Lessons from ProActive: How to
engage teams
with an inspiring North Star
Lessons from ProActive: How to
engage teams
with an inspiring North Star
The biggest success up until now, was the process itself to come up with the North Star Metric and get it in place. We did the workshops with our leadership team and it created a lot of alignment on our purpose.
The biggest success up until now, was the process itself to come up with the North Star Metric and get it in place. We did the workshops with our leadership team and it created a lot of alignment on our purpose.
A bit of background
The Product Vision Sprint in short
The biggest success up until now, was the process itself to come up with the North Star Metric and get it in place. We did the workshops with our leadership team and it created a lot of alignment on our purpose.
The North Star Framework in short
Before hearing from ProActive, let’s have a quick walkthrough of the North Star Framework. The heart of the framework is the North Star Metric, a single metric that captures and measures the core value delivered to customers and end-users. The North Star Metric should also align with the product vision and strategy, and be a leading indicator of business growth.
What makes the framework really powerful are the Input Metrics. These are metrics that each team comes up with as a way to contribute to the North Star. These often have an effect on the backlog and priorities of the teams, and help them make decisions as they develop their products and services.
If you want to learn more about the North Star Framework, or would like support in finding your North Star, you can find more information here.
With that said, let’s hear from Lars M., Managing Director at ProActive.
Could you tell us a bit about your current North Star? What were the thoughts behind it? How does it connect to your overall vision and strategy?
Our North Star is basically about measuring efficiency. That sounds simple, but it actually took us two days to get to the essence of what we should make more efficient.
Our product supports different stakeholders in a customer organisation, with possible conflicting interests depending on how you look at it. We support customers in their Spend Management. The financial controllers would like to have everything administered timely and accurately, a budget holder wants to keep track of the budget, while an employee would rather not be bothered with administrative tasks or budgets.
We realised that everything concerning financial administration, approval etc. is in service of core tasks of an organisation. We therefore decided that we should focus on the core tasks of an organisation through the perspective of an employee; “minimise time spent on acquiring goods and services to do my job”. This relates really nicely to our mission that was already in place: “empower people to focus on their core business by simplifying and automating their spend processes”. Our vision is to provide all stakeholders in a customer organisation with a “Spend Assistant”.
How did you first learn about the North Star Framework? What made you want to try it out in your company?
I have learned about it through one of our board members who facilitated North Star Workshops within Visma. At first we had a North Star focused on the number of transactions that were processed through our product.
This led to feedback from employees that they found it quite hard to contribute, because the main impact was coming from sales adding new customers.
It was not measuring if we are succeeding in our mission and vision well enough. We therefore decided to enroll in a North Star Workshop to come up with something better.
What are some successes and challenges you have experienced with your North Star? How would you describe the impact on your teams and company?
The biggest success up until now, was the process itself to come up with the North Star Metric and get it in place. We did the workshops with our leadership team and it created a lot of alignment on our purpose.
While designing the actual metric and getting this in place, the same alignment could be seen in people working on those projects. We could even see it already triggered some different thinking about our product and some customer facing people propagate our vision through the North Star to customers and partners.
Within our product development teams we have seen initiatives sparked by the North Star to create (input) metrics and KPIs on specific parts of the product, for example measuring the percentage of payment failures and related feedback messages to prevent this from happening in the future. The prevention should lead to a decrease in time spent to process successful payments.
Within the customer success team we dive into the parts of the process where most time is spent and compare successful customers with less successful customers. This leads to insights to advise both the customers as well as the product teams. We have future plans for marketing to provide proof from customers that they have saved X amount of time with our tool.
We have encountered some practical challenges in getting the tooling in place and not trying to be too perfect in theory. Apart from those practical challenges, the biggest challenge is to keep it alive and have everybody work with it in the company.
Would you recommend the North Star Framework to other companies? What advice would you give companies that are considering implementing a North Star?
Yes, I would definitely recommend it. My advice is to put a lot of effort in making sure everybody understands it, relates to it and can really work with it. We have integrated it in our strategy and OKRs for 2024 by setting some targets on the North Star Metric.
By doing this we try to make sure that focus remains. Nevertheless it is challenging to keep it alive for everyone in the organisation.
We ran a Design Sprint
If you wish to learn more about how ProActive is working with their North Star, you can check out this slide deck.
Thank you Lars and ProActive for sharing!
More success stories
Knowledge is meant to be shared. Explore the cards below to learn more about how companies around Visma have leveraged their teams to work better with turning data into insights.
