Your customers’ journey begins long before they realize they need your product. It starts with problems they’re trying to solve or goals they’re trying to achieve. It continues through researching and comparing possible solutions and ends with them choosing one. I call these stages in the journey Struggle, Search, and Selection.

Instead of a company-wide goal to “make money,” they could have prioritized acquiring and delighting more customers. Profit is an outcome of happy customers, not the other way around. And

You need to get them to the “aha moment,” when they experience the value of your product. For example, in the early days, the Netflix team figured out that if new signups added three movies to their queue in the first 90 seconds, they were much more likely to become paying subscribers compared to those who had a hard time finding good movies to

Some North Stars count active customers (e.g., daily, weekly or monthly active users), and others track the amount of activity (e.g., nights booked, repeat purchases, minutes of meditation, total storage used). This decision is important. It comes down to how concentrated your revenue is: Does most of your revenue come from a few huge customers, or

Growth sprints have six steps: Inputs: Gather your customer insights and the data in your growth model, plus any past experiments or ideas. Ideation and Scoring: Triage your ideas to create a shortlist for consideration in the current sprint cycle. Selection: Select the most promising ideas to test. Experiment: Design and run your experiments.

“When you bought our product, do you remember what you were hoping it would enable you to do?” and “Why was doing that so important to you?”

For example, Airbnb’s founders suspected better photography might improve rental rates. But sending professional photographers to every property would have been complex and expensive. Fortunately, Airbnb was founded by design students, so they grabbed their cameras and spent a weekend photographing only the listed apartments that were near their

Selection: Anxieties: What worries do your prospects have? They’ll bring a set of specific questions that you’ll need to answer. They won’t be vague like “trust” or “quality”; they’ll be ultra-specific, like “do they have many gluten-free options?” Inertia: What’s holding them back? Even after they decide, prospects may need to overcome additional

At the highest level, there are four steps to becoming an instrument of discovery: Step 1: Understand the journey that leads customers to you. Step 2: Map your growth model to find points of leverage. Step 3: Run growth sprints to test ideas quickly. Step 4: Shift your team’s mindset from optimization to discovery.