Flagship course
North-Star Architecture for SaaS Teams
An 11-week desk for product, CS, and finance partners who must agree on one metric that would actually fall if the product got worse. Taught from Bangkok with Thai and regional B2B examples.
Informational fee: THB 48,500 per seat on Calibration Bench, or included in Nodecore Circle. See Fees. There is no online checkout.
What you should be able to do afterwards
- Write a north-star definition with numerator, denominator, time window, and the user behaviour it is supposed to represent.
- Reject proxies that move when marketing spend moves, even if the chart looks healthy.
- Connect activation quality (first value, not first login) to early retention without pretending correlation is causation.
- Split expansion into seats, usage, and services so NRR can be discussed without theatre.
- Deliver a weekly board paragraph: one number, two caveats, source, and window.
Modules
-
The metric that can fail
Audit your current “one number.” We pressure-test it against a simple rule: if engineering shipped a worse experience this month, would the metric notice? Most north-stars fail this in week one.
-
Activation as a quality bar
Define first value for implementation-heavy products. Timestamp it. Compare D7 retained-after-value against D7 retained-after-login. The gap is usually the real story.
-
Cohorts small enough to keep
Build a weekly cohort table that fits in a document, not only in a BI bookmark. Acquisition week versus activation week. You will retire at least one vanity cohort.
-
Expansion without invoice noise
Thai B2B books often mix seats, true-ups, and professional services. We separate them, then rewrite NRR so finance and product argue about the same stack.
-
Leading signs before logo churn
Admin silence, unused seats, and support density. Not a “health score” product pitch — a short list of signals your CS lead already sees and currently ignores in the weekly slide.
-
The board paragraph
One number. Two caveats. Source and window. You practise reading it aloud. If it needs a footnote slide, it is not finished.
-
Critique studio
Weeks 9–11 are live critiques of your working definitions. Eight seats. If your warehouse is still a CSV export, you will be asked to say so early; we will not pretend SQL modelling is in scope.
Instructor
Araya Chanthara
Faculty lead. Previously head of insights at a Bangkok B2B workspace vendor, where she spent four years explaining why “weekly active companies” rose every time customer success sent more check-in emails. She now edits Metric Nodecore’s KPI Atlas and teaches the flagship from the Bangkapi desk.
Informational fees
Calibration Bench seat for this flagship: THB 48,500, billed by invoice after a desk conversation. Circle members include the flagship in the annual desk fee listed on Fees. Materials and live critiques are included. Travel, if you sit in person, is not. We do not process payments on this site.
Reviews from this syllabus
Module three forced us to stop mixing acquisition-week and activation-week cohorts. Our “month two retention” had been a comforting fiction. The new table is uglier and, unfortunately, more believed.
Araya would not let us keep professional services inside expansion. Sales hated that week. Finance quietly thanked her. I still think the homework load in weeks 5–6 is heavier than advertised.
Questions we actually get
Do I need a modern data warehouse?
You need some durable store of events and invoices. A warehouse helps. This programme does not cover SQL warehouse modelling, dbt project layout, or Looker / Metabase administration. Teams whose “analytics” is still a weekly spreadsheet export will spend the first fortnight catching up, and we will say so on the intro call rather than pretend otherwise.
Is this only for self-serve PLG products?
No. Most of our Bangkok room is implementation-heavy B2B: onboarding includes humans, billing includes seats and services, and activation is not a single click. Self-serve teams are welcome; they simply finish some modules faster.
Can one person attend for a whole company?
Yes, and it is common. The homework still asks you to interview a CS lead and a finance partner at your firm. If those people will not take a thirty-minute call, the north-star will not survive after week eleven.
How do I request a seat?
There is no checkout. Write to the desk with your role, product motion, and the metric that currently embarrasses you. We reply on weekdays before 16:00 ICT.