North Star Playbook
The guide to discovering your product’s North Star
The North Star checklist and statement exercise
Though the elements of the North Star Framework are straightforward, even the best teams can get derailed during planning—especially when engaged in passionate, product growth-related discussions!
We’ve put together a checklist and statement exercise to help ensure your North Star Metric is effective and aligned with the overall goals of the North Star Framework.
Want to know if you’re on track to successfully implement the North Star Framework? Ask yourself the following questions about your North Star Metric:
- Does it express customer value?
- Does it represent your vision and strategy?
- Is it a of success?
- Is it actionable?
- Is it understandable to non-technical partners?
- Is it measurable?
- It’s not a ?
1. Does your North Star express customer value?
A good North Star Metric represents what customers value about your product.
When teams fail to connect their North Star Metric to customer value, they risk leading their business down the wrong path. That’s why metrics like “Daily Active Users” or “Registered Users” are not optimal North Star Metrics because they say nothing about what your customers value.
2. Does your North Star represent your vision and strategy?
If you’ve built a strong North Star, someone should be able to read it and understand your company’s product strategy and your vision—at least at a high level.
“Each strategy we had at Netflix—from our personalization strategy to our theory that a simpler experience would improve retention—had a very specific metric that helped us to evaluate if the strategy was valid or not. If the strategy moved the metric, we knew we were on the right path. If we failed to move the metric, we moved on to the next idea. Identifying these metrics took a lot of the politics and ambiguity out of which strategies were succeeding or not.”
We generally recommend that your North Star is unique to your business, expressing your company’s and your product’s strategy and mission. However, some businesses have a mission that’s not particularly differentiated and in turn, a North Star that doesn’t feel unique—and that’s okay.
3. Is your North Star a leading indicator of success?
Some metrics tell you what has already happened to your business; these are. Other metrics predict what will happen to your business; these are leading indicators.
A good North Star Metric is a leading indicator of business success. Metrics like “” or “” aren’t optimal North Star Metrics because they tell you what happened in the past rather than predicting future results.
Ideally, your North Star Metric predicts medium- to long-term sustainable growth.
For example, if you’re running a subscription-based product, you might consider annual revenue from subscribers your key metric, but it’s a lagging indicator. Instead, a subscription-based business could identify characteristics that correlate with a user who is likely to renew their subscription and then build a North Star around that. If a user frequently runs a certain report showing the status of their customers, does that correlate to renewing a subscription? Perhaps that’s a hint that your North Star may be related to the information in that report.
4. Is your North Star actionable?
Your North Star should be something you believe you can influence or change. This means it shouldn’t measure a broader market trend or reflect real-world realities that would be true whether your product existed or not.
For example, a team building a human resources app to improve companies’ employee experience and retention might consider “Customers’ Lifelong Employees” an aspirational North Star Metric, but broader trends in the economy and labor market will make it difficult for the team to influence this metric. Instead, they might consider metrics they have more direct control over, such as the number of benefit programs an employee enrolls in or the number of career development goals created in the app.
5. Is your North Star understandable to non-technical partners?
The best North Stars are framed in plain language. It shouldn’t be so abstract that you can’t easily explain it to non-technical people or express it without jargon. A simple test: As you develop your North Star, describe it to someone who knows your business but lacks deep technical knowledge. If it’s a good metric, they’ll be able to quickly understand it without much trouble.
6. Is your North Star measurable?
If you’ll never be able to configure your products and processes to collect the data you need to track and communicate the North Star Metric, it’s not a good metric.
For example, the team responsible for a digital platform that produces thought-provoking short films might love the idea of increasing the number of people who silently reflect on the films as they lie in bed at night. However, it would be difficult to design processes and products that discern customers' thoughts while lying in bed.
So a better North Star Metric might be customers sharing insights in a community discussion—something that can be instrumented and tracked. In this example, the number of customers sharing their insights, a measurable metric, is a proxy metric for the number of customers pondering the films, which is tougher to collect.
However, be careful not to fall into the trap of thinking that your North Star must be something you can measure with your current data and tools. In many cases, with just some light and investment in new tools, or even just improvements in communication and relationships, you’ll be able to measure what you want.
Also, though measurable is an important characteristic for the North Star, don’t eliminate ideas right out of the gate based on this factor—there will be plenty of time for that later.
7. Your North Star is not a vanity metric
When your North Star changes, you want to be confident that the change is meaningful and valuable. Though some metrics might make you feel good about your performance in the short term, they don’t always actually tell you about your product’s long-term success. Be wary of choosing these for your North Star Metric.
Example Vanity Metrics:
- Daily Active Users (DAU)
- Ad impressions
- Number of downloads
- Page views
- Registered users
- Story points delivered
- Time on page
Your team might get the warm fuzzies knowing that your inquiry page experienced record-breaking activity or your team had the best development velocity ever this month, those metrics won’t actually tell you about your product’s success and shouldn’t be used as your North Star Metric.
Instead, use the following to ensure you’re not veering into vanity territory and flag areas of concern.
A delivery app had considered potential North Star Metrics like “People Opening the App,” “Scheduled Deliveries,” or “Early Deliveries.” But there was a problem: These metrics masked the real drivers of and .
Their product team conducted customer research and concluded that the deliveries customers valued most were neither early nor late. Instead, these transactions simply had no issues—what the team ultimately called “Happy Deliveries.” The company found that Happy Deliveries correlate strongly with retention, which drives customer lifetime value. Thus, Happy Deliveries became their North Star Metric.
What the North Star is not
As you consider what makes a good North Star, also recognize what the North Star Framework is not. Though it can work alongside and inform many of these models and concepts, your North Star Framework is not:
- Your roadmap
- Your software development process
- A prioritization framework
- A goal-setting framework, like objectives and key results () —although the North Star can be a strong foundation upon which to base goals
- Management by objectives (MBOs)
- A one-time quick fix
Even John, a long-time North Star Framework supporter, cautions thinking that your North Star is going to solve all your problems. “The North Star Framework is powerful—but it’s not a silver bullet.”
North Star statement exercise
Once your team has thought through what makes a good and bad North Star, their brains will undoubtedly start focusing on metrics and numbers.
However, before shifting gears, we recommend spending a bit more time thinking about your North Star qualitatively—rather than jumping to the quantitative—to ensure your team doesn’t lose sight of your overall purpose.
One thing we’ve observed is that if someone cannot explain the North Star Framework qualitatively, they will not be able to explain it quantitatively.
The North Star Framework Statement exercise helps focus your teams on ideas before metrics.
This worksheet helps your teams fill in the blanks to create your North Star statement.
Completing this worksheet is a top-down exercise because you go from the statement and functions to more granular roadmap stuff like measurement options.
“We’ve done entire workshops just chipping away at this statement,” John explains. “Because it’s that important for people to understand and get the words right before starting to focus on the numbers.”
To help your teams understand this concept, below you’ll find a completed example for a DIY project app.
But a word of caution: Don’t treat the Statement Exercise as a bunch of boxes your team just fills out. Try not to rush through it. Encourage introspection and fine-tune the statement as a team.
With the fundamentals under your belt you might be feeling ready to get to work. Use our guide to run your own workshop.