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Does your north star metric suck? And do you really need a growth team?

By John Koetsier • August 23, 2024

How do you do your most impactful work as a growth marketer? Prioritization is hard for most of us, but even harder — maybe — is having the right north star metric that everyone aligns around. And perhaps even tougher is having an accurate awareness of what growth marketing is and what it isn’t, and aligning your whole team.

I recently chatted with Hannah Parvaz, CEO of Aperture and app marketer extraordinaire, on Singular’s Growth Masterminds podcast.

Hit play, subscribe to our YouTube, and keep scrolling:

Getting the right North Star metric

A good north star metric is supposed to be the 1 key thing that will guide global, profitable, and long-lasting growth. It’s not something that you can game by getting cheap (and worthless) installs, or clicks, or impressions.

But it’s also not supposed to be just yours.

That’s just half the puzzle.

It should also be your users, players, or customers.

And balancing that is absolutely critical to long-term success.

“Our North Star metric … is this most important metric that everyone in the company can unite around,” says Parvaz. “So at Facebook that’s daily active users. You know, it’s how many people can come back to the product because that’s how they monetize as well.”

“This is a metric that represents both what the customer wants — they’re getting value, so they’re coming back — and it also represents what the business wants: they want that usage. So your North Star metric, it’s really important that you’re balancing both of these.”

Tip too far to your own side, and you’re a huckster, a shill artist, a get-rich-quick type that doesn’t care about users or customers except insofar as they represent a paycheck. This can work in the short term, but it almost never builds long-lasting and successful companies.

Tip too far to the customer side, and you do something amazing for people, but it doesn’t last because you can’t continue to fund it without adequate revenue. As Stephen R. Covey, author of The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, used to say: no margin, no mission.

The right north star metric can’t be gamed, is truly indicative of both the value you provide and the revenue you receive, and is broad enough to be something the whole team can work towards together.

“Let’s say you’re a subscription app … a meditation app,” Parvaz says. “A perfect north star metric for this kind of company would be something like weekly meditating subscribers … here you’ve got a cadence, you know, people are coming back — it’s not just meditating subscribers, you know, which might happen once a year — they’re coming back. 

“They’re receiving value, they’re doing a key action, which would be meditating, and then they’re paying us because they’re subscribers.”

Growth marketing may not be what you think it is

What is growth marketing, after all?

“I’m getting people in my inbox telling me, you know, we’re hiring a growth marketer,” Parvaz says. “And I always ask them back, what does that mean? And every single time someone says it means something different … and so there is a bit of an identity crisis happening in marketing.”

When we think about the growth marketing function, we tend to think about stuff people do:

That’s all good stuff, and it’s all valid activities for a growth marketer. But it’s not precisely what growth marketing is, says Parvaz.

Instead, it’s a mindset. A perspective. A way of thinking and approaching problems on a global scale, and then applying that thinking to specific tasks or tactics.

“A person in a growth role within your company really should be leading on what is the priority for us at the moment,” Parvaz says. “I’ve looked at all of the metrics, I’ve looked at all of our opportunities and this is where we should be focusing on.”

Do you really need a growth team?

Which kinda speaks to something else we chatted about: Mark Zuckerberg’s recent advice about growth teams.

“He said, startups do not need growth teams,” Parvaz told me. “You do not need a head of growth. Your CEO should be your head of growth and your whole company should be the growth team. Your marketer could be working on prioritizing CRM for retention. Your developer could be working on features for acquisition. And it’s really about how we are focusing together to make the biggest impact on this area so that we can move on quickly to the next, so that we’re collaborating.”

The point?

Everyone is in growth.

 

 

Developers build features that lead to growth. Designers create images and brands that lead to growth. Data scientists build models of reality that lead to growth. And, yes, marketers — growth marketers or just marketers — use a smorgasbord of marketing techniques to facilitate, stimulate, foster, and capitalize on growth.

So what Zuckerberg is kind of saying is: you don’t need a specific growth team because everyone is on the growth team.

(Which kind of is a growth team, of course, just a bigger one. But we won’t quibble.)

The right north star metric + a global perspective on growth enables building flows from ads all the way through to product

I have a particular beef with some ads.

They’re not necessarily fake ads, but they represent a part of the eventual app experience, or product experience. The problem is when the aspect they represent isn’t visible in the app store listing (leading to cognitive dissonance) and isn’t present in the first open experience (leading to more cognitive dissonance and … perhaps … and quick deletion).

Having a global growth marketing perspective, however, can fix this.

For Parvaz, it starts with jobs to be done, the Clayton Christensen framework that helps innovators understand how and why people make decisions.

“What we have to do first is really identify the jobs to be done,” she says. “What are the reasons that someone might use this product or buy this product? And so what we do first is we start testing all of the different jobs or themes why someone might start using this product.”

Finding that — or finding 5 or 6 different things, which is possible in some apps — is first. 

Once that’s done, marketers can build flows from ads that hit a specific job to be done, custom product pages on the App Store or custom store listings on Google Play that sing from the same song sheet, and then a deep link into the product — if possible — to continue the flow of focus on the topic or theme or capability that attracted a person in the very first place.

“It’s all connected,” Parvaz says.

Which, of course, is also true when you have the right north star metric.

Much more in the full episode

Take my word for it: this one is worth listening to in full. (All Growth Masterminds episodes are, right?)

Subscribe to Growth Masterminds on whatever podcast platform you prefer, and get connected to our YouTube channel as well so you never miss an episode.

In the full episode …

  • 00:00 Introduction to Growth Masterminds
  • 02:16 Hannah’s Recent Activities and Achievements
  • 05:52 The Importance of Prioritization in Growth Marketing
  • 11:12 Full Funnel Approach and Team Collaboration
  • 16:52 Defining the Growth Role
  • 18:31 Building a Growth Team
  • 20:10 Prioritizing Growth Initiatives
  • 24:05 Testing and Iteration
  • 26:02 Aligning Ads with Product Experience
  • 32:46 Full Funnel Approach
  • 33:58 Conclusion and Final Thoughts

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