THE NORTH STAR METRIC CHEAT SHEET
A North Star metric is the single measurable proxy your whole company uses to track progress toward its most important goal. Not the goal itself — the instrument. That distinction matters more than it sounds: the North Star goal is the company’s reason for being, the top-level outcome that should guide trade-offs without constant escalation. The metric is your best current attempt at measuring movement toward it. No metric is perfect, so review it regularly and place guardrail metrics around it so you know when it is drifting away from representing what your actual goal is. As I put it in the book: nothing mucks up a marketing programme more than being unclear on what success is.
Not to Be Confused With
📊 A list of KPIs
To run a team or project you should have a suite of Key Performance Indicators "KPIs". These are a range of metrics which tell you overall how things are going. A North Star Metric is the single metric they all are key performance indicators FOR. There's the north star metric and then there are indicators of performance. Don't muddle them up.
🎯 Objectives and Key Results - OKRs
OKRs SHOULD change every quarter. A North Star should survive years. When you step back the north star goal (objective) and metric (key result) should be very long term. You then need multiple projects each quarter with their own theories and results that track if you executed well that change regularly. So don't confuse the company's big, long term, strategic North Star with the tactical quarterly OKRs
The 5-Step Framework
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Define the company’s goal. What is the core outcome the business exists to achieve, and that all functions should align around? Not a number.
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Commit to that primary outcome. The North Star only works if competing goals are sacrificed so the North Star can succeed.
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Make it measurable. Use a concrete metric with an exact definition and clear counting window. This is the number.
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Ensure it’s actionable. Teams should explain how this week’s work moves the metric.
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Align the organization. Engineering, product, marketing, and support should optimize to the same signal.
Meta Example: MAU vs Revenue
At Meta, our North Star logic prioritized long-term active people, not short-term revenue spikes. While MySpace was running homepage takeovers, which made loads of money, 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 even though revenue mattered and our main competitor was doing it. We were able to do this without constant escalations because we were clear on the North Star (AND how to measure 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. This allowed us to do 2 things 1) test without having to escalate everything 2) rely on science and not gut feel, where we had a testable hypothesis.
Good Metric Tests
✅ Do this
- MAU with a clear quality threshold
- Completed transactions (not started checkouts)
- Active subscriptions with growth and retention guardrails
- Weekly active users completing key workflow
❌ Avoid this
- “Make Money” (too vague - revenue or profit?)
- “Increase engagement” without a definition
- Multiple North Stars by department vs nested goals that drive the top North Star
- Quarterly metric switching
Common Pitfalls
❌ Vanity Metrics
Page views, installs, or signups without value delivery can look good while business quality falls.
❌ Multiple North Stars
“Revenue + growth + engagement” sounds balanced but makes prioritization impossible.
❌ Changing Too Often
Constantly changing metrics prevents compounding learning, you are always starting again.
❌ Ignoring Trade-offs
A real North Star forces “no” decisions. If everything is priority, nothing is priority. Even if you have a clear North Star, if you fail to use it to make hard calls it may as well not exist.
Know Its Limits
One of the biggest criticisms I get is that I reduce everything to numbers. I think that's a strawman description of me so I want to be clear. SOME THINGS CAN'T BE MEASURED. If you have a North Star as an organization that can't be reduced to a metric don't do so.
You also shouldn't change goals or metrics frequently BUT you should sometimes change them. For example Monthly Active Users of Facebook would be a pretty terrible North Star metric for a company that runs WhatsApp, Instagram and Muse. So we updated to Monthly and then Daily Active People using the family of Meta Products. North Star Metrics shouldn't change often but they should change when appropriate.
Examples by Business Type
| Business | North Star Candidate | Why it works | Issues |
|---|---|---|---|
| E-commerce | Monthly transactions | Captures acquisition + repeat behavior | Lacks value of the transaction |
| SaaS | Weekly active users in key workflow | Reflects product value + retention quality | Could track very lightweight usage |
| Content platform | MAU consuming core content | Tracks habitual value delivery | Could track very lightweight usage |
| Marketplace | Gross merchandise value | Measures real economic activity | Doesn't track revenue or profit delivered to company |
| Social platform | Monthly active people | Strong signal for ecosystem utility | Lacks depth of engagement |
Quick Decision Filter
| Question | Action |
|---|---|
| Does this directly move our North Star? | ✅ Do it |
| Does this support it indirectly? | ⚖️ Do if capacity allows |
| Does this compete with it? | ❌ Don’t do it |
| We’re not sure yet? | 🧪 Test, measure, decide |