Software Engineering · Product & Engineering
A single long-term metric or goal that smaller, day-to-day decisions are meant to align with.
Example: A subscription business tracking 'weekly active paying users' as the one number every team's roadmap is meant to move.
In practice: A good North Star metric is hard to game and correlates with real user value — otherwise teams end up optimizing the number instead of the outcome it was meant to represent.
Debated: Criticized for encouraging teams to over-index on a single number — Goodhart's Law ('when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure') is frequently invoked against North Star metrics that end up getting gamed.