A Guide to North Star Metrics
Understand how choosing a north star metric is crucial for guiding product strategy.
North star metrics
Choosing our product’s north star metric is an important part of aligning our product strategy with the realization of a key goal. It’s common for most products to be oriented toward one top metric–the north star metric–that the company is using to track progress. Choosing the wrong one, or not choosing one at all, can have confusing influences on how our teams are built, guided, and measured.
It can also have the unfortunate unintended consequence of not giving us a full picture of what’s happening on the customer side. This is particularly important with regard to the nascent AI/ML-native product because we want to make sure we’re getting an early signal on what’s working and what isn’t so that we can improve our product sooner.
Significance of a unified north star metric
This can also have a disruptive effect on how we choose to measure the success of our product overall. This is because the north star metric serves as our primary KPI. It doesn’t just unite our entire company around a common goal, but it also communicates how well the company as a whole is performing. Using it tells folks internally and externally whether things are going well overall (or not). If we’re doing it right, we will have one metric to serve as an elegant indicator of revenue, performance, and engagement. The benefits of doing this are threefold.
Impact of a unified north star metric
We’re not just giving our organization as a whole ...
