Writing North Star Metrics

"What I thought was brilliant about it was not the metric, it was the designing it to be understood and communicated... Zuck just said 10 friends, 14 days, go. It just got people past the academic debate of like, All right, got it. As many friends as possible, the fast as possible, let's go."

"When you're looking at something zero-to-one. If you decide on a metric two prematurely, that's false precision first of all, right? I mean, CTR. When you have a thousand people, it doesn't mean anything. Retention also may not mean anything. So really being very wary of this big guy, big girl of grownup metrics as I call it, right? You are looking for more qualitative, the sound of click."

"You know it's an input metric if it is measuring something with respect to the customer experience. Which ones are the right metrics, which ones are the most causal to the outputs... basically through an iterative process of measuring, observing, improving, and looking at what the effect is on your outputs."

"the GM's goal is to sell out the tickets and win the conference championship and it actually tiers it down... explain how it all levels up to this one North Star metric for the company or two in that case."

"My north star metric is insights per minute. That's what I try to use whenever I have any live meetings with people so it squarely fits within what I'm optimizing for."

"A critical part of that process obviously is identifying we have to measure success along the way. There should be a KPI for each of those stages in that customer journey... we try to tie the KPI obviously to some sort of meaningful product usage of that key part of the product or product attribute."

"Everything at LinkedIn is a very connected ecosystem... how you make decisions based on the very complicated ecosystem is actually not very difficult because we're all here to help people connect to economic opportunity. Every time there's a discussion... everyone knows how that decision is going to be made."

"We think a lot about number of hires, converting hires. How many people did we match? Which is a real tangible way of looking at opportunity. And then number of people who learned a skill, which is usually in this world measured more by time than anything if you learn."

"The North Star metric measures how much value we create for the market. For example, let's take WhatsApp. WhatsApp for a very long time measured messages sent because every message sent is a little incremental of value for the sender, the receiver... In Airbnb, I think one of your key metrics or the real North Star metric was nights booked."

"Duolingo cares, our growth North Star is DAUs, the metric that is most effective, where a percentage change in that metric is most effective at driving DAUs is current user retention rate."

"What was the value that we're trying to produce for the customer and can we measure it from their perspective? ... We suggested this metric to ourselves, companies that have no support tickets through the incorporation service."

"Picking metric titles that make you feel something... 'companies with zero support,' that's it. And the brevity and the focus and the customer mindset built into the chart name can become currency inside the company."

"Retention is a terrible thing to goal on. It's almost impossible to drive in a meaningful way in a short term. Ultimately, you want to find a short-term metric you can measure that drives a long-term output."

"Keeping things simple is another thing I've learned... if people understand it, if they have an intuition around it, if it's something that people can talk about across the company, it's going to be a much better metric in terms of driving real outcomes than your made up composite score that nobody understands."

"It's so important to find these edge cases in these fail states and actually set concrete goals around eliminating them because it can be really powerful."

"I wrote the North Star Playbook in partnership with Jason who was a co-writer with that. We did a lot of one-to-one coaching sessions. I had these things called product therapy sessions when I would just wake up in the morning and just kind of soak in whatever problem people were having for the day."

"In Amplitude, we have this data informed product loop that we would teach, and it's basically, you need a strategy, you need to develop qualitative models, you need to add measurement to those models. So Northstar framework would be an example of a qualitative model."

"Management is still really critical. You have a north star, you have a vision, and you're just trying to figure out how to use the resources that you have to get that thing done."

"The first is defining the goal and defining the outcome and being really, really crystal clear on what does success look like... figuring out how to boil it down so that an agent can really understand what success and failure looks like is a lot of the game."

"The real question, what does engagement mean? Actually, a have fun exercise that people could do with their teams is if you ask everyone on the team what engagement means separately, you can compare answers and most likely, people are saying different things."

"An activation rate that falls in a lower percentage range, maybe for most companies five to 15%, is better than one that falls in a higher percentage range because it means that there's likely much higher correlation with long-term retention and you're really working hard to get most of your users to reach a state that they're not reaching today."

"A north star metric should really be a measure of what you plan to do, the strategy you plan to deliver is delivering results for the business on the other side, rather than the other way around."

"Even if revenue is a goal, it's like revenue is not actually the goal. Revenue is a proxy for getting more compute, which is then actually what helps us get towards getting more GPUs so that we can train better models and actually get to the goal."

"Having the right metrics is important, but it's incredible how many times people have the metrics but they don't instrument them. They'll have all these debates, because the product is not instrumented properly. And everybody will talk about the same metric, but they'll have different nuances in terms of, 'Oh, what does it really mean? What is a daily active user? Okay, daily means... Okay, I understand it's on a daily basis. What is active?' And there'll be debates about what is active. Pick a definition, instrument it, codify it. No confusion."

"It's not that hard to go to the stakeholder that requested that and say, "We're going to get to work on that, but can you tell me how are you measuring success? We want to make sure that what we do, you consider it successful. How are you measuring success?""

"Traditional engagement metrics might be misleading when depth matters more than frequency... I think overall though... I think you know when your product is really serving people... so much of when you get really metrics obsessed is when you're trying to convince yourself that it is when it's not."

"We did a lot of quantitative research and data science and wound up coming up with this new metric we call successful teams... what we found was that if you could get five people using Slack, the majority of the work week to just communicate at all, that would be a successful team there were going to be 400% more likely to upgrade over the next six months."

"The OEC or the overall evaluation criterion is something that I think many people that start to dabble in A/B testing miss. And the question is, what are you optimizing for? And it's a much harder question that people think because it's very easy to say we're going to optimize for money, revenue. But that's the wrong question, because you can do a lot of bad things that will improve revenue. So there has to be some countervailing metric that tells you, how do I improve revenue without hurting the user experience?"

"Step two for me is then figure out a metric that essentially captures units of that value being delivered. And so when I think about a north star metric, that's what I'm thinking about is something that reflects how many people are coming in and experiencing that product-market fit experience, whatever that is."

"I think monthly purchases is great because it maps to value that people are getting from Amazon... units of value from the customer perspective I think is more important than overall revenue. ... revenue should be a product of doing things. Right. It shouldn't kind of guide your day-to-day actions."

"At Instacart, for example, our north star metric for growth was monthly active orders... At Ramp... the north star was dollars of SQL pipeline."

"having GMS as our north star KPI, just having that, being absolutely front and center, being the drumbeat that we talk about in every meeting, the measuring stick that we measure the success of launches against. And maybe it's a bit surprising, but we didn't have that type of clarity in the past."

"I would say north star metric, because I find it's not only valuable to growth, it's valuable to just everything. When I think about what do I want to do with my career, does that fit my own personal north star metric?"

"we really focus on one key metric as it relates to tracking our growth or how we are doing. We call it D5, D7. A lot of other companies call it L5, L7. But the human explanation for that is how many people turn to Arc at least five days a week? That is all we obsess over from a metrics perspective, because for us it captures retention, engagement, and growth in a single metric."

"One of the things Airbnb did for experiences is we had this balancing metric, which was basically using the review rate as sort our end all, be all top line goal... we were obsessed with making sure every person who booked actually had a good experience when they showed up to experiences."