north-star-metric

To define a North Star Metric, classify your product's primary game (Attention, Transaction, or Productivity), generate 2-3 metric candidates, and score them against six criteria including customer value and strategic clarity to select the strongest KPI.

A good North Star Metric serves as a leading indicator of customer value and is hard to game, while deliberately bad candidates lack strategic clarity or are easily manipulated, exposing deltas to help teams validate the strongest choice.

Evaluate candidate KPIs by scoring each against six criteria: customer value, strategic clarity, leading indicator, actionable, measurable, and hard to game, selecting the North Star Metric with the most favorable trade-offs.

Connect input metrics to your North Star Metric by defining Breadth, Depth, Frequency, and Efficiency inputs, creating a scalable measurement framework that tracks progress and links directly to the primary value KPI.

Use a North Star Metric framework when you need to align teams around a single value-driven metric, determine whether your product plays an Attention, Transaction, or Productivity game, and set up dashboards to monitor growth.

Tracking a North Star Metric requires planning data collection and building dashboards to monitor the NSM and related input KPIs, ensuring the scalable measurement framework captures Breadth, Depth, Frequency, and Efficiency data.