One number that only improves when customers genuinely benefit. Choosing it badly points the whole company at the wrong thing.
A north star metric is the single number that best captures the value customers get from your product. It aligns the whole team on one definition of progress.
The test: it should only go up when customers are genuinely better off.
Because a team without a shared definition of progress optimises locally — engineering ships features, marketing drives signups, sales closes deals, and none of it necessarily adds up.
And because the wrong north star actively causes harm. Choose revenue and you will optimise for extraction. Choose time-on-site and you will optimise for wasting people's time.
The scheduling product. Candidate north stars:
Signups — increases with marketing spend regardless of value. ❌ Revenue — can rise while customers get worse outcomes, through price rises or lock-in. ❌ Time in app — for this product, less time is better. Actively harmful. ❌ Rotas published per active team per week — only rises when teams genuinely use it to do the job. ✅
That last one has the right property: nobody can move it without customers actually getting value. Marketing cannot inflate it. A price rise does not touch it. Engineering can only move it by making the product better at its job.
Note the structure: an action, per customer, per time period. That shape stops it being gamed by simply having more customers.
First-time founders often pick revenue because it seems the most serious. Revenue is an outcome and it lags — it can rise for a quarter while the product deteriorates, and it tells engineering nothing about what to build.
The second mistake: picking something the team cannot influence. A north star that only moves with market conditions is demoralising and useless.
The third: changing it frequently. Its whole value is alignment over time. Change it when the business genuinely changes, not quarterly.
In one sentence, from the customer's point of view. The metric comes from this.
The thing a customer does when they are getting that value.
This prevents it being inflated simply by acquiring more customers.
Could someone increase this while making customers worse off? If so, choose differently.
Every function should be able to see how their work affects it.
Its value is alignment over time. Revisit annually, not quarterly.
Once you have a team and product-market fit. A solo founder pre-PMF does not need one.
Do not set one pre-PMF — you do not yet know what value you deliver, and a wrong north star at that stage points everyone confidently in the wrong direction.
Apply this to your own startup in My Full Journey (free account).