The North Star Metric & Framework

What Is a North Star Metric?

A North Star Metric (NSM) is a single, company-wide metric that aligns your entire organisation around a common goal. It clearly measures the value your product or service delivers to customers. Popularised by growth expert Sean Ellis, the NSM acts as a compass, guiding your team towards your overarching mission.

Your North Star Metric should directly reflect your company's core purpose. For example, consider these mission statements from well-known companies:

Google - "Google's mission is to organise the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful." — Google | Our Approach

LinkedIn - "Connect the world's professionals to make them more productive and successful." — LinkedIn | About

The North Star Metric translates these missions into measurable outcomes. It is an output metric—meaning if your strategy and execution (inputs) are effective, you'll see this metric improve over time.

Why Use a North Star Metric?

Without a clear North Star Metric, teams often set goals based on their own departmental priorities. Product teams might prioritise new features, engineers might focus on technical improvements, and compliance teams might emphasise regulatory adherence. This fragmented approach leads to misalignment and suboptimal results.

A clearly defined North Star Metric solves this by:

• Aligning teams and departments around a shared goal

• Improving prioritisation and decision-making

• Clarifying communication and reducing ambiguity

• Ensuring everyone understands how their role contributes to overall success

Focus on Customer Value

The primary purpose of your North Star Metric is to measure the value your customers receive from your product or service. It should reflect the core benefit users experience and indicate their level of engagement and satisfaction.

As Lenny Rachitsky suggests, one effective way to identify your North Star Metric is to use Clayton Christensen's Jobs to be Done framework. Ask yourself, "What job are our customers hiring our product to do?" Your North Star Metric should clearly represent how effectively you're helping customers achieve this job.

What Makes a Good North Star Metric?

When choosing your North Star Metric, follow these best practices:

• Simple, clear, and easy to understand

• Expressed in plain language, leaving no room for ambiguity

• A leading indicator of future success, not a lagging indicator

• Directly tied to customer value and their end goals

• Applicable and valuable to all customers

Lenny Rachitsky summarises it well:

"Which metric, if it were to increase today, will accelerate your business flywheel?"

What Makes a Bad North Star Metric?

Not all metrics are suitable as a North Star. Common pitfalls include:

• Lagging indicators: Metrics like revenue reflect past performance rather than predicting future success. Your North Star should be forward-looking.

• Difficult to influence: Avoid metrics that teams can't directly impact or clearly understand how their role contributes.

• Not customer-centric: Metrics that don't reflect genuine customer value—such as revenue growth driven by price increases—can mislead your strategy.

• Generic metrics: Avoid overly broad metrics that don't uniquely represent your company's strategy or value proposition.

North Star Metric Examples

Here are examples of North Star Metrics from leading companies:

How Growth Method Helps You Define and Track Your North Star Metric

Identifying and tracking your North Star Metric is crucial for growth marketing teams. Growth Method is the only work management platform built specifically for growth marketers, helping you systematically define, prioritise, and measure your North Star Metric.

With Growth Method, you can:

• Align growth ideas and experiments directly to your North Star Metric

• Prioritise initiatives based on their potential impact on your North Star

• Accelerate experiment velocity and compound learnings to drive continuous improvement

• Integrate seamlessly with analytics platforms like Google Analytics, Amplitude, and MixPanel to track your North Star Metric in real-time

• Generate professional, detailed reports to clearly communicate progress to stakeholders

"We are on-track to deliver a 43% increase in inbound leads this year. There is no doubt the adoption of Growth Method is the primary driver behind these results." — Laura Perrott, Colt Technology Services

Growth Method simplifies your growth marketing workflow by combining ideation, experimentation, and analytics in one powerful platform. Book a call today to see how Growth Method can help your team define and achieve your North Star Metric: Book a call.

Additional Resources

• Choosing Your North Star Metric by Lenny Rachitsky

• Amplitude North Star Playbook

• The Three True-North Metrics that Your Product and Business Need by Itamar Gilad