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| Criterion |  Product Discovery Smoke Test |  Product Strategy Counter Metrics |  Growth North Star Metric |  Engineering Goal Question Metric |
|---|---|---|---|---|
Purposedifferent | When demand only needs to be roughly verified, it tests interest with minimal effort. It measures whether people would take a next step at all. | When a headline metric could mask side effects, it adds guardrail signals against unwanted outcomes. It connects customer value, product logic, and decision priorities. The result is captured as a counter-metric list and guardrail definitions. | 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. |
Complexitydifferent | Low | Low | Medium | Medium |
Timedifferent | 1-5 Tage | 30-60 min | 1-2 h | 90-180 min |
Participantsdifferent | Nutzertraffic | 2-6 | 3-8 | 3-6 |
Formatdifferent | Async | Workshop + async | Workshop + async | Workshop |
Outputdifferent | Interest Metrics, Conversion Signal, Learning Note | Counter Metric List, Guardrail Definitions | North Star metric, Input metric tree, Measurement cadence | GQM Table, Metric Profiles |
Tagsno overlap | ValidationExperimentsDemandGrowth | MetricsMeasurementStrategyExperiments | GrowthMetricsAlignmentRetention | MetricsMeasurementEngineeringAlignment |