Is it all about NSM?

The North Star Metric (NSM) is vital for any product manager to measure progress in any digital experience offering. Still, like everything else in life, no single metric does it all. Different aspects become more important at various stages of a product or service's life, especially as we transition from early-stage launch to mature product, i.e., from adoption to engagement or retirement focus. Choosing the right metric for NSM, measuring it honestly and consistently, building team-wide consensus around the North Star, and being super "smart" about context is crucial to success. Notably, Daily/Weekly/Monthly Active Users or Time Spent may be the most relevant NSM for B2C, but B2B SaaS thrives on NPS (Net Promoter Score). The key is to align mission, business objectives, timeframes, and metrics to ensure execution is on the right track.

In addition to NSM, we need many other supporting metrics (leading, guardrail, proxy, quality) to get a complete view of how the product or service is tracking.

For example, what might be the most appropriate NSM for an integration platform service?

Count of Production Deployed APIs, Count of Connectors deployed in production, Total count of connectors available on the platform, Count of production customers, Monthly ARR, or Daily Volume of production transactions

While all of these metrics measure progress in one or another dimension, to arrive at the right NSM, we must first understand who we are as a company (Pure Play iPaaS or a service among a suite of services), what stage we are at with the product, and our business objectives for the service.

Assuming an established, pure-play iPaaS in PLG (product-led growth stage), I would champion the 'Daily Volume of production transactions' as the NSM for the entire team to rally around. A product slated to be retired or on the path to a replacement offering may have an opposite metric as NSM.

In summary, the goal is to choose the right metric based on the business objectives for the company and product (growth, phase out, retirement) and the product's life cycle stage (inception, early adoption, rapid growth, steady state, mature, retirement). The right NSM metric must continue representing the business outcomes we want to drive forward.