What Is True North?
True North is Coastal’s strategic service that aligns your business goals, people, process, and technology into a prioritized and actionable roadmap, so every investment delivers real results. Put simply, it’s the strategic step that comes after you’ve decided to invest in a major platform, and before anyone starts building on it.
The name comes from navigation. A compass needle points to magnetic north, which is slightly offset from true north on the map. Skilled navigators learn to correct for the gap. True North does the same for a technology investment: it makes sure the work points at the outcome you care about before you pick up speed.
What True North Covers
True North is a strategic engagement focused on planning and alignment. It guides teams in deciding what to prioritize and why each initiative matters to the business. This approach gives you a high-level read on your technology landscape: systems, data, integrations, and how ready the environment is for the work ahead. The hands-on technical work, including requirements gathering, use-case design, and architecture, comes afterward during implementation, informed by what True North produces.
True North works across your existing platforms, including Salesforce, Snowflake, and other environments. It’s a roadmap built to be executed, measured, and adapted as the business changes. It stays useful through implementation and well past go-live.
What True North Does: A Four-Step Approach
A True North engagement runs in four steps, and engagements typically take 4–8 weeks. Here’s what happens in each.
Assess: Understand where you are today. We start with executive vision sessions, stakeholder interviews, and technical and data scans to get an honest picture of your current state. The interviews dig into how teams actually work and where processes break down, and they start building the organizational buy-in that makes adoption stick once the build begins.
Ideate: Surface the opportunities. Through capability assessments, end-user surveys, and design-thinking workshops, we lay out the full range of opportunities worth considering, including ones leadership hadn’t yet put on the table. The surveys and workshops bring in the people closest to the daily work, who often spot friction and openings that aren’t visible from the top.
Distill: Focus on what matters most. This is where the list gets shorter and sharper. Each opportunity is scored for business impact, aligned across functions, and signed off by your executives. Only the work with a real business case behind it moves forward.
Sequence: Build the roadmap. We turn the prioritized initiatives into a plan with phase estimates and milestones, ordered so each piece sets up the next. The sequence also reflects what the organization can realistically take on, so the rollout never outpaces the teams who have to adopt each change.
How True North Connects Investment to Outcomes: The CARE Framework
The CARE framework is the mechanism that connects a dollar spent to a result delivered.
Every initiative that wants a place on a True North roadmap has to earn it against one of four kinds of business impact:
- Cost savings: efficiency gains across people and processes
- Acquisition: new customer growth or sales acceleration
- Retention: reduced churn and increased loyalty
- Expansion: incremental revenue through cross-sell and upsell
CARE works as a filter. Every proposed initiative has to make a clear case for how it drives one of these outcomes; if it can’t, it doesn’t make the roadmap. That turns a vague “we should probably do this” into a decision you can defend: here’s the impact, and here’s where it sits in the sequence.
What You Walk Away With
A True North engagement produces four concrete things:
- Full stakeholder alignment: your leaders signed off on the same priorities, success metrics, and path forward.
- Business-impact scoring: each initiative is mapped with estimated ROI, ready to present to leadership.
- A technical and data assessment: a clear read on your systems, data quality, integrations, and readiness for the work ahead.
- A prioritized roadmap: typically a 12-month plan with clear milestones, sequenced by business impact.
So when you move into implementation, you move in aligned and with a plan you can act on.
Why True North Matters
A roadmap built around outcomes produces better results. Gartner has found that technology leaders who use business-outcome-focused technology roadmaps see roughly a 20% increase in employee and customer satisfaction, which Gartner attributes to better alignment of technology with what the business and its customers need.
That alignment is as much about people and process as it is about technology. For every initiative, True North asks why it matters to the business, who will have to work differently to make it succeed, and how its impact will be measured. A system can go live exactly as specified and still deliver little value if the people who use it were never clear on those answers. So change management is built into the plan from day one, and the teams who’ll live with the system help shape it.
The results also tend to last, because Coastal stays accountable from start to finish. The same team that builds the roadmap can stay on to implement it and measure whether it delivers results.
The point of True North is straightforward: make sure the build is aimed at the right things, and the organization is ready for it, before it starts.
What True North Looks Like in Practice
One of the world’s top medical schools set out to generate $140 million in continuing-education revenue over three years. Achieving that goal was an uphill battle. Enrollment improvements, data cleanup, and communication work were all underway, but each initiative was owned by different teams with different priorities, and no one could draw a straight line from the daily work to the $140M number.
A single True North engagement closed that gap. Coastal brought the leadership team together around a single definition of success, aligning executives, program owners, and operational leads to build a prioritized, multi-cloud roadmap in which every initiative was measured against that target. The scattered efforts became a focused set of moves, each tied to a specific kind of business impact:
- Make it effortless for learners to register, pay, and enroll, so fewer prospects fell away on the way in. (Acquisition)
- Share data across teams to end duplicate work and give everyone a single view of the learner. (Cost savings)
- Use segmentation to re-engage past learners and bring them back for more. (Retention)
- Enable multi-course purchasing to grow revenue per learner. (Expansion)
Just as important, the work was then sequenced so each piece set up the next. That meant the institution could move into implementation without re-litigating priorities or guessing what to build first.
The payoff: a set of disconnected projects became one growth strategy, with a roadmap the entire leadership team stood behind and a direct, traceable line to $140 million.
Is True North Right for You?
True North tends to fit best when one of these sounds familiar:
- You’re planning a major technology investment, and your stakeholders are still working from different definitions of success.
- You’ve just made a major platform or technology purchase and want a clear plan before the build begins.
- You have an underperforming technology investment, and you want to get more value from it.
If any of those sound familiar, the next step is simple: a straightforward conversation about where you are and where you want to go.
