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| Criterion |  Product Discovery Smoke Test |  Growth North Star Metric |  Growth Pirate Metrics AARRR |  Product Strategy Counter Metrics |
|---|---|---|---|---|
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. | 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. | 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. |
Complexitydifferent | Low | Medium | Medium | Low |
Timedifferent | 1-5 Tage | 1-2 h | 1-2 h Setup, laufend | 30-60 min |
Participantsdifferent | Nutzertraffic | 3-8 | 2-8 | 2-6 |
Formatdifferent | Async | Workshop + async | Workshop + async | Workshop + async |
Outputdifferent | Interest Metrics, Conversion Signal, Learning Note | North Star metric, Input metric tree, Measurement cadence | AARRR funnel, Metric baseline, Experiment backlog | Counter Metric List, Guardrail Definitions |
Tagsno overlap | ValidationExperimentsDemandGrowth | GrowthMetricsAlignmentRetention | GrowthMetricsExperiments | MetricsMeasurementStrategyExperiments |