North stars should evolve with your growth

I would be open-minded about being dynamic and changing that metric over time. Stability in metric is great, it helps with momentum, it helps with building expertise, but sometimes we overfocus on picking the perfect north star metric and by the time you feel like you've found the perfect one, it's actually time to move on to something different and work on a different opportunity.

Revenue is, for better or worse, more important to the company, but also much farther down the line of whether or not the growth team can directly impact that. And so at Instacart, for example, our north star metric for growth was monthly active orders. And that's what we all rallied around and looked at every day.

MAO refers to Monthly Active Orders (or Monthly Active Orderers), which was Instacart's north star growth metric.

We created via the finance and data team, a translation layer for every team's metric into MAO. It would be like if you got one extra weekly order because of your checkout flow from the same customer, it would have point X impact on the company's MAO and then you would just roll up all project plans as well as project impact back into this singular MAO metric.

If you don't understand how to move a particular metric, then the right goal is to set a goal to increase your understanding not to move that metric.