I noted it in the interview with the Defrag Tools show, but I’ll make a proper Microspeak for it. Today’s term is North star.
This term rose quickly to prominence in October 2015. My research suggests that it had been simmering below the surface for about a year. For example, here’s an isolated citation from May 2015:
The best you can do is paint a compelling picture of an improved world (your north star), and plan the long journey to it.
This citation is interesting because it seems to give a definition for “north star”: It means “a compelling picture of an improved world”.
The term has become wildly popular of late at Microsoft. I guess a major executive used the term recently, so now it’s suddenly the cool thing to say.
We had a team meeting a little while ago. One of the agenda items was “Longer term North star topics”, which was itself rather intriguing. During the meeting, I noted¹ the following uses of the term:
There may be changes along the way, but your north star of the feature is intact.
We have to decide where we want to go as a north star .
I raised my hand. “What do you mean by north star? Because if you follow the north star, you end up at the north pole, and not where you actually want to go.”
The speaker seemed a bit frustrated by this question. “Who is this idiot who doesn’t know what a north star is? Certainly this person hasn’t been in all the meetings I’ve been in, where people are saying ‘north star’ all over the place.”
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