Yes, I think you’re onto something! What you describe is akin to continuous discovery developed by Teresa Torres, which you could use to iterate your customer snapshot.

That North Star definition would definitely affect how work is shaped, so that’s a good fit with Shape Up.

I try to frame the outcome from the customer’s point of view. A customer snapshot is a “product” for your company, not the customer. A snapshot may be super useful and necessary to shape the marketing work, but a customer could care less about personas, snapshots, profiles and so forth. Those are our terms as marketers, not theirs as consumers.

Like you said, what customers care about is progress, and the seemingly random journey they take to become aware of your “marketing.” So I usually think of the customer’s “product” as a set of capabilities or “features” a customer could not do six weeks ago but is marketing they have shown previous demand for. That previously measured demand would definitely show up in that snapshot (if I used them) and inform future marketing.

Not sure I answered your question well, but hope that helps.

Shape Up is a super-deep well of process management, and I encourage you to read Ryan’s book (if you haven’t already) and join the official forum and post questions there. Thanks for reading the article and responding. Good luck!