What is a North Star Metric?

What is aNorth Star Metric?

Drive Your Company’s Sustainable Growth With A North Star Metric

The North Star Metric

What Is A North Star Metric?


The North Star Metric is a powerful concept that has emerged in recent years from Silicon Valley companies with breakout growth.


It helps teams move beyond driving fleeting, surface-level growth to instead focus on generating long-term retained customer growth.


The North Star Metric is the single metric that best captures the core value that your product delivers to customers.


Optimizing your efforts to grow this metric is key to driving sustainable growth across your full customer base.


Finding your company’s North Star Metric



Airbnb’s North Star Metric is nights booked.This captures value delivered to both guests and hosts.



Facebook’s NSM is Daily Active Users.With more users on the Facebook platform the team is able to optimize everyone’s feed to deliver more value to users.


To uncover your North Star Metric, you must understand the value your most loyal customers get from using your product.



Then you should try to quantify this value in a single metric.



There may be more than one metric that works, but try to boil it down to a single NSM.

What Is A North Star Metric?Focusing Your Team with a North Star Metric




When growth is broken down to actual value delivered to customers, it becomes clear that this is not just a marketing responsibility.



Most teams within an organization play some role in delivering value to customers.

But product & customer support teams play a key role in ensuring prospects and customers experience the core value of a product.

Sales and marketing attract new customers into the funnel.



Coordinating these teams to work together on growth initiatives can be challenging without a metric that focuses them around a common goal.

What Is A North Star Metric?Using Your North Star Metric to Drive Growth



Once you understand your North Star Metric, it’s important to document the variables that work together to move this metric.



These variables include parts of the customer lifecycle like signups, new user activations & improving engagement/retention of users.

What Is A North Star Metric?By understanding the relationship of

interdependent variables & your current conversion rates, you’ll gain insights into potential high leverage opportunities for growing your NSM.


What is a North Star Metric?

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