north-star-metrics

north-star-metrics is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from RefoundAI/lenny-skills. It costs 33 tokens per session (1,271 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A guide for defining a North Star Metric, a single measurable sign of the customer value a business is creating.

In plain words
What is it for?
It helps review current measures, identify the key useful action, break it into controllable inputs, and add safeguards for customer experience.
Why use it?
It helps teams distinguish meaningful progress from vanity metrics and connect business results with user behavior.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

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

Good fit It helps review current measures, identify the key useful action, break it into controllable inputs, and add safeguards for customer experience.

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Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/refoundai/lenny-skills/north-star-metrics
About the project

Lenny Skills is a collection of product-management and engineering workflows for Claude Code and other AI agents, covering areas such as strategy, research, planning, shipping, growth, and hiring. Each skill gives an agent specialized guidance, frameworks, checklists, or templates for product work, and the catalogue contains many of these skills.

RefoundAI/lenny-skills · 1,321 stars · on GitHub

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 RefoundAI/lenny-skills --skill north-star-metrics
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/RefoundAI/lenny-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 north-star-metrics

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

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/refoundai/lenny-skills/north-star-metrics"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/refoundai/lenny-skills/north-star-metrics.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 33 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,271 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. Third-party audits
  • NVIDIA SkillSpector pass 7 Sept 2026
How audits are shown
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 $0.00033 $0.01271
Opus 5 $0.00016 $0.00635
Sonnet 5 $0.00007 $0.00254
Haiku 4.5 $0.00003 $0.00127

Measured 13d ago against content hash e2189e205e33, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-12, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

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 13d 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/north-star-metrics/SKILL.md · 80 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 80 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

North Star Metrics

Align your team and strategy around a single, quantifiable measure of customer value and business success.

Help the user with north star metrics using insights from 14 guests and posts across Lenny's Podcast and Newsletter.

How to Help

  1. Audit current metrics - Review existing KPIs to identify if they are lagging indicators or vanity metrics that don't reflect true value.
  2. Define the core action - Identify the specific user behavior that signals the user has found utility in your product.
  3. Deconstruct into inputs - Break down high-level outcomes into specific, controllable input metrics that individual teams can influence.
  4. Set quality guardrails - Establish counter-metrics to ensure growth efforts do not degrade the long-term user experience.

Core Principles

Manage specific input metrics

Bill Carr: "When you're measuring things, you're trying to understand what actions or reactions are creating the good outputs that you want, revenue, customer growth. But by putting them all together, you basically obfuscate that. And what really we realized is we need to just break each one of these out individually and manage them each in its own way."

Avoid managing compound metrics like revenue directly. Instead, deconstruct high-level goals into specific, controllable inputs that teams can influence on a daily basis.

Optimize for leading 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. Ultimately, you want to find a short-term metric you can measure that drives a long-term output."

Identify and focus on short-term input metrics that serve as strong proxies for long-term strategic outcomes like retention and revenue.

Establish quality guardrails

Nickey Skarstad: "One of the things Airbnb did for experiences is we had this balancing metric, which was basically using the review rate as sort our end all, be all top line goal. So you can imagine a business like that. Obviously we needed to have revenue kind of moving through the platform, and we cared about high level bookings. But really at the end of the day in the beginning, we were obsessed with making sure every person who booked actually had a good experience when they showed up to experiences."

Read the full file on GitHub · 80 lines

Files

What ships with it

2 files 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. 13d ago First seen · 80 lines · 33 tokens per session scan A e2189e205e33

Subscribe to this mod's changes

north-star-metrics is a skill published in the GitHub repository RefoundAI/lenny-skills (1,321 stars, last pushed 1mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 33 tokens to every session and 1,271 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 2026-08-30.

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