What is a North Star?
A North Star is a single metric that captures the core value your product delivers to users. It's the measurable proof that you're moving toward your product vision — not just shipping features, but actually creating the change you set out to create.
The term comes from navigation: a fixed point you can orient by regardless of which path you're taking. In product work, it serves the same function. Teams debate tactics constantly — what to build, what to cut, what to defer — but the North Star tells you whether those decisions are working.
North Star vs. Product Vision
These two concepts form a pair:
- Product Vision is qualitative — it describes where you're going and why. "Every product team ships features grounded in real user evidence."
- North Star is quantitative — it measures whether you're getting there. "Number of intent specs shipped per team per month from evidence-backed sources."
Vision without a North Star is aspiration without accountability. A North Star without vision is optimization without direction. You need both.
What makes a good North Star
A useful North Star metric has four properties:
1. It reflects user value, not business vanity. Revenue and signups measure business health, not product quality. A North Star should capture whether users are getting the value your product promises. "Weekly active specs created from evidence" beats "monthly active users."
2. It's leading, not lagging. By the time churn shows up in your metrics, the damage happened months ago. A good North Star moves before the business metrics do, giving you time to course-correct.
3. Teams can influence it. If no one on your product team can take an action that moves the metric, it's not useful for decision-making. It should be close enough to the work that teams can see the connection between what they ship and whether the number moves.
4. It's singular. One metric, not a dashboard of twelve. The discipline of choosing one forces you to decide what actually matters. You'll still track other metrics — but one is the tiebreaker when priorities conflict.
Examples
| Product type | North Star | Why it works |
|---|---|---|
| Collaboration tool | Weekly documents with 3+ editors | Captures real collaborative use, not just signups |
| Developer platform | Deployments per developer per week | Reflects whether developers trust the platform enough to ship with it |
| Analytics product | Queries per analyst per day | Measures whether the tool is genuinely useful in daily work |
| Pathmode | Intent specs shipped from evidence | Captures the full workflow: evidence collected → spec written → feature shipped |
How to define yours
Start from the vision
Your North Star should be a measurable proxy for your product vision. If the vision is "teams ship better products by starting from user evidence," then the metric should capture how much of that is actually happening.
Ask the diagnostic question
If this number goes up and everything else stays flat, are we winning? If yes, you've found a candidate. If it could go up while the product gets worse (e.g., page views that increase because users can't find what they need), keep looking.
Keep it honest
The best North Stars are hard to game. If your metric can be inflated by low-quality activity, it will be — incentives work. Choose something that only goes up when real value is being delivered.
How Pathmode uses the North Star
In Pathmode, the North Star is a first-class field on every Product, sitting alongside the Product Vision. Together they create the strategic context that flows into every intent spec:
- AI synthesis uses the North Star when generating intent specs from evidence — proposed features are evaluated against whether they'd plausibly move the metric.
- Spec quality improves because writers can check each outcome against the North Star: does this spec, if shipped successfully, contribute to the number we care about?
- Prioritization becomes less political. When two specs compete for attention, the one with a clearer line to the North Star wins. Evidence + North Star alignment replaces opinion-based roadmap debates.
The Vision says where you're going. The North Star says whether you're getting there. Everything in Pathmode — evidence, intent specs, the build queue — connects back to this pair.