How to identify the North Star Metric for your product

Running a mobile app business means navigating a sea of metrics—revenue insights from Adapty, engagement trends from Mixpanel, crash reports from Firebase, to name just a few sources! Each one tells part of the story, but on its own, it doesn’t do much. 

This is where the North Star metric comes in. Think of it as a central metric that 1) consolidates your data, 2) steers your focus toward growth, and 3) aligns every team effort with your core business goal.

So let’s see what the North Star metric actually is, how it does all of this, and the steps you can follow to identify yours. We’ll also look at its key characteristics and if you can have multiple North Star metrics.

Here goes.

What is a North Star metric?

Let’s expand on what we just introduced.

As a mobile app business, you likely have multiple analytics solutions as part of your tech stack. While each of these solutions offers valuable insights into specific aspects of your app’s performance, they only provide a fragmented view of your overall performance. For example, with Adapty, you can assess your app’s performance from a revenue perspective, but that’s all. 

Additionally, while each metric offered by these analytics solutions—take Adapty’s reporting on your lifetime value (LTV) metric, for instance—provides a piece of the puzzle on how your app is doing, by themselves, the metrics might not always point to the bigger picture. Said another way, these metrics, though valuable, often operate in isolation and have gaps, making it difficult to understand what truly drives long-term success for your app. Without a unifying metric that helps you make sense of everything that’s going on in your business, it’s challenging to align your teams around what truly matters. 

Enter: Your North Star metric. 

By defining a singular, overarching metric that truly reflects your app’s overall performance, you get a clear idea of how you’re doing.

In general, when your North Star metric improves, it should be clear that users are experiencing more of your app’s promised value. This implies that all teams, including design, development, product, marketing, and service, are doing well.

Before we dive into how to identify your app’s North Star metric, let’s first understand the characteristics of a good North Star metric so you’ll know it when you see it. For example, many businesses default to using revenue metrics as their North Star metric—meaning if revenue is going up, everything is going well. But it’s not that simple. Revenue may or may not be a good North Star metric. (We’ll return to this in a later section.)

Characteristics of a good North Star metric

The most important characteristic of a good North Star metric is that it directly reflects the value users get from your app. It captures the core outcome users seek from an app—like better productivity from productivity apps, overall wellbeing from lifestyle apps, or improved fitness from health apps. In other words, it truly aligns with your app’s value proposition. 

So your North Star metric should reflect the main promise of your product. To get to this, answer this: “What’s the single most important thing users come to our app for?”

Avoid picking broad, generic metrics that don’t reflect your app’s unique value proposition (like “total active users” for a niche app).

Other than that, a north star metric needs to be:

• Actionable. It’s important that your team can act on your North Star metric. So avoid metrics that are purely reflective (like lifetime value) without any levers for improvement.
• Predictive. Your metric should be able to signal future growth or retention and not just be about historical performance. Look for behaviors that predict long-term success. Avoid lagging indicators like churn rate, as they reflect past issues, not opportunities for proactive action.
• Simple and understandable. Overly complex or multi-layered metrics that confuse stakeholders won’t make good North Star metrics.
• Leading. Your North Star metric should provide early warning signs of success or failure. Early signals allow for faster intervention. Don’t rely on delayed metrics like lifetime value (LTV) that have long feedback loops, making it difficult to iterate quickly. (This is along the same lines that your North Star metric should be predictive and not reflective.)
• Meaningful. With your North Star metric, focus on meaningful user behaviors and not vanity surface-level numbers like the “total downloads” or the “number of accounts created.”
• Aligned with company goals. Ensure your North Star metric aligns with your company’s mission and long-term goals. It should support both user and business success. Don’t choose metrics that look good to stakeholders but don’t actually tie back to the company’s strategic direction.
• Measurable in real time. Pick a metric that can be tracked and reported in near real-time to enable quick course correction. Avoid metrics that take weeks or months to materialize, like “quarterly retention rate,” which makes it hard to act in the moment.

While we’re at it, let’s also talk about why you should or shouldn’t use revenue as your North Star metric for your app.

Revenue as a North Star metric… 

While revenue is a clear indicator of your app’s “business” performance, it doesn’t directly measure how well your app is serving its users.

In a lifestyle app, for example, the value users gain—such as health improvements, habit formation, or personal growth—matters more for long-term engagement than immediate financial gain. Focusing on user experience and engagement metrics (e.g., challenges completed, health goals achieved, etc.) is typically a better indicator of success.

Focusing on revenue here can push your team to focus on quick monetization strategies, which could actually hurt user engagement.

Also, revenue could be a lagging indicator in many contexts, meaning it shows the outcome of past efforts, but it doesn’t offer insights into how to drive long-term engagement (which would be the key to success for such an app).

Besides, as users realize more value from an app, in-app purchases will follow.

With all that out of the way, we can finally see how you can identify your app’s North Star metric.

How to define your North Star metric

Here’s how to define your North Star metric.

1. Clarify your product’s core value

Start by understanding the main benefit your app offers. For example, if you have a lifestyle app focused on mental well-being through daily journaling, your core value might be “helping users improve their mental health by encouraging reflection and mindfulness.” Your North Star metric should directly reflect the value users gain from this core function. In this case, this would be understanding how engaged they are with journaling on a daily basis.

2. Define your business objectives

Next, align the core value you just identified with your business goals. What are you trying to achieve? For example, you may want to increase user engagement, improve retention, or drive subscriptions. If increasing daily engagement is a priority (which it would be in this case), focusing on daily active users—how often people return to the app to engage in journaling or related activities—could be a strong indicator of success.

3. Analyze user behavior and journeys

Examine how users engage with your app. What behaviors indicate that users are benefiting from your core value? In a journaling app, this might involve tracking how often users interact with journal prompts, log their emotions, or reflect on their mental state. Identifying these behaviors will help you pinpoint key touchpoints that matter most to your app’s success. For example, if users who engage with journal prompts every day show higher retention, that could be a valuable indicator of success.

4. Identify metrics linked to core value

Now, link the behaviors you’ve observed to specific metrics that align with your app’s core value and business goals. For example, for this app, you might focus on metrics such as “daily active users,” “average mood entries per user per day,” or “weekly reflections completed.” Your North Star metric should reflect a behavior that signals long-term engagement and the ongoing value users derive from your app. For this app, “daily active users” could be a perfect North Star metric, indicating consistent and meaningful engagement with the app’s core value of promoting mental well-being.

5. Test and validate your metric

Before finalizing your North Star metric, test its effectiveness. Analyze if this metric truly drives business success and aligns with user satisfaction. Try tracking it for a few weeks or months, then measure if it correlates with business outcomes like higher retention or increased subscriptions. If your chosen metric doesn’t fully predict these outcomes, iterate on it.

6. Make it a company-wide focus

Once your North Star metric is defined, ensure it’s a focal point for all your teams. Make sure that everyone from product development to marketing understands why this metric is important and how their work contributes to it. Align team goals with the North Star metric to ensure everyone is working towards the same objective: enhancing daily user engagement and supporting mental wellbeing.

7. Iterate and refine over time

As your app evolves and your business objectives shift, continue to refine and adjust your North Star metric so it stays relevant. Monitor changes in user behavior and the impact of new features or updates on your North Star. Make adjustments based on real-time data and insights to ensure your metric stays meaningful and effective.

By following these steps, you can define a North Star metric that not only aligns with your app’s core value but also drives long-term growth and engagement.

As you can understand, it’s quite an exercise to find your North Star metric, but here’s why it’s important to find one.

Why is finding the North Star metric important?

First up, it’s not impossible to run a business without a North Star metric, but it’s much more challenging—especially in fast-paced and competitive markets like mobile apps. Finding a North Star metric simplifies decision-making and ensures every team is working toward a common goal. It acts as a filter, helping prioritize features and initiatives that directly impact your success.

For the lifestyle app we’ve been using here, here’s how different teams would align with the daily engagement rate North Star metric:

The marketing team would focus on campaigns that attract new users and encourage regular app usage. They might run campaigns around daily reminders, special challenges, or content that promotes the value of journaling, all designed to increase user engagement and return visits.

The product team would prioritize features that improve the journaling experience and drive engagement. This could include enhancing the user interface, introducing new types of prompts, or personalizing the journaling experience to keep users coming back daily. They would work closely with data to understand which features keep users engaged and how to refine them further.

For the revenue team, the focus would be on finding ways to monetize that engagement. Since engagement is a key driver of retention and satisfaction, they could look into introducing premium features, like personalized journaling insights or exclusive content, as upsells to a free app. They would track how these premium offerings align with increased user engagement and measure their impact on subscription rates or in-app purchases.

By aligning these teams with a single North Star metric (daily engagement rate), all efforts—whether attracting new users, improving the product, or monetizing the app—are channeled toward the shared goal of increasing user interaction. This unified focus ensures the app’s growth and long-term success, providing clear direction for each department and making decision-making more streamlined and effective.

Before we wrap up, let’s explore the idea of using multiple North Star metrics.

Can you have multiple North Star metrics for your app?

Yes, you could have multiple North Star metrics, but you’ll still have a “star” North Star metric.

The key to managing multiple North Star metrics is to ensure alignment of your secondary North Star metrics with your main or overarching North Star metric. A secondary North Star metric could also be loosely called a particular business area’s “One Metric That Matters” (OMTM). Multiple areas would translate to multiple North Star metrics in this sense.

Imagine a pyramid to understand how this works.

At the very top, you have your “business” North Star metric. This serves as the overarching guiding light for the entire company’s strategic direction. It’s the one metric everyone rallies behind.

Just below it, you define supporting North Star metrics for your key teams or product areas. Each team’s metric contributes to the success of the primary business metric while focusing on specific areas that they control.

This is how it would look for our app:

Primary business North Star:
“Daily active users who complete at least one journaling session” (captures user engagement with the core app feature of daily journaling).

Supporting North Star metrics:

• Product team: “Daily active users who complete at least one journal prompt” (focuses on engagement with the app’s core journaling feature—yes, this is also the primary business North Star!)
• Growth team: “Weekly cohort retention rate” (tracks how well users are retained after their first journaling session or interaction with the app).
• Revenue team: “Subscription conversion rate” or “Average revenue per user (ARPU)” (measures progress towards monetization and recurring revenue growth).

This approach allows each team to focus on a critical part of the app’s success while keeping everyone aligned toward the broader business goal. The product team might prioritize building better challenges, while the growth team improves onboarding flows, and the revenue team focuses on upgrading free users to paid plans.

By organizing North Star metrics in a pyramid, you ensure alignment, accountability, and clarity at every level of the company. This structure also makes it easier to measure how each team’s efforts contribute to the overall mission.

Wrapping it up… 

In summary, growing your mobile app requires more than just data—it requires clarity and focus. Your North Star Metric offers exactly that: a guiding metric that unifies your data and directs your teams’ efforts toward a single shared objective.

By concentrating on this one central metric, you can eliminate distractions and ensure that every team, from product development to marketing and customer support, works in alignment with your app’s core purpose.

Now that you know how to find your North Star Metric, it’s time to act. Start by identifying the core value your app delivers to users. Determine how this ties to your primary business goal and pick your North Star metric. Finally, align your teams around this vision!