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| Criterion |  Product Strategy SMART Goals |  Growth North Star Metric |  Growth Flywheel |  Engineering Goal Question Metric |
|---|---|---|---|---|
Purposedifferent | When goals are formulated too generally, it brings measurability, direction, and timing into shape. It prevents intentions from staying without clear verification. | 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. | 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. | 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. |
Complexitydifferent | Low | Medium | Medium | Medium |
Timedifferent | 15-30 min | 1-2 h | 60-120 min | 90-180 min |
Participantsdifferent | 1-8 | 3-8 | 3-8 | 3-6 |
Formatdifferent | Workshop + async | Workshop + async | Workshop | Workshop |
Outputdifferent | SMART Goal, Measurement Note, Deadline | North Star metric, Input metric tree, Measurement cadence | Flywheel Map, Friction Points, Growth Levers, Experiment Backlog | GQM Table, Metric Profiles |
Tagsno overlap | GoalsPlanningMeasurementAlignment | GrowthMetricsAlignmentRetention | GrowthRetentionConversion | MetricsMeasurementEngineeringAlignment |