North Star metric

Suhail Doshi explains how to measure product growth with a simple funnel: visits, sign-ups, valuable actions, retention, and sharing. He recommends choosing a small set of metrics, then using them to diagnose whether people understand the product, can get started easily, and keep finding value in it. He illustrates the ideas with Mixpanel’s early landing pages and onboarding, and examples from Airbnb, Google, and other products. He stresses that retention and churn deserve early attention, and that teams with few users should learn by talking directly to customers.

Ed Baker and Gustaf Alströmer explain how growth teams evolved from viral experiments to cross-functional organizations that use data and experimentation across the company. They describe how product quality, retention, and a clear North Star metric shape growth, including the challenge of balancing riders and drivers in a two-sided marketplace. They also discuss paid acquisition, international expansion, and the operational realities of growing a real-world service. Their examples show how small changes, such as renaming invites to announcements, can have large effects, and why teams should test assumptions rather than trust intuition.