Alex Schultz’s argument is that an organisation should agree on one dominant strategic goal—a “North Star”—and use a measurable indicator to track progress toward it. The goal is not the metric: the metric is only an imperfect proxy. In Facebook’s example, the goal was to “connect the world online” and monthly active users (MAU) helped measure progress. Schultz makes the case in Click Here: The Art and Science of Digital Marketing and Advertising, published in the United States on October 7, 2025. The framework is most useful when it clarifies trade-offs; it becomes risky when leaders mistake one number for the whole mission.
What Schultz means by a North Star
Schultz uses “North Star” as a navigation metaphor: a shared, ambitious objective that helps people throughout an organisation decide what to do without sending every disagreement up the management chain. It should be clear enough to guide trade-offs, durable enough to outlast a campaign or quarterly initiative, and meaningful to the people the organisation serves.
That objective is not simply a dashboard number. A goal describes the outcome the organisation wants; a North Star metric is an operational proxy for whether it is making progress. The distinction matters because no metric perfectly captures a broad outcome. Schultz’s argument, as presented in a November 10, 2025 excerpt from his book, is for one clear direction—not for ignoring every other measure.
It helps to distinguish five related ideas:
- Mission or purpose: why the organisation exists.
- North Star goal: the primary outcome it is trying to achieve.
- North Star metric: a measurable, imperfect indicator of progress toward that outcome.
- Guardrails: conditions the organisation must protect while pursuing the goal.
- Supporting metrics: diagnostic measures that reveal why the main indicator is rising or falling.
A North Star can reduce internal negotiation, conflicting requests for resources and local optimisation by individual teams. It does not make hard choices disappear. Instead, it gives teams a common question for resolving them: which option better advances the agreed outcome without breaching the guardrails?
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How Facebook applied the idea
In Schultz’s account, Facebook’s goal when he joined was to “connect the world online,” and monthly active users served as the principal measurement proxy. Registered-user totals would have been a weaker signal: someone could have an account without actively using the service. Schultz describes the shift toward MAU reporting as unusual and influential at the time; that is his characterization, not a claim that Facebook was definitively the first company to make the change.
The distinction shaped monetisation decisions. Revenue mattered, but tactics that threatened continued use could conflict with the broader goal. Schultz cites intrusive advertising formats such as “homepage takeovers” as examples of placements that might bring short-term revenue while harming the user experience and engagement. The lesson is not that revenue must always yield to engagement. It is that a company should make the trade-off against its chosen strategic outcome rather than treat every immediate revenue opportunity as automatically beneficial.
Schultz also uses Facebook’s discussions with Yahoo about a possible sale to illustrate the risk of competing strategic priorities. As he tells it, some executives saw the company as a startup to grow, sell and monetise, while Mark Zuckerberg’s priority was to remain independent and pursue the goal of connecting the world. Schultz interprets subsequent leadership changes as helping clarify the direction. This is his account and interpretation of the episode, not a complete independently established explanation of the negotiations or their causes.
Why the second-most-important goal can be the problem
Schultz’s warning is that an organisation can be pulled apart not only by a lack of ambition but by two priorities that each claim to be primary. If leaders alternate between growth and near-term monetisation, or between product quality and volume, teams may divide resources, compete for influence and optimise against different definitions of success. Neither objective then receives coherent execution.
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This does not mean every secondary goal is illegitimate. A company can have financial targets, quality measures and legal duties alongside its North Star. The practical distinction is between a supporting objective that fits under the primary direction and a rival objective that repeatedly overturns it. Leaders need to state which is which and how conflicts are decided.
How to choose a North Star
- Define the outcome in plain language. Complete the sentence: “If this organisation succeeds, what meaningful change will exist for customers, users or society?” Begin with the outcome, not with a convenient number such as revenue, clicks or app opens.
- Name the primary beneficiary. Specify who should benefit: customers, users, patients, students, employees, shareholders, a community or the public. If the goal serves only the organisation, it may incentivise extraction rather than durable value creation. Where several groups have non-negotiable interests, identify those as constraints instead of pretending one measure represents them all.
- Choose the closest useful proxy. Ask whether the candidate metric reflects value delivered, whether it can rise without the underlying outcome improving, whether it measures quality as well as volume, and whether teams can understand how their work affects it. Define terms such as “active,” “retained,” “customer” and “quality” so teams do not report incompatible numbers under the same label.
- Set guardrails before incentives follow the metric. Depending on the organisation, limits might cover retention, complaints, refunds, safety incidents, quality, privacy, employee turnover, regulatory compliance, profitability or cash flow. A guardrail should name a real condition to protect, not merely add another aspirational slogan.
- Test the metric against hard decisions. Consider a price increase, a low-quality acquisition campaign, a product change that lifts activity but reduces trust, or a tactic that encourages spam. Would the metric encourage a decision that improves the number while making the underlying outcome worse? If so, revise the proxy, add a guardrail or both.
- Clarify decision rights. State which decisions teams may make independently and which require executive review. The point is to let teams use the shared direction to act coherently—not to turn “North Star” into a wall slogan or an excuse for leaders to centralise every choice.
One North Star does not mean one number
Organisations still need measures that diagnose what is happening. A North Star gives strategic direction; it does not replace the systems used to set goals or report performance.
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| Term | What it does |
|---|---|
| North Star | Names the dominant strategic direction and the outcome the organisation is pursuing. |
| KPI | Measures an important part of performance; an organisation can have many. |
| OKR | Pairs an objective with measurable key results for a defined planning period. |
| Dashboard | Displays measures for monitoring and diagnosis; it is a reporting interface, not a strategy. |
| Growth metric | Tracks an area such as acquisition, activation, retention, revenue or referral. |
Supporting measures help expose weaknesses hidden by a headline result. A rising user count, for instance, can conceal falling retention or uneven outcomes between groups. Teams should examine relevant segments, quality signals and potential harms rather than assume an aggregate improvement means everyone is better served.
This is also an incentive-design problem. Once a measure becomes a target, teams may learn to raise it without improving the goal it was meant to represent. Growth in volume can mask declining quality; an aggregate can hide a badly served group; a metric can become obsolete as the organisation changes. Keeping a small set of diagnostics and guardrails visible helps identify those failures without giving every measure equal strategic status.
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In a 20VC interview, Schultz argues that consumer and software-as-a-service companies before product-market fit should pay particular attention to retention: continued use is stronger evidence of value than acquisition alone. A company can attract sign-ups or generate activity without giving people a reason to stay.
Retention is not automatically the right North Star. Enterprise sales, marketplaces, infrastructure businesses and public-sector organisations may need different outcome measures. Even where retention matters, customers can remain because of long contracts, high switching costs or a lack of alternatives. The relevant retention window also depends on how often a product is naturally used. Treat retention as evidence to interpret, not proof by itself that a product is valuable.
Examples beyond consumer social media
The appropriate proxy depends on what the organisation exists to achieve. These are illustrative choices, not measures Schultz prescribes:
- Subscription software: successful recurring use or retained accounts may be more informative than downloads, with support quality and customer outcomes as guardrails.
- Marketplace: completed, valuable transactions may be a stronger direction than listings or visits, with fraud, cancellations and satisfaction on both sides monitored.
- Non-profit: verified beneficiary outcomes may be closer to the mission than donations, traffic or sign-ups alone.
- Media organisation: loyal, engaged readership may better express durable audience value than raw pageviews, alongside accuracy and trust measures.
- Internal operations: reliable service delivery may matter more than tickets closed if closing tickets quickly leaves problems unresolved.
Where the framework can fail
A single dominant objective is not a universal law, and some organisations cannot responsibly reduce success to one outcome. A conglomerate may run businesses with fundamentally different purposes; a regulated institution may have duties that cannot be traded away; a crisis may demand several simultaneous survival priorities. In these cases, a hierarchy of goals and explicit constraints is more honest than forcing every decision into one number.
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- It confuses proxy and purpose. “Increase MAU” is not equivalent to connecting people meaningfully; a measure may rise while the intended value falls.
- It rewards a vanity metric. Accounts, impressions, downloads or visits can look impressive without showing durable benefit.
- It hides harmful side effects. A target that boosts activity may also encourage spam, weaken trust or create safety, privacy or legal risks.
- It masks different experiences. A healthy average can conceal harm to a particular user group or stakeholder.
- It freezes a changing business. A useful early-stage measure may stop being appropriate after product-market fit, monetisation or expansion into new markets.
- It suppresses scrutiny. Leaders should use the North Star to resolve choices, not treat disagreement or evidence of harm as disloyalty.
The test is whether the goal remains a useful guide under scrutiny. If the metric is gameable, the beneficiary is unclear, the guardrails are routinely breached or the organisation’s circumstances have changed, revisit the framework rather than defend the number for its own sake.
About Schultz’s book
Click Here: The Art and Science of Digital Marketing and Advertising was published in the United States by Little, Brown Spark on October 7, 2025. The publisher lists a 400-page hardcover, ebook and audiobook download. Its U.S. listings showed prices of $32.00 for the hardcover and audiobook download and $15.99 for the ebook when retrieved; prices and availability can change. Schultz has said he hopes the book will become a textbook for the current era of advertising, an aspiration rather than an established outcome.
See the publisher’s hardcover and audiobook listing or the ebook listing.
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