Your North Star goal and your North Star metric are not the same thing. The goal is the company’s reason for being — the top-level outcome that should guide trade-offs without constant escalation. The biggest threat to that goal is usually your second priority, not your tenth, because that’s where prioritization is actually hard. The metric is your best current instrument for tracking progress toward the goal, not the goal itself. Because no metric is perfect, review it regularly — if the proxy drifts, decisions drift with it.

1. Define the company’s goal. What is the core outcome the business exists to achieve, and that all functions should align around?
2. Commit to that primary outcome. The North Star only works if competing goals are sacrificed so the North Star can succeed.
3. Make it measurable. Use a concrete metric with an exact definition and clear counting window.
4. Ensure it’s actionable. Teams should explain how this week’s work moves the metric.
5. Align the organization. Engineering, product, marketing, and support should optimize to the same signal.

At Meta, our North Star logic prioritized long-term active people, not short-term revenue spikes. While MySpace was running homepage takeovers, our revenue team wanted to run them too. But we knew that interruptive takeovers would hurt MAU by degrading the user journey, so we made the call not to do them — without constant escalation — even though revenue mattered and our main competitor was doing it. That is the power of an empowered North Star goal: it makes trade-offs understandable and decisions faster.

In other cases, the decision was less obvious and we had to measure whether a change would hurt growth before deciding. That’s where the North Star metric was useful — not as the goal itself, but as a decision instrument.