Your product team doesn’t need a “North Star Metric”

Although North Star Metrics can work for some products, they often fall short of being the "guiding light" teams need. Let's look at why.

A few years ago, I sat in a stuffy conference room with a product team as we debated the "North Star Metric” for our product. The whiteboard filled with candidates—acquisition, engagement, retention, revenue. Hours passed. Voices raised. By the time we landed on a metric everyone could agree on, it was so watered down that it had lost all meaning.

Sound familiar? I've witnessed this scene play out across many companies, and it highlights a fundamental flaw in how we think about guiding product teams.

What is a North Star Metric?

A North Star Metric is “a single metric that best captures the value customers derive from your product”. Amplitude's North Star Playbook defines the approach:

"A team using the North Star Framework identifies a single, meaningful metric and a handful of contributing inputs. Product teams work to influence those inputs, which in turn drive the metric. The North Star is a leading indicator of sustainable growth and acts as a connective tissue between the product and the broader business."

This framework is powerful in its simplicity. It provides a clear target to aim for, aligns teams around a common goal, and offers an objective measure of success. When done well, it removes ambiguity and helps teams focus their efforts.

When does the North Star Metric fall short?

In my experience, it’s difficult and sometimes misguided to try to channel an entire team's efforts into a single metric. The North Star Metric approach suffers from a few critical problems:

One metric can’t rule them all

The North Star Metric approach assumes that everything valuable a team can do ladders up to the same metric — which provides an inflexible way of thinking about how to deliver value to the customer.

Remember, a good metric guides the team. It’s a leading indicator — a lever that the team can pull to create value. A good metric helps us understand trade-offs and focuses our work in a specific direction to achieve a particular outcome.

A good metric is an opinionated decision-making tool.

In some businesses, it's possible a single metric to be equally useful — as a decision making tool — for all teams. Amplitude is a good example: their product has a single overarching value proposition for users.

But other businesses aren't so straightforward.

For example, marketplace products face a unique challenge: they serve both suppliers and consumers, each with fundamentally different needs and success metrics. A single measurement fails to capture the progress required on both sides of the market. Rather than enhancing decision-making, a single metric can undermine a team’s ability to make clear, opinionated choices about where to focus their efforts.

There are other circumstances where a single metric won't work well:

• Products with multiple different modes of usage

• Products with user cohorts that have very different needs

• Companies with a portfolio of products

All of these resist boiling down everything a team can do to a single North Star Metric.

The curse of Goodhart’s Law

Second, it suffers from Goodhart's Law: when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to become a good measure. People optimize for the metric, rather than the value it's supposed to represent. They game the system.

Teams often optimize their North Star Metric in ways that prioritize short-term gains over strategic growth. I've seen product teams concentrate heavily on the U.S. market while neglecting international expansion, simply because domestic improvements move the metric faster. Similarly, many teams focus on increasing revenue through price increases for existing customers rather than working to expand their market share. Both approaches may improve the metric today, but at the expense of building a stronger foundation for tomorrow.

The North Star Strategy approach

These limitations of North Star Metrics reveal a fundamental problem: we've been focusing on the wrong kind of north star altogether. While a single metric provides simplicity, it lacks the context and flexibility teams need to navigate complex product decisions. What if instead of anchoring teams to a number, we anchored them to a story that gives meaning to their work?

Instead of fixating on a single metric, product teams should express their goals as a strategic narrative — what's the couple of sentences that describe what we're trying to achieve and why?

From there, the team can define the handful of metrics that are the evidence that the team is making progress on that strategic narrative. This approach focuses on the strategic thinking, not just the number — and it gives the team the responsibility and flexibility of solving for the true nature of the problem, not just hitting a quantitative goal.

Vision over metrics — the biggest successes often go against the metrics

The biggest product successes often come from decisions made based on vision, not metrics — in fact, the most vision-aligned strategies often result in near-term risk or cannibalization of metrics.

Apple put iPod revenue at risk when they launched the iPhone, a high-priced cell phone that bucked the conventional wisdom that powerful, expensive phones needed to have an integrated keyboard. Had they been guided purely by a North Star Metric of iPod sales or music revenue, they might never have risked the category-defining move that transformed their entire business.

Netflix risked cannibalizing their business when they turned away from rentals to streaming — especially when Netflix Originals put them at odds with the studios they depended on. A North Star Metric of subscriber growth or retention wouldn't have captured the strategic vision that led them to fundamentally reinvent their business model.

Facebook had to jettison a promising social app/platform strategy when they embraced mobile as their future. The shift to mobile wasn't a metrics-driven decision — it was a strategic imperative driven by where the world was heading and how Facebook needed to position itself to remain relevant.

A real-world example from Tinder

At Tinder, we went through a North Star Metric exercise: what one metric should the product team use to evaluate impact? At first, matches seemed like the right metric. But, there are good matches (that result in conversations) and bad matches (that get ghosted).

Maybe active conversations? This seemed like a good metric for some teams, but it was a terrible metric for the trust & safety team — scammers are very good at starting conversations when left unchecked.

We searched some more. By the time we were done, our ideal North Star Metric was so generic that it no longer served any useful purpose for guiding the team.

Tinder has a very clear North Star Strategy — make single life more fun by helping people match and talk with the people they want to meet. But, there is no single metric that can measure that strategy. Each team needs to define their work relative to that strategy, and each team needs different metrics to measure that progress.

We needed to ladder up to a single strategy, not a single metric. We needed to align our efforts with logic, not math.

This is where a North Star Strategy — a story of what the company is trying to achieve — becomes crucial. It serves as the guiding light that helps people make trade-offs and understand whether they're heading in the right direction.

Let's remember that the "North Star" concept is all about a guiding light. It's about understanding if you're going in the right direction or the wrong direction. In some cases, a single overarching metric can help. But in many cases, it can't — in fact, trying to fit all valuable work into a single metric can send teams in the wrong direction. That's where strategy becomes incredibly important as a way to provide alignment and clarity.

North Star Strategies succeed where North Star Metrics fail because they provide context and meaning, not just a number to hit. They tell the team what mountain they're climbing and why, not just how high they need to go.

What’s your take?

Do you find North Star Metrics helpful, or do you prefer a more strategic approach? Has your team struggled with finding the "perfect" metric? I'd love to hear your experiences and perspectives.