Advice from 25 preeminent growth experts at top startups

The North Star Metric (NSM) is a powerful concept that has emerged in recent years from Silicon Valley companies with breakout growth. It helps teams move beyond driving fleeting, surface-level growth to instead focus on generating long-term retained customer growth.

You need a metric that specifically answers this. It can be “x people did 3 searches in the past week”. Or “y people visited my site 9 times in the past month”. Or “z people made at least one purchase in the last 90 days.” But whatever it is, it should be a signal that they are using their product in the way you expected and that they use it enough so that you believe they will come back to use it more and more.

Building out your go-to-market strategy.

Applying a growth mindset to your own career or product team is hard work, over and above the everyday work of product and people management. Much of it is also deeply uncomfortable and personal. What follows are some practical tips to help you get started.

Diligence is designed to help us understand both what currently exists and what may come to be as well as to try and help the entrepreneur on their path.

There are three main reasons retention has gotten harder - fierce competition, channel fatigue, and the rise of monopolies.

Long-term, meaningful growth is about much more than signups or downloads. It means making your users successful, and driving them back to your product again and again.

Whether it is Airbnb, Uber, Booking or most high-growth companies, they didn’t find out their remarkable growth hack thanks to some random idea. Discovering “silver bullets” was the result of hard work and a strict process to get something worthwhile to focus on.

This article includes some of the mental models I’ve found most valuable for each stage of growing a product, and how to apply them.

Transitioning from Product Management to Growth.