Pipedrive’s North Star: Aligning a data-driven mindset with a customer-obsessed culture

In business, the North Star represents the overall goal or purpose of a product or service that customers are very fond of. Usually, it defines the strategic approach that the company uses to manage, optimize, and maximize its success story through exceptional product or service delivery. In company culture, understanding the North Star can amplify positive employee experience and a sense of belonging in the workplace. In this article, Almonzer Eskandar and Brandon Whitman explore the journey of re-establishing Pipedrive’s North Star and how this has impacted team collaboration.

A North Star is a single critical metric representing our core purpose as an organization. Pipedrive’s North Star is to help small businesses grow. It’s the interface between our product (what we’ve already built), our strategy for the future (what we plan to build for customers), and business growth (the financial impact of our decisions and efforts). It means the North Star acts as a leading indicator, helping to define the relationship between customer problems our product teams solve and sustainable, long-term, product-led business growth. Simply put, it’s a way to ensure all our teams at Pipedrive align on a common customer-centric goal and are objective about how well we tackle this goal.

So, how does this conceptual approach reflect in what we do at Pipedrive? In this article, we’ll explore how Pipedrive utilizes a data-driven, customer-focused approach to improve its product and ensure customer satisfaction.

Finding Pipedrive’s North Star

Running a successful small business is incredibly challenging, particularly in today’s economic climate. At Pipedrive, we aim to make this easier by providing outstanding product experiences to help our small business customers grow. But organizations often only measure their success on slow/lagging metrics (like churn) or entirely business-focused metrics (like ARR), meaning they tend to ignore their mission and customers’ needs. We decided we could do better.

“As a product analytics team, we paid a lot of attention to internal business metrics like churn and revenue, but there was a certain disconnect between customer-centricity and the impact on our mission of helping small businesses grow. We believe that if we can understand, quantify, and measure the core benefits customers get from Pipedrive, we can massively improve our product experience. If our customers profit from using Pipedrive, we can also deliver better outcomes for Pipedrive as a business. That’s where the North Star really lies,” explains Brandon Whitman, VP of Product Analytics at Pipedrive.

“We have highly autonomous teams at Pipedrive, and this has always been part of our secret sauce. However, it was clear that we needed to pair autonomy with focus to achieve our business goals. Having a clear framework on how to measure our progress toward this vision was a clear next step to align all our efforts moving forward without hindering teams’ ability to make decisions on their own,” says Almonzer Eskandar, Group Product Manager at Pipedrive.

Over the last year, Pipedrive has started using the North Star and Customer Benefit Metrics (CBMs) framework to ensure we’re both impact-focused and customer-obsessed. The key goal is to align the company with our primary mission: helping small businesses grow. By definition, the CBMs are the essential benefits customers get from using the product. Additionally, these metrics are closely tied to observable behaviors and will ultimately define our North Star. They’re quantitative measures that help us evaluate how effectively Pipedrive delivers value to our customers. Since they directly indicate the benefits our customers gain from using Pipedrive, we view them as a reflection of customer success and overall satisfaction.

Similar to how nearly every business would measure their growth in business metrics, like revenue, over time, we want to understand, measure, and assess how much we can improve the core benefits our customers derive from Pipedrive.

Pipedrive’s formula for success: data x analytics x determination

At Pipedrive, finding and defining the North Star started with engaging and collaborating with colleagues across different R&D departments. The North Star shouldn’t be a solely theoretical concept. Instead, we aimed to combine numerous years of experience and customer exposure to find the right formula for it.

Here’s our success formula for solving Pipedrive customers’ most critical problems:

• Create a definition of a customer-centric metric (for example, as Pipedrive is a sales CRM, for us, it was “deals won”). This could be something like “total number of deals across all customers and all users won using Pipedrive each month.”
• Explore existing data to determine whether we can provide a quantitative view of the defined metric. If we can, we can continue to explore this data. If we can’t, we need to decide if there are alternatives or if accessing this metric warrants further investment. In the example of “deals won” as a metric, are we currently instrumenting how a customer can win a deal in Pipedrive? Do we have readily available access to this data?
• Provide some basic descriptive analytics around this new metric. How does this metric trend over time? Do we see differences in this metric across our most important customer segments? Do we see correlations between this metric and our most important business KPIs? For example, do customers who win more deals churn at lower rates?
• Experiment and determine causality. Once a metric has been defined and quantified and has gathered sufficient evidence of its value to customers, we want to drive improvements in that metric.

“The best part of the North Star framework is that it gives us the right lens to think about what we’re doing and why. We don’t launch a random feature, hoping it’ll drive more revenue. Instead, we’re incredibly focused on what our customers require to grow and succeed. We can think about it in terms of defining success and being clear about how that looks for the customers and the company. When we add a new feature to an existing one, we know for a fact that it’s making customers’ lives better, improving their odds of business success, and ultimately, helping them grow. Pipedrive also accomplishes its mission,” explains Brandon.

Brandon Whitman, VP of Product Analytics at Pipedrive

Everybody on the team wins from the North Star, not only customers

Different metrics come into play at different stages of a company’s growth cycle. This means that without maintaining a customer-centric view and focusing solely on business metrics, it’s easy to lose track of what’s truly important. By adopting the North Star framework, Pipedrive kept its customer-centric approach when building the product and even doubled down on it.

Pipedrive employees have also benefited from the North Star. Foremost, the framework has clarified how their work brings value to end users, which translates into a high sense of purpose. Our recent internal e-NPS survey showed that employees’ understanding of customer problems and the impact this has on end users was rated higher than in previous years. This indicates that the North Star metric and CBMs framework really work.

“As a Group Product Manager, I couldn’t be happier about the North Star and Customer Benefit Metrics framework we have in place. I can now translate our work into measurable impact on the customer and the business, giving the team and myself a clear purpose behind our work. This leads to higher team engagement and a much faster decision-making process,” says Almonzer about the framework’s benefits.

Almonzer Eskandar, a Group Product Manager at Pipedrive

The main benefits of the North Star framework include:

• Aligned teams. Having clear North Star metrics helps everyone in the organization align on what matters the most when making decisions about new products or features, ensuring we solve the most impactful customer problems. This ensures we all move in the same direction.
• Autonomous teams. While the framework gives direction on what benefits we should bring to our customers (the “why”), it doesn’t dictate the “how” and the “what,” leaving it for product teams to discover the biggest customer problems in their areas and the best ways to solve them.
• Speaking the same language. Using the customer benefit as a benchmark, product teams can find it easier to communicate product decisions on where we should invest our resources. Clarifying how such investments impact ROI on key customer benefits helps stakeholders decide which projects need the most backing based on their relative impact.
• Customer problems over business problems. Part of being customer-obsessed is that now we have a clear link between customer needs and our business growth. This empowers product teams to start with customer problems, focusing on the root cause of these problems before tackling them.

About the Authors:

Brandon Whitman: A previous VP of Product Analytics at Pipedrive Pipedrive.

Almonzer Eskandar: A Group Product Manager at Pipedrive.

The article was edited by Maie-Liisa Sildnik a Senior PR Manager at Pipedrive.