Managing any business can be an uphill task. It is not easy to find a balance between concentrating on the product and the growth of the company. Every company has a well defined mission to meet a need and a unique value to meet that need. This is where the North Star Metric (NSM) comes into play.
What is a North Star Metric and how to Define it?
North Star also called Polaris, sitting directly above the North Pole acts as a navigational tool if you find yourself lost on a clear night without a compass.
The North Star Metric (NSM) is to companies what North Star is to people who lose their ways. The NSM provides you a direction that is in line with the value you offer your customers.
NSM is an essential and powerful concept that has emerged from Silicon Valley in the recent years and has been adopted by companies with a focus of building and retaining long-term customer growth. It focuses both on the product and the core value it delivers to the customers.
So, it is important to optimize efforts to grow NSM for a sustainable growth in your company.
Examples of North Star Metric:
- Facebook - Daily active users.
- Quora - Number of questions a user answers.
- Amazon - Purchases per prime subscriber.
- Airbnb - Nights booked.
- WhatsApp - Number of messages a user sends.
- LeadMine - In our company LeadMine, we have NSM as “the number of leads generated in a month”.
How to find your North Star Metric?
Before determining the most important metric for the company’s growth model, you should know how your product delivers value to your customers. There can be many metric that works but, you will have to try and find that one metric which will work the best.
You should first be able to understand the value your customers receive from the interest of your users in your product and the level of activity they are involved in. Once you fix your North Star Metric, you will have to keep a constant check on the variables that work with this metric. So, it is important to choose the NSM for your company wisely to see a sustainable growth.
Share your company’s North star metric and share your thoughts/suggestions.
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