How a North Star Helps Develop Better Products

By Anisa Holmes

With more than 930,000 digital subscribers, and a 1.9 million person readership, the Financial Times is a publisher that likens itself more to subscription-based digital companies like Netflix or Spotify, than traditional news publishers. This is because, as Gadi Lahav, Head of Product for FT UK, explains, in order to reach their goal of one million subscribers, they need to promote “consumption on a habitual basis”.

And while most companies use several key metrics in order to formulate strategies and boost revenues, the Financial Times takes a more elegant and straightforward approach called “The North Star”. The north star is a simple, easy to understand metric that has consistent, proven correlation with their real goal. Using just one metric allows the FT to bypass the common pitfall of metric overload, where the sheer variety of metrics makes it difficult to really measure change. For the FT, the north star is an engagement score made up of recency, frequency, and volume (RFV), and it correlates with their cancellation rate.

Using the north star as their guiding force, FT works to improve their retention through a variety of means. Using RFV, they have been able to prioritize distinct user journeys and track habits. They also created a tool called MyFT, which serves as an internal Twitter with which to follow specific topics and receive notifications. This tool increased their engagement by 86% and was the number one driver for engagement over the past three years. Additionally, Lahav explained the FT’s discovery of the importance of the website’s loading speed: “We are obsessed with speed because we calculated that one second is worth millions annually”. Making their website’s loading time just a few seconds faster has had a greater financial impact than any feature besides myFT.

Overall, Lahav recommends for every company who wants to boost subscriptions to find a simple, clear metric with proven correlation to their goals to drive their business strategy and product development.