 I'm a senior product manager with MyFitnessPal. Those of you who don't know what MyFitnessPal is, it's a health and fitness app that really helps you with any goals that you have, be it nutrition, be it weight loss, or any other things that help with calorie and nutrition tracking. So a little bit about me before we go into today's topic. I actually started out my career as an engineer. I worked as an engineer for a couple of years, but I got an opportunity in my own team where there was an opening for a product. It wasn't really an opening. It was like they needed somebody to take it. So I kind of just volunteered, and I really enjoyed that work and enjoyed how I was working with customers, working with product, working, developing a vision and strategy, and that's when I decided to make a move. So that's how I worked with a couple of different companies, Wall Street Journal, Salesforce, and Atos, and now MyFitnessPal. So now I've been in product for a couple of years and love to share my thoughts with you. Honestly, the today's topic is what's your product not star? So there's a lot of information online. If you go and even research this, you might find a lot of content. So I'm really just focusing on my learnings and what I have learned and some tips that can probably help you as you go on in your journey. So today's agenda, yeah, well, what is, what do I mean when I say products not star? Why is it important as a product manager to worry and think about it? Some examples of good and bad and then some learnings. Before we get into it, just a quick exercise. Let's imagine we all of us are product managers at Airbnb for one minute. And what do you think is important for Airbnb? If you are a product manager, what metric would you care about if anyone wants to take a shot at it? Rentals, yes, like number of rentals that people do, yeah? Anyone else? Yeah, like number of listing, number of rentals, number of times people make a booking on Airbnb. That's kind of what generates their revenue and everything, yeah? No, these are actually a great example. And to be honest, as a product manager, that's probably what you would care about in your day-to-day. But think of it for one second. Does Airbnb really care about that? Think of it not just for one year, but think of it five years or 10 years. Do they care about number of rentals and do they care about how many people are booking with us? Is that sustainable for five years or six years or 10 years as their strategy? So that's kind of like where the North Star comes in. Even though you know that the company, this is what they're focusing on right now, as a product manager, it's really your job and your responsibility to think what is, where is the company going? So for example, let's say Airbnb, yes, that's what they focus on right now, but if you've seen Airbnb's trajectory, not just from booking, they're moving to experiences. So it's not just about how many rentals, but they're actually thinking, okay, how can I make the user feel like a local when they visit some place? So it's really like driving their strategy into different experiences and what's their goal and how can they achieve it? So every feature or every project that the product managers work is kind of towards that goal. Okay, so just for fun, let's do Spotify. Now that we've talked a little bit about North Star and you want to take a stab at it, what North Spotify is aiming for in five years? Music at any moment, so music everywhere. So that's kind of what their goal. And if you even do more of case studies and see about Spotify, they're even moving towards where the creators can actually have their own autonomy here. So it's not just our user base, which is people listening, but it's also for people creating it. So that's kind of how people think and honestly, North Star doesn't have to be something that once you've set it and you've started a company, this is your vision and it has to be the same. Like I'm sure Airbnb and Spotify started with different kind of what the things we talked about, but now they're digressing and they're changing based on where they are and where they're in the stage of their company. So it's really important to keep thinking about where do you want to go? And to be honest, as product managers, it's very easy to get lost in everyday features and everyday things that you do and not think about how it impacts the organization. So that's kind of what we talked about today. All right. So we've been using this word of North Star. What exactly is it? What do we mean when we say North Star? Is it vision for the company? If I say my vision for the company is, I want to reach 100 million users for my fitness pal. Is that a North Star for my company? Right? Exactly. So it's more, but you would more often than not, you would see that companies have retention as their metric or conversion as their metric. But it's really important to know that what the North Star is actually that emotional moment or the a-ha moment for the user that, oh my God, this is what I want. This is the product I want to use. If I go and tell a user that maybe this product is something or this product is, there are 10,000 people who use it, do you want to use it? It's not really relevant to the user and they're probably just going to ask me, what do you want? Like what is the product? So it's really important to connect with the user that this is my moment. And that's where that would come in. For example, in my own company, my fitness pal, we talk about that, yeah, it's about tracking and calorie and weight tracking. But again, what actually connects with our users is we tell them that we'll help you reach goals that you don't even know you have. Because honestly, a lot of people don't. We have to educate them about their nutrition, about their health, to know, okay, this is what I want to do with my health. So it's kind of going beyond and seeing not what just the current problem is for the user, but seeing what actually emotionally will connect with that particular user. So let's go. So why do we care about, kind of we already talked about it, but why do we think not store is important? It's not a real number. You can't really measure it. You can't, if you go in and tell your other leadership in the company that, oh, I want to just, like how Airbnb said it, I just want to build experiences for users. The biggest question is going to come up, like, yeah, but what about it? How do we grow our business around it? How do we do grow our strategy around it? So there's no right answer. It is not the flashiest number. It's not something you can say, oh, I have these 10 billion users that I want to convert. You can never say that. But if you don't have Nordstar, you really don't know where to go. And taking a simple example is just in the name. Nordstar is not the brightest star, but it is what gives you direction, tells you where the North Pole is. So you kind of need to know where are you going? And not just you, as a whole organization, you need to know where you're going, and not just the metric that you're following right now. So a different case study. I'm pretty sure everyone's already familiar with Facebook and maybe MySpace. So since we know Facebook is such a successful billion dollar company, and MySpace miserably failed in the same space, does anyone want to again try why that happened, even though their vision was the same? They tried developing a platform for social media, but they thought that the users are not going to be very open with messaging or open with their own, releasing their identity information. But Facebook took a stab at it. They did their customer research and realized that people are okay with it. So they actually built a longer term vision to get there. The second most important thing is, even though MySpace realized, if you see case studies, and honestly, don't take my word for it, but there are many case studies that say that MySpace realized that this is not going to work, but they did not iterate. Just because they thought that that's their company vision when they started, they didn't change it. They didn't realize that, okay, the market is different, the users want something else. They just kept trying to improve what was currently there. Another example is like Netflix versus Blockbuster, very similar reasons. So this is kind of my overview of why NotStar is important, how you can actually think about it, how you, why is it important in your company, and as product managers, honestly, it is your responsibility to think about it. Because if you don't, there's no one else who's going to do it. So there's one person who has to be responsible for it. And these are my learnings from my own experience that I learned and I wish I had kind of thought about them more earlier when I started as product manager. So first and foremost, if you're starting to think about NotStar or think about vision for your company, you have to think that you're building it right. And it doesn't mean that you have to be right at the first time. It just means you have to just try enough and just in the end be right. So it's okay that if your vision is wrong and you completely wasted a lot of time, but then you're building it correct. You're building and you're learning and you build it correctly. So let's start from scratch. Let's assume you're starting a company or you just started or you just joined a company, which is the startup. They don't have a vision yet. Yes, they have an idea of what they want to build, but there's no perfect goal at the end. And as product managers, honestly, we get very excited. I'm like, okay, I'm gonna start building all these features. I'm gonna start working on this. I'll get engineers and designers and everybody. And I'm gonna have something shipped very soon. But what if it's not a market fit? Like we haven't even thought about whether our vision or our NotStar that we think we want, is that even a market fit? Do users even want it? Do they even care about it? Kind of like how we go back to Myspace. So it's really important that before you spend all your time and energy into building something, really make sure that you validate that you're building something correctly, that there's a market for it. Second, and I cannot stress this enough because even I have found myself doing that, is that there is an unconscious bias, generally as humans and honestly as product managers, we wanna be right. So when you do research and when you develop the strategy or if you find yourself asking the questions that kind of prove yourself right. Even if you do customer research, you're asking questions that are biased because you have your own hypothesis to it. So again, I don't have a solution for it. It's just something to keep in mind that. I haven't perfected it. So it's just something that you have to keep reminding yourself that the solution is not to get it right. Not to validate what you think is right, although it would be good if you're right, honestly. But that's not the whole motive in the end. So try and avoid asking leading questions or just validating your research in a way that you think would lead to a hypothesis. And then third, tell a story or a vision that the user actually understands. We as different people in the company or as the tech people might have a vision that we understand. It's really possible that everyone in the company also understands the vision. But if it is not communicated correctly to the user or in a simple way, no matter how amazing a product you build, no user's gonna come and see it. No user's gonna come and come to your product and actually feel like, oh my, yeah, I wanna use it. So there is a way to think of your notestar which is from business perspective, but you also have to think it from user perspective. What is understandable for them? What is easy for them? Then get the basics. Honestly, I just again wanna stress more and more on this part that don't jump into things, spend more and more time in thinking what do you wanna achieve? And it doesn't have to be that your first intuition is right, that this is what you wanna do with your product. But that's honestly the difference between a good and a great product manager that you keep thinking about your vision. You keep thinking about your long-term goal instead of your everyday thing. Because let's say even if you start in a new company or in an existing one, there's so much going on. You're working with so many stakeholders. You're working on new feature requests. You're working with all the other disciples like sales, marketing. It's very easy to get boggled down and you don't have time to even think of it at a higher level. But I would still stress it that take that time out, doesn't matter if you have to compromise on something else because honestly no one else is gonna do it. So you have to make sure that you are spending time on making sure what the vision is. And think long-term. Think three months, six months, one year, honestly five years. Think any long-term that you think would be validated for the company. Communicate. Communicate is a word we often use for product managers that it is very important. Why is it important when you're thinking about your vision for the company? So, okay, you have to take ownership. Like how is it, in a typical company, when you're setting vision, how it works is that people in leadership or yes, you may as a product manager might be involved in setting up a vision for the company. But then as it boggles down and it goes down into different engineering or it goes down into different sales, marketing, people have their own understanding. And everybody is thinking of what they are doing instead of thinking of who actually owns the vision. And usually what people rely on, oh, somebody set the vision, they don't know who. It could be product, it could be leadership. But they have no idea. So honestly, you actually have to take ownership even if it's not given to you, which kind of with most of the things with product are, you don't have authority, but you still have to do the work. It's the same, you don't have ownership, but you still need to own it. Otherwise, you can never ask the hard questions to other people that why are we doing this. Always anchor stakeholders. This is also part of communication because like we talked about, the stakeholders, all of them have their own goals. Sales have a goal of like, sales may be running a promotion or marketing is running a campaign. Engineering is probably doing something that's related to tech debt or even building features. Everybody is doing their own thing, but you as a product manager have to have to keep repeating and keep getting that vision into everything that everyone is doing. Because honestly, you are the center of whatever is going on. You're working with all these disciples. If you don't pay attention to if the work is actually related or does it converge to the vision, nobody else is gonna do it. Third, reflect and repeat. I know I've said it multiple times that think about like, keep telling these people, keep telling everybody that this is a vision, this is a vision. And it can sound like, oh, but how am I gonna do that? And when is the right time to do it? Or is it even right to repeat it so many times? Honestly, yes. It's, there is no number of times you can not repeat it. You have to keep repeating it to everybody because people tend to forget. They wanna do what's right in short-term. They wanna achieve short-term goals. So you have to keep repeating that this is not our goal. This is the goal. If people are digressing, you need to kind of pull them back and get them aligned into what your vision is. And lastly, things will change. All of my criteria is saying that nothing's gonna change. You're fine, you built a vision, you're working and you're happily working with all the stakeholders. You have, you're communicating perfectly. You spent enough time building a vision. Honestly, you might have spent even two quarters building a vision. And then something changes. It's possible you have, we have less resourcing in the company or it's possible that the user mindset has changed or it's possible there's a competitor product in the market. Things will always change even if you've done all the things correctly that we talked about. So just be prepared for it. You'll always be compromising on speed, quality and cost. But even in this three, don't forget that you don't have to compromise on vision. You can compromise on speed, you can compromise on cost and other things. And as you work on more and more products, you kind of develop this intuition of what to trade off. But it shouldn't be your vision. It shouldn't be something just because of a small term or a short term benefit. It rate as your product grows. If something has changed, don't stick to what we already built or don't hang on to it sentimentally. Just let it go and kind of build it again or just improve it. And lastly, we talked a lot about that this is what the vision should be and this is what the qualitative should be. But don't forget the quantitative too. Even if I just go and say like for Airbnb, they want to build experiences. Yes, they do and that's a great vision. But how would that vision go down into metrics? Am I going to get these experiences through new users, through existing users, through converting new people or through retention? So even if you have a good vision, think of quantitative too, that to achieve that vision what's important.