"Teams risk two primary pathologies that I’ve personally suffered from multiple times:"

"Nearsightedness. The team is skilled at moving sensitive metrics, but their optimizations don’t translate to long-term business success."

"Farsightedness. The team monitors metrics tied to their company’s long-term business success, but they’re unable to see how their work can move the metrics that matter."

"“Good vision,” in the product development sense, is the capacity to make short-term bets that compound to create long-term business value."

"It might seem paradoxically hard to be simultaneously short-term and long-term oriented, but this is exactly what the world’s top companies do."

"There are two sides to the brutal reality of metrics-driven product development:"

"Lagging indicators are the KPIs that actually matter for your business; things like revenue and customer retention. Because they are lagging and subject to external forces, product teams often feel helpless in impacting them."

"Leading indicators can be influenced by work, like the percent of users that perform a certain action during a session. By themselves, they don’t equate business success. Impacting them feels more like local optimizations than game-changing breakthroughs."

"Your North Star metric is the antidote. It’s the bridge between your leading and lagging indicators."

"Each link in the graph is an assumption that could be wrong or go wrong. You can form hypotheses for how work will move input metrics and for how leading indicators influence lagging indicators."

"And a correlation that exists at one point in time might break in the future."

"Thus, your map of relationships between work and metrics must be dynamic, not static."

"Metrics-driven product development is hard and will always be hard. But there's a lot to be done to make it easier."