provides good thinking exercises and structure. We ruthlessly prioritise and look at what we can measure. But it takes work to narrow down, and you’ve got to have the right people in the room.
Go deep and get lots of input metrics. Then, take a second pass to extract the essence and make it consumable and actionable. It’s about the conversation, not who can get the most stickies on the board competition. The conversation and group of people are important.
Clarity of Purpose Books and Resources
Melissa Perri: Escaping the Build Trap
Amplitude and Jon Cutler
Martin Cagan’s book INSPIRED: How to Create Tech Products Customers Love
Simon Sinek: Start with Why
Serverless Craic from The Serverless Edge
Check out our book, The Value Flywheel Effect
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