north-star

# North Star Metric Defines a single North Star Metric (NSM) that measures the value customers actually receive, then decomposes it into the 3-4 input metrics teams can directly influence — the North Star + input metric tree framework. **Grounded in:** *Lean Analytics* — Croll & Yoskovitz: the One Metric That Matters and its input tree. **Go deeper (The Product Channel):** [How to Develop and Write KPIs](https://sidsaladi.substack.com/p/how-to-develop-and-write-kpis-a-guide) ## When to use this - The team is optimizing for revenue or signups and it's quietly degrading the product or customer experience. - Leadership wants "one number" to rally the org but every proposal is a lagging vanity metric. - A roadmap exists but no one can say how a given feature moves the top-line goal. - You're setting OKRs or quarterly goals and need a metric tree to cascade them from. - Multiple teams each chase their own metric and the numbers conflict or cancel out. ## Before you start (gather these) - **The core value exchange**: what does a customer do in your product that means they got value? (the action, not the purchase) - **A rough activity dataset or description**: usage counts, active users, key actions per period — pasted numbers or even ballpark ranges are fine. - **Business model**: subscription, transactional, marketplace, ads, freemium — this shapes whether the NSM should be breadth, depth, or frequency. - **Current metric(s)** the team reports today and who owns them. If 2+ o...