What is a North Star metric
The one metric that best captures the core value your product delivers to customers. It’s the number that should drive your weekly leadership meeting — not because it replaces all other metrics, but because movement in the North Star usually correlates with movement in everything else: retention, revenue, engagement.
A good North Star metric is leading (it moves before revenue does), actionable (teams can influence it directly), and reflective of customer value (not just internal activity). For Slack, it’s messages sent. For Shopify, it’s GMV. For a B2B SaaS, it might be weekly active accounts or net revenue retention.
Read the full framework and all 14 candidate metrics in the methodology.
Why you need one
Without a North Star, teams optimize for their own metrics in isolation — marketing chases signups, product chases engagement, sales chases revenue. Each team hits its number while the company stalls. A shared North Star aligns these efforts around a single definition of progress.
But picking the wrong one is worse than having none. A vanity metric sends the entire company in the wrong direction. If your North Star is total signups, you’ll optimize for acquisition at the expense of activation and retention — and you won’t notice until churn catches up.
How this tool works
The tool runs through three phases designed to narrow from 14 candidates to one recommendation:
1. Context — 7 questions
Your business model, stage, primary revenue driver, customer type, and current priorities. These inputs determine which candidate metrics are relevant and which are eliminated.
2. Hypothesis — 1 question
You propose your current North Star or let the tool suggest one based on the context. This anchors the pressure test to a specific metric rather than testing all 14 abstractly.
3. Pressure Test — 4 questions
Stress-tests the hypothesis against common failure modes: Is it a lagging indicator? Is it actionable by your team? Does it actually capture customer value? Can it be gamed without improving the product? The algorithm scores the 14 candidates and recommends the best fit.
What you get
A shareable brief containing everything you need to align your team:
- Your recommended North Star metric and why it fits your business
- 2–3 guardrail metrics to prevent blind spots
- Trade-offs to discuss with your team
- A suggested review cadence
The brief is designed to be shared in a leadership meeting or board deck — it includes enough context for someone who wasn’t in the room to follow the reasoning.
See the full framework
Read about all 14 candidate metrics, how the scoring works, and when to revisit your North Star.
Read the methodology