north-star-metric-finder

north-star-metric-finder is a skill for Claude Code from varunk130/ai-customer-discovery-skills. It costs 86 tokens per session (969 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A method for choosing a product's North Star Metric, the single measure of value delivered to customers that can indicate future business growth. It also identifies the smaller measures that influence it.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it when selecting one main product metric, rejecting weak alternatives, and mapping the three to five input measures that drive it.
Why use it?
Teams can waste time tracking easy-to-count numbers that do not show customer value or predict retention. This method tests candidates against value, prediction, actionability, clarity, and singularity.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: when-to-use in frontmatter.

Good fit Use it when selecting one main product metric, rejecting weak alternatives, and mapping the three to five input measures that drive it.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/varunk130/ai-customer-discovery-skills/north-star-metric-finder
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 varunk130/ai-customer-discovery-skills --skill north-star-metric-finder
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/varunk130/ai-customer-discovery-skills

Made for: Claude Code.

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-metric-finder

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/varunk130/ai-customer-discovery-skills/north-star-metric-finder/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/varunk130/ai-customer-discovery-skills/north-star-metric-finder)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/varunk130/ai-customer-discovery-skills/north-star-metric-finder"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/varunk130/ai-customer-discovery-skills/north-star-metric-finder/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-metric-finder

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/varunk130/ai-customer-discovery-skills/north-star-metric-finder"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/varunk130/ai-customer-discovery-skills/north-star-metric-finder.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 86 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 969 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 $0.00086 $0.00969
Opus 5 $0.00043 $0.00485
Sonnet 5 $0.00017 $0.00194
Haiku 4.5 $0.00009 $0.00097

Measured 12d ago against content hash 3de21084c301, 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-metric-finder 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/north-star-metric-finder/SKILL.md · 72 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 72 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

North Star Metric Finder

Identify a candidate North Star Metric (NSM) that satisfies five strict criteria, then map the 3-5 input metrics that drive it. The output is a defensible recommendation, not a brainstormed list.

Core Principle

A North Star Metric is a forcing function, not a slogan. Adopting the wrong one quietly skews two years of roadmap decisions. The five criteria below exist to eliminate candidates that look reasonable but fail under stress.

The Five Criteria

Criterion The Question Failure Example
Value-capturing Does this metric only go up when customers receive real value? "Logins per week" - easy to game with notification spam
Predictive Does this metric lead revenue and retention by ≥1 quarter? "MRR" - lagging, not leading
Actionable Can the team move this metric with deliberate actions? "NPS" - moves slowly, hard to attribute changes
Understandable Can every employee state the metric and why it matters in one sentence? "Weekly active accounts with ≥3 successful API calls in their primary workspace"
Singular Is this a single metric, not an index of three? A weighted composite hides which input is broken

A candidate must pass all five. Three out of five is not a NSM - it's a useful KPI.

Output

Save to outputs/nsm-[product]-[YYYY-MM-DD].md

  • Recommended NSM + the five-criteria pass/fail evaluation
  • Runner-up candidates with the criterion they failed and why
  • Input metrics (3-5) that drive the NSM, with the direction and expected magnitude
  • Counter-metrics that prevent gaming (e.g., NSM ↑ + churn ↑ = bad)
  • Cadence - how often to review the NSM and re-validate it

Process

Step 1: Generate Candidates

I'll ask:

"What does your product do for the customer? What's the moment they get value? Share your current top-line metrics and a one-sentence pitch."

I generate 6-10 candidate NSMs grounded in the value moment, not the business model.

Read the full file on GitHub · 72 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 · 72 lines · 86 tokens per session scan A 3de21084c301

Subscribe to this mod's changes

north-star-metric-finder is a skill published in the GitHub repository varunk130/ai-customer-discovery-skills (2 stars, last pushed 1mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 86 tokens to every session and 969 once invoked, about $0.0004 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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