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| Criterion |  Product Discovery Smoke Test |  Growth North Star Metric |  Growth A/B Testing |  Growth Pirate Metrics AARRR |
|---|---|---|---|---|
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 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. | When two variants compete, discussions quickly decide by taste rather than effect. A/B Testing checks behavior under controlled conditions and separates real improvement from chance or expectation effects. | For products with complex usage paths, overall growth alone is too coarse to reveal bottlenecks. Pirate Metrics breaks the relationship with the product into consecutive stages and shows where the funnel actually leaks. |
Complexitydifferent | Low | Medium | High | Medium |
Timedifferent | 1-5 Tage | 1-2 h | 1-4 Wochen | 1-2 h Setup, laufend |
Participantsdifferent | Nutzertraffic | 3-8 | 1-6 | 2-8 |
Formatdifferent | Async | Workshop + async | Async | Workshop + async |
Outputdifferent | Interest Metrics, Conversion Signal, Learning Note | North Star metric, Input metric tree, Measurement cadence | Experiment results, Decision log, Learning summary | AARRR funnel, Metric baseline, Experiment backlog |
Tags1 shared | ValidationExperimentsDemandGrowth | GrowthMetricsAlignmentRetention | ExperimentsGrowthAnalyticsValidation | GrowthMetricsExperiments |