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| Criterion |  Growth North Star Metric |  Architecture ARID (Active Reviews for Intermediate Designs) |  Growth Flywheel |
|---|---|---|---|
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. | Growth often breaks down where a reinforcing mechanism builds up too much friction. A Flywheel shows the cycle of value, repetition, and reinforcement meant to sustain growth. |
Complexitysame | Medium | Medium | Medium |
Timedifferent | 1-2 h | 2–4 h review as a planning range; preparation and evaluation additional | 60-120 min |
Participantsdifferent | 3-8 | Designers, developers as users, and facilitation | 3-8 |
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 | Flywheel Map, Friction Points, Growth Levers, Experiment Backlog |
Tagsno overlap | GrowthMetricsAlignmentRetention | ArchitectureEngineeringFeedbackValidationTasks | GrowthRetentionConversion |
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