Writing North Star Metrics

This framework distills insights from 27 product leaders into a practical guide for choosing your primary success metric. It walks you through defining what customer value actually looks like (not revenue), testing if your metric is simple enough for anyone to discuss, and adding guardrails to prevent gaming. The questions are sharp: "What would break if you gamed this metric?" The advice is opinionated: avoid retention as a goal because it's too lagging, skip composite scores nobody understands, measure value delivered rather than extracted. Use this when you're drowning in dashboards or watching teams optimize for different things. It won't pick your metric for you, but it gives you a clear lens for evaluating candidates.

Install to Claude Code

npx -y skills add refoundai/lenny-skills --skill writing-north-star-metrics --agent claude-code