Dynamic North Star Metrics
Hold a North Star for at least six months, then be willing to abandon it
- Difficulty
- Advanced
- Time to result
- ~months to results
- Steps
- 5
- Confidence
- 91%
Isford's contrarian position: the perfect North Star metric doesn't exist, and by the time you feel you've found it, it's usually time to move on. Stability matters — six months minimum, for momentum, expertise and compounding — but working the same metric forever means you're probably no longer chasing the biggest impact. Crucially, the North Star should be derived from strategy, as a measure of whether the strategy is working, rather than being chosen first and driving all decisions.
Origin
Lauryn Isford's view, formed while leading growth at Airtable, where the growth org changed its North Star metric more than once — most notably pivoting from revenue to user and customer growth.
Core principles
- 01Six months of stability in a North Star is table stakes — below that you get no momentum, no domain expertise, no compounding.
- 02If you're working the same metric forever, there's probably inefficiency in what impact you're chasing.
- 03Derive the metric from strategy: it measures whether the plan is delivering results — it does not drive decision-making from the start.
- 04Start from the mechanics of the business and the impact your specific team composition can actually have.
- 05Over-focusing on picking the perfect North Star wastes the window in which it would have mattered.
How to run it
- 1
Start from the mechanics of the business
Before choosing a metric, map how the business actually works and what your growth team — given whether it's marketing-heavy, product/engineering-heavy, or a mix — could realistically drive.
Pro tip Literally draw the funnel on a whiteboard, brainstorm as a team, and do the analysis on the side.
- 2
Pick the biggest opportunity to chase
Identify where the largest opportunity sits given your resources, and commit to the strategy for capturing it — this is the decision, not the metric.
- 3
Derive the North Star as the output of that strategy
Build a North Star metric that reflects whether the strategy you plan to deliver is producing results for the business, rather than choosing a metric first and letting it drive every decision.
Pro tip The metric is a measure of the plan working — it is downstream of the plan, not upstream of it.
Watch out Choosing the metric first inverts the causality and lets the scoreboard write the strategy.
- 4
Hold it for at least six months
Give the metric enough stability to build momentum, develop domain expertise, and let wins compound where you find growth flywheels worth optimizing.
Watch out Changing a North Star is a big deal that manifests across several teams — don't do it lightly.
- 5
Move on when it's old news
When team activation looks healthy because you did great work on it, ask whether user retention, conversion, or another long-term retention signal is the right focus now — and be willing to change.
Pro tip Signals it's time: you're outgrowing the metric, or you want to work on different things.
In the wild
Airtable's growth org shifted its organization-level North Star from revenue to user and customer growth. The reasoning: taking a decades-long view, bringing millions more people onto the platform and getting them to find value mattered more than near-term monetization, since those users could always be converted later. Focusing on revenue had been pushing the team toward shorter-term decisions than was ideal — and under a product-led sales motion, you may deliberately want to delay revenue by months, quarters or years to manifest it later via an enterprise contract, which means growth must be in lockstep with sales on user growth.
→ The pivot gave the growth org more strategic clarity and let it move faster, despite the change being a big deal that cascaded across several teams.
Common mistakes
Optimizing the choice of North Star instead of the business
Teams over-focus on picking the perfect metric. By the time they're satisfied they've found it, the opportunity it measured has usually passed and it's time to work on something else.
Letting the metric drive decision-making from day one
A North Star should measure whether your strategy is delivering. Inverting that — deriving strategy from the metric — makes the team optimize the scoreboard rather than the mechanics of the business.
Optimizing revenue when the business is playing a long game
A revenue North Star pushed Airtable toward short-term decisions. In a product-led-sales motion where you may want to delay revenue by quarters or years, user growth is the correct focus and revenue is actively misleading.
Is it for you?
Best for
Growth leaders and org heads deciding whether their North Star still reflects the biggest opportunity available to them
Not ideal for
Teams less than six months into their current metric, where instability would destroy momentum and expertise
From the transcript
“in general I would say having stability in North Star metric for at least six months feels like table Stakes to me”
“sometimes we over focus on picking the perfect North Star metric and by the time you feel like you've found the perfect one it's actually…”
“try to build a Northstar metric that reflects the output of that work rather than drives all of your decision making from the beginning”
“from being a growth org focused on Revenue to a grocery focused on user growth and customer growth”
From the episode
Mastering onboarding
Lauryn Isford (Head of Growth at Airtable)