pm-north-star

pm-north-star is a skill for Claude Code from marfoerst/the-pragmatic-pm. It costs 100 tokens per session (2,797 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A product strategy skill for choosing a North Star metric—the main measure of value delivered to customers—and linking it to the smaller measures that influence it. It is designed for business-to-business subscription software and uses the Sean Ellis criteria to test candidate metrics.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to define or review a North Star metric, compare candidate product metrics, or build an input-metric tree.
Why use it?
It helps teams agree on what product success means and connect company-level outcomes to team-level work. It also gives a way to assess whether the chosen main metric reflects real customer value.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: shipped in a Claude Code plugin.

Part of the pm-toolkit plugin — 54 skills, 5 agents, 4 hooks shipped together

Good fit Use it to define or review a North Star metric, compare candidate product metrics, or build an input-metric tree.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/marfoerst/the-pragmatic-pm/pm-north-star
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 marfoerst/the-pragmatic-pm --skill pm-north-star
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/marfoerst/the-pragmatic-pm

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install pm-toolkit, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 54 skills, 5 agents, 4 hooks.

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 pm-north-star

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/marfoerst/the-pragmatic-pm/pm-north-star/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/marfoerst/the-pragmatic-pm/pm-north-star)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/marfoerst/the-pragmatic-pm/pm-north-star"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/marfoerst/the-pragmatic-pm/pm-north-star/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 pm-north-star

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/marfoerst/the-pragmatic-pm/pm-north-star"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/marfoerst/the-pragmatic-pm/pm-north-star.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 100 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 2,797 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 $0.00100 $0.02797
Opus 5 $0.00050 $0.01399
Sonnet 5 $0.00020 $0.00559
Haiku 4.5 $0.00010 $0.00280

Measured 12d ago against content hash 34a93ce6c303, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-11, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

pm-north-star 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 12d 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.

skills/pm-north-star/SKILL.md · 255 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 255 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

North Star Metric Definition

You are a product strategy advisor helping a product leadership team. Read domain-context.md at the plugin root for company, product, persona, compliance, and industry context. Adapt all outputs to match that context. The user is a Head of Product, PM, or product leader seeking clarity on what metric best captures product value delivery.

Intent Detection

Activate this skill when the user:

  • Wants to define or redefine their North Star metric
  • Asks what the "one metric that matters" should be
  • Needs to build an input metric tree
  • Wants to validate whether their current North Star is correct
  • Is debating between candidate metrics
  • Asks about connecting team metrics to company-level outcomes
  • Mentions "Sean Ellis", "metric tree", or "product-led growth metrics"

Process

Phase 1 — Problem Clarity (Ask First)

Before suggesting any metrics, ask these questions. Do not skip this phase.

Mandatory questions (ask all 3):

  1. What is your product's core value promise? In one sentence, what does a successful customer get from using your product that they could not get before (or could only get with much more effort)?
  2. Who is your primary customer, and what does "activated" look like for them? (Not "signed up" — what is the first meaningful action that predicts retention?) Describe the user, their role, and their first valuable outcome.
  3. What is your current business model and growth motion? (Sales-led, product-led, hybrid? Per-user, per-entity, flat pricing? Land-and-expand or big-deal?) This determines whether your North Star should orient toward breadth or depth.

Follow-up questions (ask based on initial answers):

  • Do you have an existing North Star? What is it, and why do you think it might be wrong?
  • What does your retention curve look like? (Flat after X months, or still declining?) This hints at whether you have product-market fit clarity.
  • Is this for the entire platform or a specific module/product area?

Read the full file on GitHub · 255 lines

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. 12d ago First seen · 255 lines · 100 tokens per session scan A 34a93ce6c303

Subscribe to this mod's changes

pm-north-star is a skill published in the GitHub repository marfoerst/the-pragmatic-pm (8 stars, last pushed 2mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 100 tokens to every session and 2,797 once invoked, about $0.0005 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 2026-08-31.

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