North Star Metric

A North Star Metric is the single metric a company chooses as the clearest proxy for the core value it delivers to customers, used to align teams around one shared goal.

A good North Star Metric sits close to both customer value and revenue, without being revenue itself — Airbnb's is reportedly nights booked, Spotify's is time spent listening, a metric chosen precisely because you can't inflate it with tactics that don't actually make the product better for users (unlike, say, signups, which can be juiced with weak acquisition tricks that don't reflect real usage).

The risk of over-indexing on a single North Star Metric is Goodhart's Law in action — once a metric becomes the target, teams can find ways to move the number that don't reflect the underlying health it was meant to represent. Most mature teams pair a North Star Metric with a small set of guardrail metrics specifically to catch this.