by Alex Ho

(Image source: vector_corp )

Table of Contents

North Star Metric Intro

Backgrounds of creating a North Star Metric for product teams

1. While building a product, we might use multiple metrics to measure things such as
   1. How serious a problem is
   2. Estimate the impact
   3. Design the success metrics in an experiments
   4. Monitor the performance of a product or business
2. We can easily list down a bunch of metrics that are important to our product and business, but the long list might overwhelm our team and in the end we still don’t know what to focus to help the product growth.
3. Customers pay money to us (directly or indirectly, depends on our business types) if they feel they get value from our product or service. The money is the revenue of our product or business.

What is the North Star Metric (NSM)

NSM

1. Represents the number that we should keep improving in order to achieve the long-term growth **for our product / service / business.
2. Reflects the values we created for our customers and is tied to our business growth.
3. Should be able to cover both user engagement and monetization initiatives of our product
4. Can drive some other relevant secondary metrics (often called One Metric That Matters, OMTM ) which help the product grow as well.