Verified against ChatGPT · 2026-08-04
Pick a North Star metric that leads value instead of just reporting revenue
Selects a North Star metric that reflects value actually delivered, is owned by a real team, and names a stated countermetric — so it can't be quietly gamed the moment it becomes the thing everyone optimizes for.
The prompt
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You are a growth strategist selecting a North Star metric — the single metric that best reflects the core value the product delivers to customers, chosen to be a leading indicator, not revenue reported after the fact. CONTEXT Product: A shift-scheduling app for restaurant managers The core value customers get when the product is working well for them: Managers spend less time building schedules and have fewer last-minute uncovered shifts Candidate metrics already being considered, if any: Monthly active managers, total shifts scheduled, MRR, number of shift-swap requests approved Team(s) that would actually own moving this metric: Product team (scheduling UX) and a small customer success team (onboarding) LEADING VS LAGGING CHECK Evaluate Monthly active managers, total shifts scheduled, MRR, number of shift-swap requests approved (or propose new candidates from Managers spend less time building schedules and have fewer last-minute uncovered shifts if none given) against one rule: does the metric move before revenue does, as a cause of value delivered, or does it just restate revenue in different units after the fact? Eliminate anything that's a lagging financial outcome dressed up as a North Star. ACTIONABILITY CHECK For each surviving candidate, name specifically which team in Product team (scheduling UX) and a small customer success team (onboarding) could move it through their own work within a quarter. A metric no team can actually act on directly is a reporting number, not a North Star, regardless of how well it correlates with value. FINAL SELECTION Select one metric and state it as a specific, countable definition — not "engagement" but a stated action, count, and time window (e.g. "number of accounts completing X within Y days of signup"). COUNTERMETRIC Name one countermetric that would catch the North Star metric being gamed — improved on paper while something that actually matters quietly gets worse (e.g. volume rising while quality or retention falls). State what pairing this countermetric protects against specifically. OUTPUT FORMAT Four headed sections: Leading vs Lagging Check, Actionability Check, Final Selection (with exact definition), Countermetric.
Customize
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Why this works
The leading-versus-lagging rule is the actual mechanic distinguishing a North Star metric from a revenue dashboard wearing a growth-strategy label — the whole point of North Star metric literature, from Slack's messages-sent-per-team to Facebook's early '7 friends in 10 days,' is that these are metrics which move before revenue does, as a cause of retained value rather than a restatement of it, so a candidate like MRR fails this check immediately even though it's the number leadership probably cares about most in a board meeting. The actionability check — naming which specific team in {{owning_teams}} could move the metric through their own work within a quarter — matters because a metric no one owns is a number people watch, not a number people act on; if the answer to 'whose job is it to move this' is genuinely unclear, the metric will get reported quarter after quarter with no real intervention behind its movement, which defeats the purpose of picking a North Star at all. The countermetric requirement targets Goodhart's Law directly — any single metric an organization optimizes hard enough eventually gets gamed in a way that improves the number while quietly damaging something the number was supposed to be a proxy for, and the classic example here is exactly the kind of thing {{candidate_metrics}} might include: total shifts scheduled can rise because scheduling got genuinely easier, or because managers are now scheduling more redundant shifts to route around a bug, and only a paired countermetric like uncovered-shift rate or manager churn would catch the difference before it shows up as a real problem months later.
Verified against
ChatGPT GPT-5.1 · 2026-08-04
Changelog
- 2026-08-04 — Initial publish, verified against ChatGPT GPT-5.1.
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