define-north-star

define-north-star is a skill for Claude Code from ramybarsoum/prodkit. It costs 22 tokens per session (653 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A guided exercise for choosing and checking a North Star Metric, the main number that represents the value a product provides to users. It connects that metric with supporting measures and safeguards.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it during product strategy to identify the product’s core value, define a metric formula, test candidate metrics, and choose supporting and guardrail measures.
Why use it?
It helps teams focus on a shared measure when different groups are optimizing unrelated numbers, while checking that the measure reflects real user value.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: disable-model-invocation in frontmatter. Also seen: names the AskUserQuestion tool.

Part of the prodkit plugin — 10 skills shipped together

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.

agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/ramybarsoum/prodkit/define-north-star
Any agent
npx skills add ramybarsoum/prodkit --skill define-north-star
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/ramybarsoum/prodkit

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install prodkit, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 10 skills.

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 define-north-star

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/ramybarsoum/prodkit/define-north-star.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/ramybarsoum/prodkit/define-north-star)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/ramybarsoum/prodkit/define-north-star"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/ramybarsoum/prodkit/define-north-star.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 22 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 653 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. Scan, not verified.
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 $0.00022 $0.00653
Opus 5 $0.00011 $0.00327
Sonnet 5 $0.00004 $0.00131
Haiku 4.5 $0.00002 $0.00065

Measured 5d ago against content hash c1e1a11108b4, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-05, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

define-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 5d 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/define-north-star/SKILL.md · 56 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 56 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Interaction style: Use the AskUserQuestion tool for all structured questions in this skill. Group related questions together (2-3 per call) rather than asking one at a time.

Define North Star Metric

When to use: During strategy planning, when metrics feel scattered, or when teams are optimizing different things

Framework source: Aakash Gupta's "Do you really need a North Star Metric?"

Quick Start

  1. Tell me: "Help me define our North Star metric" (or "Validate our current North Star")
  2. I will check knowledge/company/business-info.md and knowledge/strategy/ for your business model, growth stage, and existing metrics
  3. I will ask about your core value, retention drivers, and business model to narrow candidates
  4. We work through: Core Value identification, Metric formula (Frequency x Core Action x Breadth), Validation tests, Input metrics, and Guardrails
  5. Output goes to work/analyses/north-star-[quarter].md

Key decision: Not every product needs a single North Star. Marketplaces, multi-product companies, and complex B2B may need a constellation of 2-4 metrics instead. I will help you decide which approach fits.

Context Routing Logic (Internal - for Claude)

Automatic Context Checks: When this skill is invoked, immediately check:

Source Files/Folders Search Terms What to Extract
Strategy Docs knowledge/strategy/*.md objective, business goal, success metric Current metric direction, if any
Business Model knowledge/company/business-info.md revenue model, growth focus, metrics What drives the business
Metrics History knowledge/metrics/*.md baseline, trends, retention data Current metric baselines and movement
Meetings work/meeting-notes/*.md "North Star", "KPI", "success metric" Stakeholder expectations
PRDs projects/*/ success metric, target Feature-level success indicators
Product Principles knowledge/company/product-principles.md product principles, core values Which principles this feature embodies and how

Read the full file on GitHub · 56 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. 5d ago First seen · 56 lines · 22 tokens per session scan A c1e1a11108b4

Subscribe to this mod's changes

define-north-star is a skill published in the GitHub repository ramybarsoum/prodkit (4 stars, last pushed 4mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 22 tokens to every session and 653 once invoked, about $0.0001 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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