#109 — Cold Take: Your North Star is broken if it's just for product
August 20, 2025•6 min read
Get actionable go-to-market insights delivered weekly. No fluff, no spam, just essentials.
Get actionable go-to-market insights delivered weekly. No fluff, no spam, just essentials.
Why it matters: Startup founders constantly struggle to align their teams around a single vision of success. The North Star Framework is often pitched as the silver bullet, but it consistently fails when it's confined to the product and engineering departments.
- Sustainable growth isn't just about building the right features. It's about how those features are marketed, sold, and supported. When your North Star lives in a silo, you get a fractured company culture where teams work at cross-purposes.
The big picture: The North Star Metric should be your company's operating system for growth. It's the connective tissue that aligns every department—from product and marketing to sales and customer success—around a single, shared definition of customer value. For it to work, every team's efforts must directly connect to the inputs driving that metric.
Deconstructing the Framework
The model is a causal chain that connects your team's daily work to the long-term success of the business.
-
Start with the Goal: Business Results & Customer Value (Lagging Indicators) This is what founders, boards, and GTM teams are ultimately measured on: revenue, customer lifetime value (LTV), net revenue retention, and market share.
- The nuance: These are lagging indicators. They tell you the result of past actions, not what to do today to influence next quarter's results. Relying on them alone is like trying to drive by only looking in the rearview mirror.
-
The Bridge: The North Star Metric (A Predictive Indicator) This is the one metric that best captures the core value your product delivers to customers. It acts as a predictor of future business results.
- The nuance: If your North Star Metric is trending up, you can be confident that revenue and retention will follow. It translates abstract, long-term business goals into a more immediate, tangible target that the entire company can rally around. It answers the question: "What customer behavior best predicts our long-term success?"
- Example: For a B2B collaboration tool, a good North Star might be "Weekly Active Teams" who complete at least three collaborative actions. This is a much faster signal than waiting for the quarterly renewal numbers.
-
The Levers: The Inputs (Leading Indicators) These are a small set (3-5) of influential factors that your teams can directly impact day-to-day.
- The nuance: These are leading indicators. Improving an input metric this week should have a near-immediate effect, which then drives the North Star Metric, which in turn predicts future business success. This is where your product and GTM teams have direct agency.
Go Deeper: Mapping Your Entire GTM to the Inputs
To build a unified growth engine, map your inputs and "the work" across the entire organization. A powerful heuristic for defining these inputs is to consider breadth, depth, frequency, and efficiency.
1. Breadth: Reaching More Users
This is about expanding the user base that experiences your product's core value.
- Product's Role: Builds features that encourage virality, sharing, and team invitations.
- Marketing's Role: Owns the top of the funnel. Their campaigns, content, and SEO efforts directly fuel this input by bringing new users and qualified leads to the product.
- Sales's Role: Lands the initial accounts. In a B2B motion, every new logo is a direct and measurable contribution to increasing breadth.
2. Depth: Driving Deeper, Stickier Engagement
This measures how much value users are getting and how invested they are in your ecosystem.
- Product's Role: Develops advanced modules, integrations, and power-user features that solve more complex problems.
- Sales's Role: Unlocks this input by demoing high-value, "sticky" features that justify an enterprise contract. Their sales strategy directly impacts the depth of adoption for new accounts.
- Customer Success's Role: Manages onboarding and ongoing training to drive adoption of these core features, turning basic users into power users and preventing shelf-ware.
3. Frequency: Making Your Product a Habit
This reflects how often users return to experience value, making your product integral to their workflow.
- Product's Role: Designs an engaging and rewarding core product loop that solves a recurring problem.
- Marketing's Role: Executes re-engagement campaigns, sends value-add newsletters, and builds a community that creates reasons for users to come back.
- Customer Success's Role: Monitors usage data to proactively identify at-risk accounts with declining frequency, then provides targeted interventions to rebuild the habit.
4. Efficiency: Delivering Value Faster and with Less Friction
This focuses on the user's ability to achieve their desired outcome successfully and seamlessly.
- Product's Role: Optimizes user flows, improves performance, and removes friction points in the UI/UX.
- Customer Success's Role: This is their domain of expertise. They are on the front lines and know precisely where users get stuck. Their insights are gold for identifying the most impactful product improvements to boost efficiency.
- Marketing's Role: Sets clear expectations on the website, in ads, and through all communications. If marketing promises a five-minute setup, the product and CS teams must be aligned to deliver on that promise.
Putting It Into Practice: "The Work" Is More Than Code
To make this framework operational, you must expand the definition of "the work." It's not just about shipping code. It's the marketing campaign, the sales play, and the customer success onboarding sequence.
When your cross-functional leadership team gathers for quarterly planning, the backlog should look like this:
- Product Initiative: Build a new dashboard widget to increase depth.
- Marketing Initiative: Launch a content series targeting a new user segment to increase breadth.
- Sales Initiative: Create new sales collateral focused on an enterprise feature to improve our win rate and drive depth.
- CS Initiative: Develop a new automated onboarding flow to improve the activation rate and drive efficiency.
The bottom line: By integrating your go-to-market functions directly into the North Star Framework, you transform it from a product-centric KPI into a true measure of your company's health. It forces conversations that break down silos and aligns every dollar spent and every hour worked toward the single, unified goal of delivering sustainable customer value. This is how you build a company that grows not just bigger, but stronger.
Frequently asked questions
What is the North Star Metric (NSM) and why is it important for startups?
The North Star Metric (NSM) is the single key measure that best captures the core value your product delivers to customers. For a startup, it's a compass for sustainable growth, ensuring every team is aligned on a leading indicator of long-term success, rather than a lagging indicator like revenue. For example, Spotify’s NSM is 'Time spent listening,' which predicts customer retention and lifetime value far better than tracking monthly subscriptions alone.
How do you choose effective input metrics for your North Star?
Effective input metrics are the actionable levers your teams can influence daily. A best practice is to use the breadth, depth, frequency, and efficiency framework. For a SaaS product, this could be: Breadth (new active teams), Depth (key features adopted per team), Frequency (weekly sessions), and Efficiency (time-to-value for new users). These are the leading indicators that, when improved, directly drive your North Star.
What is the difference between a North Star Metric and an OMTM (One Metric That Matters)?
A North Star Metric is a long-term measure of sustainable customer value, guiding your company's strategy for 12+ months. An OMTM is a short-term, tactical metric focused on a specific business problem or growth experiment, often changing every 2-6 months. Your North Star is your destination (e.g., 'Weekly Active Projects'); your OMTM is the immediate next turn you need to make to stay on course (e.g., 'Increase project invitations by 15% this quarter').
How does the North Star Framework integrate with OKRs (Objectives and Key Results)?
They work together perfectly to connect strategy to execution. Your North Star Metric defines the company's long-term vision of success. Your OKRs break that vision down into actionable, quarterly goals. For example, if your North Star is 'Weekly Collaborating Teams,' a quarterly Objective for the product team might be 'Increase team collaboration,' with Key Results like 'Increase file shares by 20%' (driving the 'depth' input).
Can you provide examples of good and bad North Star Metrics?
Good North Stars reflect customer value. Examples: Airbnb's 'Nights Booked,' Slack's 'Messages Sent,' and Asana's 'Weekly Active Paying Users.' Bad North Stars are often vanity metrics that don't predict success. Avoid 'Total App Downloads,' 'Registered Users,' or simply 'Revenue.' Revenue is a result of delivering value, not a direct measure of it, and can mislead you into acquiring low-quality customers who churn quickly.
How can non-product teams like marketing and sales impact the North Star?
Smart founders integrate go-to-market (GTM) teams directly into the framework. Marketing drives breadth through acquisition campaigns. Sales increases depth by landing enterprise accounts and demoing high-value features. Customer Success improves efficiency and frequency through better onboarding and proactive support. Atlassian’s growth is a prime case study of this cross-functional alignment on shared inputs.
How does the North Star Framework apply to different business models (B2B, B2C, PLG)?
The framework is highly adaptable. A B2C company like Instagram might focus on 'Daily Active Users' (frequency). A B2B company like Salesforce might track 'Active Enterprise Accounts' (breadth). A PLG company like Calendly blends both, focusing on inputs like 'Meetings Scheduled per User,' where product-led adoption is supported by sales and marketing to drive enterprise-level depth.
How do you use the North Star Framework before achieving product-market fit (PMF)?
Pre-PMF, your North Star should focus on validating your core value hypothesis, not scaling. Instead of a growth metric, choose one centered on retention and deep engagement for a small user cohort. A good pre-PMF North Star could be, 'Percentage of new users who complete a core action and return 3+ times in their first week.' This helps you iterate toward a sticky product before hitting the gas.
How often should a startup review or change its North Star Metric?
Your North Star should be durable, but not permanent. Review it annually or when your company strategy makes a major pivot (e.g., expanding from a single product to a platform). You shouldn't change it frequently, as that creates organizational whiplash. However, the input metrics that drive it are more flexible and should be reviewed and potentially adjusted quarterly as you learn what best moves the needle.
How can founders get buy-in for their North Star from teams, investors, and the board?
Frame the North Star as a de-risking strategy. Show stakeholders how it connects customer value directly to long-term business results like net revenue retention and LTV. Run a cross-functional workshop to define the metric and inputs together, creating shared ownership. For investors, present your inputs as a data-driven plan for how the team will execute and achieve its goals, demonstrating operational maturity.
What are the most common pitfalls to avoid when implementing the North Star Framework?
The biggest pitfalls include: 1) Picking a vanity metric that doesn't reflect customer value. 2) Operating in silos where only the product team cares about the North Star. 3) Defining inputs that teams can't actually influence. 4) Setting it and forgetting it, without building rituals for regular review and communication. Success requires making it the centerpiece of your company's operating rhythm.
Keep reading
#110 — Social media for founders
Social media is no longer optional for founders. It’s where you research audiences, build hype, foster brand affinity, and accelerate organic growth.
#111 — Build-A-Bear’s "Micro-community" social media targeting
Build-A-Bear’s strategy of engaging micro-communities has transformed both its customer base and financials.
#112 — A formula for building effective AI agents
As AI capabilities explode, founders are rushing to build agents for everything. That's a mistake.