Hi Star Radar readers,

Over the past 16 years, Star has embarked on an incredible journey of growth, adapting to market dynamics, technological advancements, and – most importantly – our clients' evolving needs. As businesses today seek digital solutions to enhance both operational excellence and customer experiences, we are here to navigate the complexities of digital transformation, bridging the gap between strategy and execution to create lasting impact. You can read more about our founders’ perspectives on Star’s next chapter as a global technology consultancy and how to unlock enterprise value in this new era of digital transformation.

I’m also excited to share that Star Radar now has a LinkedIn edition where we share more practical insights on how technology drives value creation and empowers CTOs and technology leaders to make a meaningful impact on their organizations and end users.

Now, let’s dive into my take of the month: North Star metrics – a singular focus for aligning teams, driving strategic decisions, and tracking progress on your organization’s digital transformation journey.

Finding the North Star in your transformation journey

In the early 1960s, Japan implemented universal health coverage and enacted the Act on Social Welfare for the Elderly. At that time, the country had ~150 centenarians (people over 100 years old). 60 years later, that number sits at over 95,000, and Japan boasts the world’s highest proportion of centenarians in its population.

This amazing feat made me think about the role of North Star metrics in measuring strategic progress, specifically in the context of transformation. Rather than relying on traditional healthcare metrics, Japan identified a single, powerful demographic indicator that effectively captured the systemic changes taking place in society as a result of their initiatives.

Knowing your endgame is obviously the first step to successful transformation. But a critical step is to articulate a metric that helps you assess whether you’re making progress towards that endgame.

North Star metrics are a familiar concept in product management, where it's used to articulate product success in a single metric, to help keep product teams focused on creating customer value. 

North Star metrics can also be incredibly valuable in transformation journeys, though when applying this concept in a transformation context it needs to take on a different form:

• Avoid traditional business metrics – it’s tempting to measure the impact of transformation in familiar metrics, such as revenue growth. But transformation is not about growing the status quo, it’s about changing the status quo. Challenge yourself to define transformative progress so that operating business as usual doesn’t lead to a false sense of accomplishment.
• Embrace imperfection – transformations are long and messy journeys, and it’s impossible to perfectly capture their progress even with multiple metrics. The aim is to understand directional progress, not absolute outcomes. Accept that you will not find a perfect metric that captures all of the outcomes of your transformation.
• Make it accessible – your North Star metric will help rally your organization around your transformation. If they can’t relate to or easily understand the metric, it loses its value in highlighting what you’re working towards. Define transformative progress in a way that everyone can get behind, and so it doesn’t take a degree in financial or data analysis to understand what the metric truly represents.

Transformations are complex, but understanding its progress should be simple. A single, crisply articulated North Star metric can help guide your organization’s focus, when the complexity of day-to-day execution makes it hard to see the forest for the trees.