Joshua Franklin Wiedeman

North Star Dashboard

A north star dashboard is organized around the one metric that best shows customers getting value from your product. Instead of tracking dozens of KPIs equally, the team focuses on one number, such as nights booked for a travel marketplace or messages sent for a chat tool. The dashboard shows how each team’s work feeds that number.

How it works

When you track everything, nothing gets focus. The north star metric (NSM), a term popularized by Sean Ellis, is the one number that signals the business is healthy when it grows. A good NSM meets three tests:

  • It reflects value delivered to customers, not just revenue taken.
  • It leads revenue growth.
  • Several teams can move it.

Below the NSM, the dashboard shows the input metrics that drive it, linking daily work to outcomes.

How to do it

  1. Ask: “What single user action shows they are getting real value?” Check that it correlates with retention and revenue.
  2. Pick 3 to 5 input metrics that drive the NSM. For “weekly active projects,” inputs might be new signups, onboarding completion, features adopted per user, and invites sent.
  3. Build the dashboard with the NSM at the top, inputs below, and a trend line for each. Use your BI tool or a warehouse view.
  4. Set alerts when the NSM or an input moves outside a set range, such as two standard deviations from its rolling average.
  5. Review weekly with leadership and monthly with the whole team. Prioritize work on the input with the most room to improve.

What to measure

  • North star trend: the NSM by day or week, with period-over-period change.
  • Input contribution: how much each input moves the NSM, measured by regression or experiments.
  • Dashboard usage: how often people open the dashboard.

Best practices

  • Fit the dashboard on one screen. If it needs scrolling, it has too much.
  • Show both the number and its rate of change.
  • Pair it with a short weekly meeting where each team reports what it did to move its input.

Common pitfalls

  • Picking a metric the team cannot move week to week. Annual revenue is an outcome, not a north star.
  • Adding too many inputs. More than 5 brings back the clutter you were removing.
  • Never revisiting the NSM. Re-check it yearly as the product and market change.