Framework for Goal Setting & North Star Metrics
Metrics questions are among the most common question types you'll encounter in a PM final round. Here are a few examples that candidates have been asked in their interviews:
Asked at 
Asked at 
Asked at This lesson walks through a four-step framework for defining a product goal and choosing the primary metric that best captures it. For broad company or product questions, that will often be a north star metric. For a narrower feature question, it may be a more focused success metric.
Later lessons go deeper on specific metric types, north star selection, and tracking and guardrail metrics.
We’ll build an answer to this example question as we walk through each step:
How would you measure the success of Airbnb?
Step 1: Clarify the scope
Start by confirming your understanding of the product and what you've been asked to measure.
This prevents you from building an answer on a faulty assumption and shows the interviewer that you know how to clarify ambiguity before committing to an approach. State your understanding briefly and invite a correction if you've misread the question.
A simple template:
Just to make sure we're aligned: my understanding is that [product] is [brief description]. Are there any constraints I should know about, like whether we're looking at [parent company/specific feature/particular user segment]?
The interviewer will usually either confirm your interpretation or narrow the scope. Either way, you’ve aligned on the product being measured and can move forward without guessing.
Step 2: Understand the product context
Before proposing a metric, consider three things: the company’s mission, the product’s role, and its lifecycle stage. This shows the interviewer that your metrics follow from the product’s goals rather than being chosen in isolation.
- The company's mission. Start with what the company is trying to achieve and how the product contributes. You don't need to know the official wording, a reasonable summary is enough.
- The product's role. Explain what the product helps users do and how that supports the company’s goals.
- The lifecycle stage. Identify where the product is in its lifecycle. This helps you choose the right type of metric to focus on.
Tell the interviewer which stage you discern the product is in, then use that to narrow down the types of metrics you’ll consider.
Step 3: Identify each group’s goals
Before brainstorming metrics, identify which groups matter for this product and what success looks like for each. Not every product has all three:
- Creators or suppliers, if applicable: the people who create or supply the product’s core value
- Consumers or customers: the people who receive or use that value
- The company: the business operating the product
For a single-sided product, you may only need to consider the customer and the company. For a marketplace or platform, include the supply side as well. Keep this brief—two or three sentences per group is enough.
Step 4: Choose the primary metric
Now, brainstorm a few possible primary metrics using the metric focus from Step 2 and the needs of the key groups from Step 3. For a broad question like Airbnb, these will be possible north star metrics. Talk through the tradeoffs, then choose one.
A strong primary metric has three properties:
- Customer value: It represents the relevant customer groups achieving something meaningful
- Business value: It maps to the company's mission and model
- Team influence: The product team can move it in a reasonable timeframe, and it’s scoped closely enough for that impact to show up
Be specific about the metric itself.
- “Engagement” is a category, not a north star metric;
- “Number of nights booked per month per active host” is a metric.
Define exactly how it’s calculated and what it tells you.
Practice
Before practicing full metrics answers with peers or our AI interviewer, get comfortable diagnosing products. Pick any product you encounter (e.g., an app you use, a feature you read about, or a company in the news) and ask:
- What stage is it in?
- Which type of metric matters most right now?
Getting faster at this makes the rest of the framework easier to apply under pressure.