North Star Metric and a Check Metric

The North Star Metric is the single metric that best captures the core value that your product delivers to customers. Optimizing your efforts to grow this metric is key to driving sustainable growth across your full customer base. 

However, NSM is not sufficient. Growing it in an unsustainable or unconstrained way can lead to challenging situations and inhibit long-term growth. For example, the NSM for an e-commerce company is orders. When the company runs a price promotion, orders get a nice boost. 

Welcome Check Metric - It’s a metric that constrains the NSM and ensures that the NSM grows in a way that is sustainable and creates long-term value. Example, for an e-commerce company, a possible check metric could be Gross Profit, which leads to unit economics staying sustainable and strong.

Read more about Check Metric here- https://medium.com/@gokulrajaram/the-second-most-important-metric-for-every-company-df958ff8c5ec