South Star Metrics

Misused metrics have resulted in some of the worst UX decisions ever.

We’ve all heard the term “north star metric”, which is the over-arching needle that a product team is supposed to move (because it ties directly to business objectives and/or customer value). But sometimes, over-rotating on a number results in an anti-pattern with unintended side effects - I refer to this scenario as a “south star metric”.

Let me walk you through an example.

During my Amazon tenure, I spent a lot of time on hiring - at my peak I was doing 5 phone screens and 1 onsite a week…for a solid year (topic for a future post). You get to a point where you have canned questions and all the answers start to sound the same (not in a bad way - many candidates just know how to give a good-but-not-contentious answer given the interview-prep industry). One of my pet questions:

“walk me through a time when you had a decision to make, and the data in your hands didn’t match the intuition in your head - how did you reconci…