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| Criterion |  Growth North Star Metric |  Engineering Goal Question Metric |  Architecture ARID (Active Reviews for Intermediate Designs) |
|---|---|---|---|
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. | Helps clarify technical problems, hypotheses, and next steps in concrete terms. It breaks a technical problem into testable parts. The result is captured as a GQM table and metric briefs. | 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. |
Complexitysame | Medium | Medium | Medium |
Timedifferent | 1-2 h | 90-180 min | 2–4 h review as a planning range; preparation and evaluation additional |
Participantsdifferent | 3-8 | 3-6 | Designers, developers as users, and facilitation |
Formatdifferent | Workshop + async | Workshop | Workshop + async |
Outputdifferent | North Star metric, Input metric tree, Measurement cadence | GQM Table, Metric Profiles | Prioritized development tasks, Jointly produced code or pseudocode, Observed difficulties and open design questions, Proposed design revisions |
Tagsno overlap | GrowthMetricsAlignmentRetention | MetricsMeasurementEngineeringAlignment | ArchitectureEngineeringFeedbackValidationTasks |
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