North Star Metric
The single metric a company designates as its measure of delivered customer value, used to align every team's work.
Full definition of North Star Metric →:: COMPARE ::
North Star MetricvsGoodhart's law
The short answer
Goodhart's Law is the North Star Metric's built-in failure mode. The moment the star becomes the target, it stops measuring what it measured — the practice and the warning are the same sentence read in opposite directions.
Side by side
| Aspect | North Star Metric | Goodhart's law |
|---|---|---|
| Says | Pick one number | Targeting corrupts numbers |
| Timescale | Works at first | Bites later |
| Aware of the other | Rarely | n/a |
| Remedy | Change it periodically | Use several |
What each one means
Goodhart's Law
Once a measure is used as a target, people optimise the measure and the measure stops describing what it used to describe.
Full definition of Goodhart's Law →