Is a company 'north star' a substantive strategic tool or vacuous language?

Sri Batchu · published Jul 26, 2023

There is no perfect North Star metric for growth; the right one sits between metrics highly correlated with business outcomes and metrics close enough to the team's actions that they can move them and see fast feedback

Pure lead-count goals get gamed with small, low-quality leads, while contribution-profit goals are too far from the team's sphere of influence and have feedback loops so slow the team becomes demotivated

Scope: depends on business model; needs guardrails

9:45 20Growth: Biggest Growth Lessons from Instacart and Opendoor, Why 70% of Growth Experiments Should Fail and How to Fail Fast, How to Hire a Growth Team; Secrets and Tips & Why Operator Investors WIll be the Best Investors in 10 Years with Sri Batchu @ Ram

Geoff Charles · published Dec 6, 2023

Teams should be goaled on leading metrics like customers on a new product or features shipped in a segment, not lagging metrics like revenue, market share or NPS

Lagging metrics don't make it clear to a team how it can actually change them

Scope: you still want to win on the lagging metric

28:54 20VC: Ramp's Product Playbook: How To Hire Product Teams, How to Run Sprints, How to Increase Product Velocity, When and How to Go Multi-Product with Geoff Charles, VP Product @ Ramp

Geoff Charles · published Dec 6, 2023

The test of a good team metric is whether the team can move it within a two-week sprint; if it can't, it shouldn't be part of their goals

Highly lagging indicators like a stock price reflect work from twelve months ago, so teams working hard see no movement and conclude their work isn't valuable

Scope: agrees with value-based metrics but prioritizes correlation with today's work

29:50 20VC: Ramp's Product Playbook: How To Hire Product Teams, How to Run Sprints, How to Increase Product Velocity, When and How to Go Multi-Product with Geoff Charles, VP Product @ Ramp

Chandra Narayanan · published Mar 13, 2024

A metric is only a good north star if the team actually has levers to move it; a metric you cannot move is a bad metric

Facebook's ads team targeted advertiser growth rather than revenue because they had tangible levers on advertiser count but not on revenue

Scope: maintains DAU/MAU were movable at Facebook through multiple paths, so output-style metrics can still qualify

21:38 20Growth: Top Five Lessons from Leading Analytics at Facebook and Data Science at Sequoia Capital, The Two Skills Required to do Analytics Well, The Three Types of Execs within Companies and When and How to Hire for Growth with Chandra Narayanan

David Lieb · published Sep 21, 2022

Monthly active user counts are a flattering metric that hides whether users actually wanted the product, and founders reach for them because the charts look good.

At Bump, with 150m installs, a huge share of sessions were under one second long — users were accidentally tapping the blue icon instead of Facebook — so roughly 20% of usage was accidental despite the aggregate numbers looking excellent.

23:49 20 Product: The No 1 Metric You Need To Look at When Building Product | Why the Best in Product Have No Domain Experience | Why You Should Not Hire From Incumbents & The Difference Between Good vs Great PMs with David Lieb, Visiting Group Partner @ Y Comb

Adam Grenier · published Mar 15, 2023

Defaulting to DAUs or MAUs is wrong for most products; the North Star should be rooted in the natural frequency of the customer problem being solved

Most products aren't actually used daily, weekly or monthly — e.g. a Masterclass customer takes maybe three classes a year — so frequency-based metrics misrepresent engagement and retention

Scope: applies to products whose underlying problem doesn't recur daily/weekly

22:44 20Growth: The Inside Story to Uber's Hypergrowth Scaling; What Worked, What Did Not? | Spending a $1BN Budget at Uber and Why China was the Wild West for Uber | Why You Do Not Need a Growth Team with Adam Grenier

Harry Stebbings · published May 31, 2024

A Northstar should be tied to a specific user behaviour (sheets created, tables shared) rather than a generic engagement metric like weekly active users

Generic activity metrics misread products with naturally lower usage cadence — an accounting tool used at month-end doesn't mean customers aren't getting value

16:15 20Growth: The Six Channels Startups Need to Dominate to Grow, Why the Best Growth Talent Never Comes from Marketing or Product, Who and How to Hire Growth Leaders and Teams and Why in a World of AI, Growth is More Science than Art with Matt Lerner

Harry Stebbings · published Aug 29, 2025

First principles thinking and frameworks are hollow buzzwords, and 'alignment' is a tell that the speaker doesn't have the answer

People who know the answer are incredibly specific and support arguments with data; people who don't fall back on culture and alignment talk

39:43 20Product: Why Most CPOs are Bad | Why You Do Not Need PMs in a World of AI | Why the Design Stage is Dead and How to Use Vibe Coding to Replace It | The Three Roles All Founders End Up Firing on Repeat with Jason James @ Tezi

Harry Stebbings · published Dec 12, 2025

The 'north star' framing is fluffy and vacuous, much like talk of company culture

Scope: stated as personal opinion, not as criticism of Wiz

34:25 20Growth: How Wiz Built a $30BN Brand in Enterprise | What Worked vs What Was a Mega Failure: Lessons Learned | Why Marketers Make the Worst CMOs & What To Look for in Growth with Raaz Herzberg

Hila Qu · published Jan 18, 2023

A North Star metric must sit at the intersection of the business objective, users getting value from the product, and the company's current strategic direction

Ignoring user value means the revenue may not last, and the right metric depends on the company's focus at that stage

37:34 20Growth: When To Make Your First Growth Hire? How To Structure the Hiring Process for Growth? Five Core Things the Best Growth Hires Do in the First Week? What to Expect New Growth Hires to Achieve in the First 30 and 90 Days with Hila Qu, Growth Advisor

Matt Lerner · published May 31, 2024

A growth model should start from a Northstar metric that increments when you deliver value to customers, encompasses the whole funnel, and is stress-tested so it can't be gamed without delivering real value

14:52 20Growth: The Six Channels Startups Need to Dominate to Grow, Why the Best Growth Talent Never Comes from Marketing or Product, Who and How to Hire Growth Leaders and Teams and Why in a World of AI, Growth is More Science than Art with Matt Lerner

Harry Stebbings · published Jul 26, 2023

One of the biggest problems founders have is choosing the wrong North Star metric — often revenue, which is an output rather than an input

Revenue is an output of the work, not something a team can directly act on

9:30 20Growth: Biggest Growth Lessons from Instacart and Opendoor, Why 70% of Growth Experiments Should Fail and How to Fail Fast, How to Hire a Growth Team; Secrets and Tips & Why Operator Investors WIll be the Best Investors in 10 Years with Sri Batchu @ Ram

Matt Lerner · published May 31, 2024

The biggest and most common Northstar mistake is choosing revenue or profit as the Northstar metric

There are too many ways to grow revenue without delivering customer value (password-sharing crackdowns, bundles, upsells) and none of those drive hypergrowth; and asking six functional heads how to make money yields six strategies pulling in six directions, while a value metric like weekly active users gives them one productive conversation

Scope: most acute at early stage, but applies at any stage

15:16 20Growth: The Six Channels Startups Need to Dominate to Grow, Why the Best Growth Talent Never Comes from Marketing or Product, Who and How to Hire Growth Leaders and Teams and Why in a World of AI, Growth is More Science than Art with Matt Lerner

Mike Duboe · published Feb 15, 2023 · hedged

A company's North Star metric should change across its lifetime — for Harry's show, from guests above an audience threshold, to a guest retention metric, to converting listeners into guests

Different stages of the growth model make different points in the loop the binding constraint

Scope: applied speculatively to Harry's specific business

18:45 20Growth: Top Five Growth Lessons Scaling Stitchfix to IPO, How to Master the Art of Paid Marketing, Why CAC/LTV is a BS Metric & How To Use Payback Period as an Alternative to CAC/LTV with Mike Duboe, Partner @ Greylock

Chandra Narayanan · published Mar 13, 2024

North Star metrics should be expected to change over time, for three reasons: the market shifts, the world changes around you, or you simply picked the wrong metric initially

Facebook's shift from web to mobile made MAU the wrong goal metric; and getting to the right metric often takes many iterations

22:36 20Growth: Top Five Lessons from Leading Analytics at Facebook and Data Science at Sequoia Capital, The Two Skills Required to do Analytics Well, The Three Types of Execs within Companies and When and How to Hire for Growth with Chandra Narayanan

David Lieb · published Sep 21, 2022

The single most important decision behind Google Photos' success was defining a narrow, explicit mission — to be the home of the world's memories — including what the team would explicitly not build.

Being clear it was not a social network let them select the right team, shed people who wanted to build social, and attract people all-in on the mission; ten years on everyone on the team still knows the mission by heart.

9:06 20 Product: The No 1 Metric You Need To Look at When Building Product | Why the Best in Product Have No Domain Experience | Why You Should Not Hire From Incumbents & The Difference Between Good vs Great PMs with David Lieb, Visiting Group Partner @ Y Comb

Raaz Herzberg · published Dec 12, 2025

A north star isn't fluffy: it is precise clarity on exactly who you sell to and what problem you solve for them, which defines what is in and out of scope

Knowing she sells to security and development teams and helps them secure every application they build and run in the cloud makes scope decisions unambiguous

34:39 20Growth: How Wiz Built a $30BN Brand in Enterprise | What Worked vs What Was a Mega Failure: Lessons Learned | Why Marketers Make the Worst CMOs & What To Look for in Growth with Raaz Herzberg

Gokul Rajaram · published Aug 14, 2017

The North Star Metric alone is not sufficient: growing it in an unconstrained or unsustainable way can harm the company's long-term growth even as it benefits short-term numbers.

Principled NSM growth benefits customers, employees and shareholders, but unsustainable growth leads to challenging situations and inhibits long-term growth.

source The second most important metric for every company

Gokul Rajaram · published Aug 14, 2017

Even a well-chosen NSM will drive behaviors that maximize short-term gains over long-term value creation if the company places no constraints on how the metric may be achieved or defines what long-term value means.

In the e-commerce, media and enterprise examples the NSM was solid and well-meaning, but the absence of constraints led knowingly or unknowingly to short-term-maximizing behavior.

source The second most important metric for every company

Paul Graham · published Sep 2012

Founders should use growth as a compass to make nearly every decision they face.

Startups are so hard you can't succeed while aimed off to the side; if you get growth, everything else tends to fall into place.

Scope: for people starting startups

source Startup = Growth

Paul Graham · published Sep 2012

Growth rate is the measure of a startup and the one number every founder should always know.

Without knowing it you don't know whether you're doing well or badly.

source Startup = Growth

Paul Graham · published Sep 2012

Optimizing for growth can itself discover startup ideas, and founders should follow the growth constraint wherever it leads rather than clinging to an initial vision.

Growth acts as evolutionary pressure — anything growing consistently at 10% a week is almost certainly a better idea than the one you started with — much as a scientist does better following truth than his wishes.

source Startup = Growth

Paul Graham · published Sep 2012 · hedged

Launching something small and using growth rate as evolutionary pressure is so valuable that any company able to start that way probably should.

It works as evolutionary pressure on the idea, though it isn't available to companies like one building a new database.

Scope: only for startups that can launch early

source Startup = Growth

Hila Qu · published Jan 18, 2023

A North Star metric should rarely change, while focus-area input metrics should be re-evaluated quarterly with the team

If the North Star changes frequently it isn't a North Star; input metrics need reassessment on whether enough progress was made to move on

39:04 North star should rarely change while input metrics are reassessed quarterly

Chandra Narayanan · published Mar 13, 2024

A north star metric must be derived from the company's mission

Facebook's mission of making the world open and connected implied getting the largest number of people onto the product, which made MAU the natural metric

21:05 North star metric must be derived from the companys mission

Shreyas Doshi · published Aug 3, 2022

The North Star metric is the most misunderstood metric concept — it is not a panacea and finding the perfect NSM is unnecessary

Perfect metrics are often very hard to measure, so chasing one means spending time working on a metric instead of shipping product and improving the usage and adoption metrics that actually feed the North Star

10:24 Chasing a perfect north star metric is unnecessary and wastes effort versus shipping

Shreyas Doshi · published Aug 3, 2022

The founder must stay deeply involved in defining and tracking the North Star metric, even if they delegate parts of the work to a CPO or someone else

It is a top-level metric that targets get set against and that should be tracked regularly, so it remains ultimately the founder's responsibility

13:04 Founder must personally own the north star metric even when delegating other work

David Lieb · published Sep 21, 2022 · hedged

Incumbent companies' new product teams at best have a mission written down; they almost certainly don't revisit and reaffirm it daily with the team.

10:27 Mission becomes vacuous unless actively reinforced daily

Geoff Charles · published Dec 6, 2023

Each team should have one or at most two goals, aggregated to three or four at the organization level, and a good goal is clear, achievable, measurable and motivational

'Put a man on the moon by this date' is the model: it has an outcome, it's measurable, and it's motivational

30:47 Good goals are clear achievable measurable and motivational like moonshot framing

Geoff Charles · published Dec 6, 2023

A goal repeated across many quarters is a bad goal, and vision or mission statements should never be used as goals

Repetition makes the goal unmotivating

31:11 Repeated or mission level goals fail to motivate teams

Matt Lerner · published May 31, 2024

The right way to define a Northstar is to ask how a normal customer would behave if they absolutely loved your product, count how many behave that way, and track it in cohorts over time

16:33 Northstar defined via customer love behavior tracked in cohorts

Matt Lerner · published May 31, 2024

A Northstar should be changed only when you learn your assumption about which customer behaviour drives retention was wrong, or when you spawn a genuinely separate business line

If expense-loggers don't retain but quarterly VAT filers do, the metric and its cadence must follow the retaining behaviour; and separate business lines have separate value mechanics — Amazon's 1996 Northstar was repeat purchases, but AWS's is something like server usage

18:06 Northstar should change only when the retention behavior assumption is wrong or a genuinely new business line emerges

Alex Schultz · published Sep 5, 2025

A north star is a goal, not a metric; the metric only describes the goal and will always be an imperfect description of it

Clarity on what you're trying to achieve comes first, and any metric is by nature broken as a description of a goal

4:25 North star is the goal the metric is only an imperfect description

Alex Schultz · published Sep 5, 2025

Large companies need a clear north star metric and clear guardrails so teams can move fast without escalating decisions to the CEO

Without it, everything has to be resolved with the CEO, which kills speed and therefore the number of at-bats

65:38 North star plus guardrails enable decentralized speed

Gokul Rajaram · published Aug 14, 2017

A North Star Metric — the single metric that best captures the core value a product delivers to customers — is necessary and essential for a company to align its strategy, plans and people around.

Company leaders set internal goals and talk publicly about growth in terms of the NSM, so it is the alignment device for strategy, plans and people.

source North star metric is necessary to align strategy plans and people across the company

Gokul Rajaram · published Aug 14, 2017

The second most important metric for every company is a check metric on the NSM — a metric that constrains the NSM so it grows sustainably and creates long-term value.

A constraining metric ensures NSM growth is sustainable and long-term value creating rather than short-term.

source Pairing the nsm with a constraining check metric ensures sustainable long term growth

Gokul Rajaram · published Aug 14, 2017

The perpetual tension between the NSM and its check metric is what produces great companies that maximize long-term stakeholder value, so every company should hold at least two top-level goals.

The check metric is the yin to the NSM's yang; the push-pull between them drives long-term stakeholder value maximization.

source Tension between nsm and check metric maximizes long term stakeholder value so firms need at least two top level goals

Gokul Rajaram · published Aug 14, 2017

A check metric is more prescriptive than a high-level goal: it emphasizes the facet of the goal that critically matters and thereby guides which actions and strategies create long-term value.

source Check metrics are more prescriptive than general goals guiding which actions create long term value

Gokul Rajaram · published Aug 14, 2017

Since any given check metric is just one of many possible options, what matters is that a company adds some check metric to its top-level goals rather than having none.

Each situation admits several plausible check metrics depending on what the company wants to optimize for, so the choice is less important than having a constraint.

source Having some check metric matters more than which specific one is chosen

Paul Graham · published May 2004 · hedged

Founders should treat a startup as an optimization problem whose measured objective is number of users, which is nearly the perfect test.

The key to optimization is measurement, and guesses are usually wrong; user count is what acquirers care about, what revenues depend on, what upsets competitors, and a better test than a priori notions of which problems matter.

source User count is the best single north star metric for a startup

Paul Graham · published Sep 2012

Revenue is the best thing to measure growth of, with active users the best proxy for startups not yet charging.

Once a startup starts monetizing, revenues will probably be a constant multiple of active users.

source Revenue is the best growth metric to track with active users as the pre monetization proxy

Paul Graham · published Sep 2012

Startups should pick an achievable weekly growth target and treat hitting it as the sole criterion of success, letting it decide all other questions.

This turns the bewilderingly multifarious problem of starting a startup into a single optimization problem, and narrow focus is wonderfully effective.

source Pick an achievable weekly growth target and treat hitting it as the sole success criterion

Paul Graham · published Sep 2012

The theoretical risk that growth-driven hill-climbing traps startups on a local maximum does not materialize in practice.

Hitting a weekly number forces action, which is the high bit of succeeding; founders' intuitions about which hill to climb are better than they realize; and maxima in startup idea space are not spiky and isolated.

source Growth driven hill climbing does not trap startups in local maxima in practice

Paul Graham · published Sep 2012

Manufacturing growth through tricks like buying users above lifetime value or miscounting active users ultimately hurts the founders themselves, even if it fools investors.

Such tricks throw off your own compass — the growth number you're using to steer.

source Gaming growth numbers through tricks like overpaying for users corrupts the founders own steering metric