What your company is actually optimising for
Unit 4 of 8 · Lesson 3 of 3Index
Growth just shipped more notifications. Retention is trying to make Sona feel calm. Both teams are sure they are right, and their work cancels out.
North star, quarterly goal, health metric
Two teams, opposite directions
Growth sends more notifications. Retention wants Sona to feel calm. Nobody is wrong. They are steering by different numbers.
One north star
The one number that means the product is working for users and the business. Every team should be able to say how their work moves it.
- Goals for this quarter03
Goals for this quarter
What you will move in the next three months. They should push the north star, never compete with it.
- Health metrics stay still04
Health metrics stay still
Opt outs, complaints, crash rate. The numbers you never want to move, whatever this quarter's goal is.
How YouTube handled it
Doing it with AI, and where it breaks
Give a model your company's stated goals and ask where two of them would conflict in practice, with a concrete decision that helps one and hurts the other.
It finds polite, theoretical tensions. Push for a specific decision on a specific screen, or you get a management platitude instead of a finding.
Here are our north star, this quarter's goals and our health metrics. Name one specific product decision, on a specific screen, that would move one goal up and another down. Say which team would make it and why.
Build it
A one page map of Sona's real goals, or your company's, with one conflict named and a call on it.
The worked solution
Stuck, or want to compare?
There is a worked solution. Try the build first. Reading it before you have attempted anything is the fastest way to learn nothing.
Checkpoint
If you did the build, these take two minutes. If you cannot answer one of them, that is the part to go back to.
Moving on marks this lesson complete. Finish the build first, it is the part that counts.