May 5, 2025 - 10 minutes read
Product Management
SaaS product teams need clear direction. This guide explores essential goal-setting frameworks like OKR, North Star Metric, HEART & AARRR. Understand why they're vital for SaaS success—from boosting retention to powering product-led growth. We compare their pros, cons & ideal uses, helping you select the right framework to connect strategy with execution, avoid the 'build trap' & achieve measurable impact.
AUTHOR
Sybren van Putten
Sr. Product Consultant
May 5, 2025 - 10 minutes read
In our recent article on the use of metrics, Connecting Product Effort to Business Success we highlighted the importance of measuring the impact of product development. Knowing if your efforts generate results is crucial, but measurement alone doesn't set the course. Especially in SaaS (software-as-a-service), where consistent value creation is key, a proactive approach to steering is key.
SaaS product teams must ensure that development effort consistently leads to measurable business results and genuine customer value. Among our clients, I see this as one of the main challenges these companies face. Strategy is often in place, although formalization and articulation leave room for improvement. However, strategy alone does not resonate in your operational teams. The answer to this challenge lies, for a large part at least, in strategically guiding the team’s efforts by setting clear goals, aligned with strategy, and consistently tracking progress toward achieving them. Here, goal-setting frameworks are of great help. These frameworks act as navigation tools, providing out-of-the-box structure, focus, and alignment, helping you translate abstract strategies into actionable plans that, unlike strategy only, do resonate in the operation. They define success and help prioritize what needs to happen to achieve it.
This article explores several goal-setting frameworks that are commonly used in SaaS Product Management: OKR, North Star Metric, HEART, AARRR Pirate Metrics , Impact Mapping, and NCT. Each offers a unique lens, but all aim for the same goal: to stimulate targeted effort. Selecting and implementing them effectively, however, requires careful consideration and often a great deal of guidance - a nod to the complexity where expertise truly matters.
The unique context of a SaaS product team makes structured goal-setting a necessity, not a luxury. This dynamic stems from its subscription-based model, where customer retention is as crucial as acquisition, demanding alignment across teams and frequent updates and improvements. Unlike the traditional software’s focus on projects and one-time sales, SaaS product teams thrive when continuously delivering value to retain and expand customers.
Goal-setting also shapes team culture. The trend is shifting focus from the delivery of features (output) to the achievement of results (outcomes). This cultural shift has a significant impact on SaaS success, and choosing the proper framework will support your organization in adopting this new mindset.
So, in essence, these frameworks bridge the gap between high-level company vision and strategy and the product team's daily tasks. They prevent siloed efforts and the development of features disconnected from business objectives (a pitfall that I observed occurring at many of my clients, all with limited goal-setting practices). Without a framework, SaaS development often becomes reactive and misaligned, ultimately hindering growth and wasting already limited resources.
Let's examine the most relevant frameworks for SaaS product management.
A popular goal-setting method developed by Intel and Google that encourages (stretch) goals using ambitious objectives (the what) and 3-5 measurable Key Results (the how). Transparency and regular check-ins are vital.
The NSM framework defines your product’s true north by focusing on the North Star Metric; the single metric best representing customer value. A good NSM not only reflects customer value, but also predicts business success (leading indicator) and is influenceable. The framework adds 3 to 5 directly influenceable inputs that drive the NSM.
The HEART framework was developed by Google UX researchers to measure and improve user experience quality across five dimensions, for a holistic UX view: Happiness, Engagement, Adoption, Retention and Task success.
The AARRR framework focuses on five customer lifecycle stages: Acquisition, Activation, Retention, Referral, and Revenue. By tracking users through a sequential funnel, focused on measurable conversion metrics per stage, it helps optimize the growth funnel.
Impact Mapping is a visual planning technique (rather than a framework) that connects goals (the what) to actors (who), desired impacts (behavior changes / how), and deliverables (features or the what). By doing so, it ultimately connects features to goals and ensures they contribute to achieving them. Note that it focuses on outcomes rather than outputs.
NCT (Narrative, Commitments, Tasks) is a modern framework emphasizing and starting with strategic context (the narrative) alongside measurable commitments and action-oriented tasks, in a quarterly cadence. Effectively addresses perceived OKR shortcomings.
While you should never introduce complexity from the start and therefore begin lean and small, these frameworks often work best in combination. For example: a team may use OKRs for high-level goals, AARRR to diagnose a funnel issue within a key result and HEART to evaluate the UX impact of the solution.
There's no single best framework. The optimal choice depends on the - often unique - dynamic of your organization. This also implies that switching to another framework may be beneficial when your organization matures and its context changes. So far, we haven’t seen dogmatic adherence pay off.
Instead, you should consider at least these six factors:
The selection process itself forces valuable strategic discussion. It's not a one-off choice; regularly evaluate your framework's suitability to avoid blind spots.
Framework | Focus | Metric Type | Cadence | Best for | Complexity |
OKR | Alignment, Focus, Ambitious goals | Qualitative Objectives, Quantitative KRs | Quarterly | Aligning cross-functional teams and driving specific measurable results | Medium |
North Star Metric | Value delivery, Long-term growth | One leading metric (NSM), Input metrics | Continuous | Product-led growth companies, Focus on the core growth engine, Strategic focus on customer value | High |
HEART | User Experience quality | Qualitative & Quantitative UX metrics | Continuous / project | Improving product UX, Linking UX to retention/satisfaction, Data-driven UX design | Medium- High |
Pirate Metrics / AARRR | Growth Funnel Optimization | Conversion metrics per phase | Continuous / weekly | Startups, PLG, Identifying & solving conversion bottlenecks, Growth hacking | Low-medium |
Impact Mapping | Strategy to feature alignment, Outcome-focus | No direct metrics | Project / initiatief | Preventing the build-trap, Stakeholder communication, Product discovery | Medium |
NCT | Strategic Context (the why), Flexible execution | Narratives, Commitments (metrics/deliverables) | Quarterly | Ambiguous projects, 0-1 products, Teams needing deep context, OKR alternative | Medium |
As you ponder about Product and explore the potential within your product management practices, remember that you're not navigating these waters alone. We, the 25Friday team, are dedicated to guiding tech companies through the maze of product strategy. With our expertise in consultancy and nearshore development, we partner with organisations to fine-tune their product vision, align their teams, and craft strategies that resonate in today’s dynamic market. Reach out to us, and let's work together to turn your product challenges into successful ventures that stand out in the tech landscape.
Choose Product Goal Framework
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Drive SaaS Business Results
AARRR Pirate Metrics
North Star Metric SaaS
OKR for SaaS Products
SaaS Product Management Goals
Steer Product Development
SaaS Goal Setting Frameworks
Product Management
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Connecting Product Effort to Business Success
As a product manager in a SaaS scale-up, you’re constantly shipping features, improving user experience, and optimizing workflows. But how often do you step back and ask: is this actually moving the business forward?
As a Product Management consultant, I often find product teams celebrate launches as if shipping features is the goal. But releasing stuff is different from making an impact. Without a clear connection between product effort and business success, teams risk prioritizing the wrong initiatives, struggling to get stakeholder buy-in, and ultimately becoming a cost center rather than the company’s driver of growth.
Sybren van Putten
Sr. Product Consultant
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3 min read
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Many SaaS businesses deal with an often challenging partnership: the collaboration between their product and sales teams. This dynamic was the topic of an event we hosted earlier this year: “Product & Sales: A Winning Partnership?”, where we gathered product management professionals and sales representatives to exchange insights and strategies for stronger collaboration and overcoming friction. The discussions illuminated the obstacles and opportunities in aligning these two functions, offering a roadmap for achieving shared success. In this blog, we provide you with the 5 key takeaways.
Sybren van Putten
Sr. Product Consultant