Forcing a company / brand to think about their North Star Metric is a fundamental necessity to get the marketing team moving in the right direction. Quite often, the NSM is poorly defined, and in the worst cases — is a metric that the marketing team isn’t equipped to make an impact on.
That’s the easiest way to keep your marketing team as a cost center. Identifying the NSM, equipping the marketing team to impact that metric, whether it’s via access to the right tools of people, has to be done.
And finally, something that I’ve often done with clients is to also build a list of supporting metrics that “point” to the North Star metric. In the case of Airbnb, it would probably be metrics like the number of people that reach the booking page, or people that save a search / location, or people that make enquiries about a specific location.
These metrics at some point impact your NSM, and they’re crucial to be tracked as well because they provide a good insight into where a product / experience problem potentially exists that’s impacting the NSM. Also important to ensure that you don’t have 7–8 supporting metrics because things start becoming cluttered, best to limit this to the region of 3–4. Solid post and a great reminder, Sean Ellis — thanks for this. :)
