Rarely can you or your team directly or solely impact a North Star Metric, such as increasing active users or increasing revenue. Instead, these metrics are the output of the team’s day-to-day efforts, such as increasing the conversion of a flow, or driving more traffic to the site by running more Google ads. That’s why these are called output metrics and input metrics. Once you have your North Star Metric (an output), your next step is to break this metric down into its component parts and decide which metrics (the inputs) to invest in [...]

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Whenever you have a candidate for your North Star Metric(s), determine what levers move this metric, and then focus your ideation around those input metrics. Here’s a (non-exhaustive) set of input metrics for each of the six types of North Star Metrics I outlined above: