writing-north-star-metrics

writing-north-star-metrics is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from cnfeat/top-pm-skills. It costs 47 tokens per session (1,027 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A guide for choosing one main measure of the value a product gives users. It also helps define supporting measures that prevent the main measure from being misleading.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to choose a North Star metric, assess whether it is useful and actionable, and design safeguards against gaming the measure.
Why use it?
Teams often track too many numbers or focus on revenue and internal activity instead of user value. This helps them agree on a simple measure that teams can influence.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Written for no agent in particular: nothing here depends on one.

Good fit Use it to choose a North Star metric, assess whether it is useful and actionable, and design safeguards against gaming the measure.

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Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/cnfeat/top-pm-skills/writing-north-star-metrics
Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

Any agent
npx skills add cnfeat/top-pm-skills --skill writing-north-star-metrics
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/cnfeat/top-pm-skills

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Wrote this? Show the measurements

A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.

agentmods badge for writing-north-star-metrics

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/cnfeat/top-pm-skills/writing-north-star-metrics/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/cnfeat/top-pm-skills/writing-north-star-metrics)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/cnfeat/top-pm-skills/writing-north-star-metrics"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/cnfeat/top-pm-skills/writing-north-star-metrics/github.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>

Or the 80×15 button, for a site that already has a row of RSS and ATOM ones. Only the verdict fits; the numbers stay here.

agentmods 80×15 button for writing-north-star-metrics

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/cnfeat/top-pm-skills/writing-north-star-metrics"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/cnfeat/top-pm-skills/writing-north-star-metrics.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 47 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,027 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe.
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5.1 $0.00047 $0.01027
Opus 5 $0.00023 $0.00513
Sonnet 5 $0.00009 $0.00205
Haiku 4.5 $0.00005 $0.00103

Measured 9d ago against content hash eb967e0d1f24, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-12, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

writing-north-star-metrics scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 9d ago.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

参考skill/lenny-skills-main (2)/lenny-skills-main/skills/writing-north-star-metrics/SKILL.md · 78 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 78 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Writing North Star Metrics

Help the user define their North Star metric using frameworks and insights from 27 product leaders.

How to Help

When the user asks for help with North Star metrics:

  1. Understand the value - Ask what specific value the product delivers to users (not revenue or internal activity)
  2. Test for simplicity - Ensure the metric can be understood and discussed by anyone in the company
  3. Check for actionability - Confirm teams can actually influence this metric through their work
  4. Add guardrails - Help them identify countervailing metrics that prevent gaming

Core Principles

Measure value delivered, not captured

Itamar Gilad: "The North Star metric measures how much value we create for the market. WhatsApp measured messages sent because every message is incremental value. Airbnb used nights booked." Select a metric that tracks core utility provided to the customer, not business extraction.

Avoid lagging indicators

Jess Lachs: "Retention is a terrible thing to goal on. It's almost impossible to drive in a meaningful way in a short term. Find a short-term metric you can measure that drives a long-term output." Identify proxy metrics that are sensitive to experimentation and correlate with long-term goals.

Simple beats sophisticated

Jess Lachs: "If people understand it, if they have an intuition around it, if it's something people can talk about across the company, it's going to be a much better metric than your made up composite score that nobody understands." Avoid composite metrics with complex coefficients.

Measure from the customer's perspective

Jeff Weinstein: "What was the value we're trying to produce for the customer, and can we measure it from their perspective? We suggested 'companies with zero support tickets.'" Define metrics based on the absence of friction or the presence of success moments.

A high-level mission simplifies decisions

Hari Srinivasan: "Everything at LinkedIn is a very connected ecosystem, but decisions aren't difficult because we're all here to help people connect to economic opportunity." A clear company-wide mission serves as the ultimate tie-breaker for product decisions.

Read the full file on GitHub · 78 lines

Files

What ships with it

1 file beside SKILL.md in the same directory: the scripts, references and assets a skill reads on demand. Not counted in the per-session cost; read them before you install if any of them is executable.

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. 9d ago First seen · 78 lines · 47 tokens per session scan A eb967e0d1f24

Subscribe to this mod's changes

writing-north-star-metrics is a skill published in the GitHub repository cnfeat/top-pm-skills (48 stars, last pushed 3mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 47 tokens to every session and 1,027 once invoked, about $0.0002 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-09-03.

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