One of the best ways to use data to find your North Star metric is to look at the usage data you already have on hand. When you've already got usage, analyze it.

(source: Intercom on Product Management)

As Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield says, for each metric used to build product "you have to figure out what conversion means in your case. What does retention mean? What does activation mean? For every business, it's going to be slightly different because of the nature of the product and the kinds of people who use it."

Different products will have different core metrics. Data only becomes useful for product development when you can figure out how it fits into the bigger picture.

Map out product usage by feature to see what levers you can find to improve. Your core metric will be different depending on where you are in the product lifecycle:

• Beginner: In the early stages of your product, focusing on upping your total active user base is perfectly acceptable.
• Intermediate: As you hone your approach to data, look for more specific levers of growth. For an analytics product, this would be something like getting users to create 3 reports.
• Advanced: When you get more at home with your analytics data, you can start using a secondary metric to supplement your core metric. As you have multiple product teams, you can have each of them devoted to upping other specific core metrics.

Here are some examples of single metrics with target goals:

• Twitter: Twitter very early on knew that its ability to generate revenue was tied to the amount of views that Twitter feeds received. They used number of feed views to help predict potential revenue.
• Remind: Remind, a communication tool for teachers, focused on getting new users to refer other teachers to their product at the optimal moment. Internal data showed that momentum in growth was tied to when the first teacher at a school used Remind, so the product team focused its efforts on getting these users to shower.
• Zynga: Zynga, an online game platform, looked specifically at Day 1 retention. If a user came back the day after they had downloaded a game, they were more likely to stick around longer. They were also more likely to spend money in the game.
• Dropbox: For Dropbox, the key action for engagement was getting users to place at least one file in a Dropbox folder.
• Slack: Slack focused on getting companies to hit a milestone of 2,000 messages sent, which corresponded to a 93% retention rate. Their reasoning was simply that that's how long it takes for an organization to really use the product and realize its value.