The goal of growth is to get more people to experience the value of your product.

Growth strategy means coming up with experiments that help people ”do the thing” — experience that value — more.

To know if an experiment worked, a metric should improve. That metric should flow into your North Star Metric: the measurement of when people “do the thing”.

Examples

• Rides completed per week (Uber)
• Monthly active users (Facebook)
• Documents sent per month (DocuSign)
• Daily active users (Slack)

Bad Examples

• Signups. What if people don't actually take a ride, order food, etc.?
• Revenue. Revenue happens because of your NSM.

We have serious horror stories about teams picking the wrong NSM. Choose wisely.

Good growth teams check on the north star metric every week and come up with explanations for why it went up or down.