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| Criterion |  Growth North Star Metric |  Architecture ARID (Active Reviews for Intermediate Designs) |  Facilitation Alignment Mapping |
|---|---|---|---|
Purposedifferent | When product teams track many metrics, the view of the actual customer outcome easily gets lost. A North Star Metric bundles growth, usage, and value contribution into one signal that makes the system's direction visible. | ARID examines how well developers can work with a technical design. It focuses on a part of the system that can still be revised, between the architecture overview and the detailed specification. | When several people work toward one goal but hold different mental maps, Alignment Mapping makes the discrepancies visible. It arranges goals, assumptions, and priorities so shared direction becomes verifiable. |
Complexitysame | Medium | Medium | Medium |
Timedifferent | 1-2 h | 2–4 h review as a planning range; preparation and evaluation additional | 1-2 h |
Participantsdifferent | 3-8 | Designers, developers as users, and facilitation | 4-12 |
Formatdifferent | Workshop + async | Workshop + async | Workshop |
Outputdifferent | North Star metric, Input metric tree, Measurement cadence | Prioritized development tasks, Jointly produced code or pseudocode, Observed difficulties and open design questions, Proposed design revisions | Alignment Map, Open Issues, Decision Questions |
Tagsno overlap | GrowthMetricsAlignmentRetention | ArchitectureEngineeringFeedbackValidationTasks | AlignmentStakeholdersStrategyFacilitation |
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