The North Star doesn’t move, but it moves the sailor. — Unknown
Two years ago, I attended a DesignX conference talk that reframed how I think about metrics. The speaker laid out how customer value and business impact can align through the North Star Metric (NSM) framework, and it stayed with me. This year, our CEO made NSM a company direction, and I was brought in as the business lead. My partner was a superstar analyst, Srushti, who brought the technical rigor and product knowledge to make this real.
After reflecting on the journey and early results, two things became clear. This experience broadened my perspective from “proving design’s value to the business” to “understanding where the business is going and connecting design opportunities to that.” It also showed me how much a human-centered, customer-centric approach matters in a data initiative. Numbers need context to drive decisions. Without it, they’re just numbers.
The challenge: one number for a complex ecosystem
Our product ecosystem includes multiple products, touch points, and a mix of new and legacy technologies. The NSM definition was sound, but it couldn’t cover every use case on its own. Customer value in our context isn’t realized in a single moment: it takes a journey. Any metric that ignored that journey would misrepresent what we were actually trying to measure.
The approach: design the report, not just the metric
To create a first report that would actually resonate with teams, I designed the NSM presentation alongside the full customer journey funnel: from onboarding, through adoption of key capabilities, to value realization. That structure did more than get the work done. It surfaced actionable opportunities for multiple teams, including customer success, product, and technology, in a way that a standalone number couldn’t.
The second challenge was that not all product touch points carry equal weight. Some products reach millions of users but contribute less revenue than others. Simply summing across touch points would distort the picture. But selecting one product alone doesn’t represent the entire ecosystem either. In the end, we presented a combined number, followed by how it breaks down across products. We then dove deeper into a flagship touch point to represent core customer value and serve as the long-term business growth indicator, with data and insights from other major touch points presented alongside it for context.
How to make it better is still under investigation, and I think that’s the honest place to be at this stage.
Lessons learned
Bias to action over waiting for perfect data. Defining and measuring an NSM for the first time in a complex business isn’t clean. We had data from other business systems that carried limitations from previous contexts. Rather than wait, we presented the numbers to the product team and asked for their interpretation. It turned out the product managers were investigating the same inconsistencies. By putting imperfect data in front of the right people, we identified where the gaps came from and made concrete recommendations to correct them. Imperfect data, presented with transparency, moves things forward. Waiting for clean data doesn’t.
A bigger business perspective changes how you lead. As a design leader, I had spent years focused on validating design’s contribution to business outcomes. This initiative flipped that lens. The question became: where is the business now, and how do we navigate a rapidly shifting landscape? From that vantage point, the design and product opportunities look different and more interesting. I’m still working through what this means for how I lead, but it’s already changed how I frame problems.
An open question: what happens to NSM as touch points multiply?
As SaaS products connect to LLMs through MCP and other integrations, where customer value gets realized is changing. Users increasingly work within LLM environments and pull product capabilities into their workflows, rather than logging into a product to complete a task. If that shift continues, the touch points our current NSM is built around may not capture the full picture of customer value or the full growth opportunity.
This is still a theory, and I’m sitting with it rather than solving it. But I think it’s worth putting to others who are navigating similar questions: how are you thinking about NSM as the definition of a “product touch point” evolves? I’d genuinely like to hear how others are approaching this.
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