Your team is busier than ever. Engineering is shipping features, marketing is generating leads, and sales is hitting its quota. Every dashboard is green. But are you all rowing in the same direction? Is all this frantic activity actually creating long-term, sustainable value for your customers and, in turn, your business? How do you know that today’s hustle will lead to tomorrow’s growth? Without a single, shared point of focus, even the most productive teams can drift off course. What you need is a guiding light. You need a North Star Metric.

Just as sailors for centuries have used Polaris—the North Star—to navigate vast oceans, modern product-led companies use a North Star Metric to guide their growth strategy. It’s a single, powerful concept that cuts through the noise of conflicting priorities and vanity metrics. This guide will take you from a beginner’s understanding to a pro-level ability to define, implement, and rally your company around a North Star Metric. You’ll learn the framework, the famous examples, and the practical steps to find the one metric that truly matters for your product.

Definition & Origin: A Guiding Light for Growth

While the concept of focusing on a key metric is not new, the term “North Star Metric” was popularized by Sean Ellis, the Silicon Valley entrepreneur who also coined the term “growth hacking.” Ellis championed the idea that to achieve sustainable, non-linear growth, companies needed to orient their entire efforts around a single metric that reflected their unique value proposition to customers.

The analogy is intentional and powerful. Polaris, the North Star, is a fixed point in the night sky. It doesn’t tell you how to navigate the immediate obstacles—the storms or the reefs—but it ensures that after every maneuver, you are still pointing in the right direction. Similarly, a North Star Metric doesn’t dictate daily tasks, but it provides a constant, unifying purpose that ensures all the team’s efforts contribute to the same long-term goal.

Core Benefits: Why Your Company Needs a North Star

Adopting a North Star Metric is a transformative exercise that offers profound benefits:

1. Clarity and Focus: It cuts through departmental silos and competing priorities. When a new feature or marketing campaign is proposed, the team can ask a simple question: “Will this move our North Star Metric?” This creates a powerful filter for decision-making.
2. Customer-Centricity: A true North Star Metric is fundamentally linked to customer success. By focusing on the NSM, you are inherently focusing on delivering more value to your users, shifting the company’s mindset from internal outputs (e.g., “features shipped”) to external outcomes (e.g., “customer problems solved”).
3. Predictive Power: A good NSM is a leading indicator of success, not a lagging one. While revenue is a result of past actions, a rising NSM predicts future revenue. It gives you a real-time pulse on the health of your business.
4. Clear Accountability: It provides an unambiguous measure of the product team’s impact. It makes success tangible and progress visible to the entire organization, from the board room to the individual contributor.

How It Works: The North Star Framework & Finding Your Metric

A North Star Metric doesn’t exist in a vacuum. The most successful companies use the broader North Star Framework. This framework consists of the NSM itself and a handful of key Input Metrics that directly influence it. The input metrics are the levers your team can pull day-to-day.

Visual Asset Prompt: A diagram of the North Star Framework. It should be a pyramid or a starburst with the “North Star Metric” at the center/top. Radiating out from it are 3-5 “Input Metrics,” each with a brief description (e.g., Breadth, Depth, Frequency).

Here is a step-by-step guide to finding your North Star and its supporting inputs.

Step 1: Re-discover Your Product’s Core Value

Before you can measure value, you must understand it. Get your team in a room and answer these fundamental questions:

• What is the “aha!” moment for our users?
• What critical problem do we solve for them? (Think in terms of Jobs To Be Done).
• What makes our most loyal, retained users successful?

Step 2: Brainstorm Candidate Metrics

Based on your core value, brainstorm potential North Star Metrics. For a collaboration tool like Miro, candidates might be “Number of collaborative boards created,” “Number of users invited to a board,” or “Time spent collaborating on boards.”

Step 3: Validate Your Metric with a Checklist

Not all metrics are created equal. Run your top candidates through this checklist, championed by experts at Amplitude and Mixpanel. A true North Star Metric should:

• [✔] Express Value: Does the metric measure the value your customers receive?
• [✔] Represent Engagement: Does it reflect the activity of your most loyal users?
• [✔] Be a Leading Indicator: Does it predict future success, or just report on past results? (Revenue is a lagging indicator).
• [✔] Be Actionable: Can your team influence it?
• [✔] Be Understandable: Is it simple enough for everyone in the company to grasp?
• [✔] Not Be a Vanity Metric: Does it reflect real value, or just make you feel good (e.g., total signups)?

Step 4: Define Your Key Input Metrics

Once you’ve settled on your NSM, identify the 3-5 key activities that drive it. These input metrics often fall into categories of breadth (more users), depth (more intense usage), frequency (more frequent usage), and efficiency.

Let’s use Spotify as an example:

• North Star Metric: “Time Spent Listening”
• Input Metrics:
  • Time per session (Depth)
  • Number of sessions per week (Frequency)
  • Number of new subscriptions (Breadth)
  • Number of playlists created (Efficiency/Engagement)

The product teams at Spotify don’t come to work thinking “How do we increase Time Spent Listening?” They think, “How do we get users to create more playlists?” or “How do we improve our recommendation engine to increase session length?” They work on the inputs to move the North Star.

Real-World Examples of Great North Star Metrics

Studying the NSMs of successful companies is the best way to understand the concept.

Company	North Star Metric	Why It Works
Airbnb	Nights Booked	Directly measures the core value exchange between hosts and guests. More nights booked means more value for both sides and predicts future revenue.
Spotify	Time Spent Listening	Captures user engagement and satisfaction. A user spending more time on the platform is less likely to churn and is more likely to see value in a paid subscription.
Slack	Messages Sent	Reflects active team collaboration. A team sending messages is getting real value. (An even better version is teams that reach 2,000 sent messages, a key retention indicator).
Facebook	Monthly Active Users (MAU)	An early, powerful NSM that focused the company on growth and engagement. It measures the network effect, which is the core value of a social platform.
Amplitude	Weekly Querying Users (WQU)	Measures how many users are getting value from their core analytics feature each week. This is highly specific to their product’s “aha!” moment.

North Star Metric vs. OMTM (One Metric That Matters)

It’s easy to confuse the North Star Metric with the “One Metric That Matters” (OMTM). They are related but serve different purposes.

• North Star Metric (NSM): A long-term, company-wide metric that represents core customer value. It is stable and rarely changes. It’s the destination on the map.
• One Metric That Matters (OMTM): A short-term, team-level metric that focuses on a specific goal within a limited timeframe (e.g., a single quarter or sprint). It’s the next turn on your GPS.

An OMTM should always be a driver of the NSM. For example, a product team at Spotify might set an OMTM for the quarter to “increase the number of playlists created by 10%,” because they know that is a key input metric for their overall North Star, “Time Spent Listening.”

Interlinking Prompt: Link “OMTM” to a more detailed guide on goal-setting frameworks like OKRs (Objectives and Key Results), as OMTMs are often used as Key Results.

Common Mistakes to Avoid When Choosing Your NSM

Choosing the wrong North Star can be worse than having none at all. Avoid these common traps:

• Choosing a Vanity Metric: Metrics like “Total Registered Users” or “App Downloads” look impressive but say nothing about customer value or engagement.
• Picking a Lagging Indicator: Revenue is the most common mistake. Revenue is a result of past value creation, not a predictor of future success. You can hit revenue goals in the short term while delivering a poor experience that kills long-term growth.
• Making it Too Complex: If your team can’t remember the metric or explain it easily, it will fail to provide clarity and focus.
• Not Connecting it to Customer Value: If your metric can go up while the customer experience gets worse, it’s the wrong metric.
• Changing it Too Often: The North Star should be a long-term guide. While it can evolve, changing it every quarter will create confusion and whiplash.

Conclusion

In a world of endless data and competing priorities, focus is a superpower. The North Star Metric provides that focus. It is more than just a number on a dashboard; it is a declaration of what matters most to your company: creating value for your customers. It’s a powerful tool for alignment, a compass for decision-making, and a leading indicator of the sustainable, long-term growth that every business craves.

The process of defining your North Star Metric is a journey of discovery in itself. It forces you to have critical conversations about who your customers are, what problems you solve for them, and how you measure that success. Once you find it, hold it up high. Let it guide your strategy, your product roadmap, and your daily work. By keeping your eyes fixed on that single, guiding light, you ensure that every step you take is a step in the right direction.

FAQ’s