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Alex Schultz’s central argument in Click Here: The Art and Science of Digital Marketing and Advertising (published October 7, 2025) is that an organisation needs one clearly understood ultimate goal—a “North Star”—to guide trade-offs. The North Star is the outcome; its metric is only an imperfect proxy. That distinction makes the idea useful far beyond Facebook, while also showing why a single number can become hazardous.
The book’s publisher identifies Schultz as Meta’s CMO and vice president of analytics. His argument, reported in a November 10, 2025 excerpt, is a management proposition rather than a universal law: organisations need a dominant direction, supporting measures and explicit limits on what they will sacrifice to pursue it.
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What Schultz means by a “North Star”
Schultz uses a navigation metaphor. A North Star is visible, ambitious and stable enough to help teams decide where to go without sending every disagreement to senior leadership. It should be shared across the organisation, specific enough to settle trade-offs and durable beyond a campaign or quarterly initiative.
It is not simply a dashboard number. Keep these layers separate:
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- Mission or purpose: why the organisation exists.
- North Star goal: the primary outcome it is trying to achieve.
- North Star metric: the measurable proxy used to track progress.
- Guardrails: conditions that cannot be violated while pursuing the goal.
- Supporting metrics: diagnostic measures that explain performance without replacing the main objective.
Schultz’s point is that a clear primary objective reduces internal negotiation, executive bottlenecks and local optimisation. It does not make decisions easy; it gives people a common test: which option better advances the agreed outcome?
Facebook’s example: “connect the world online”
In Schultz’s account, Facebook’s North Star when he joined was “connect the world online.” The principal measurement proxy was monthly active users (MAU), because a registered account did not prove that someone was actually using the service. He describes Facebook’s move away from registered-user reporting toward MAU as unusual and influential at the time; that historical claim should be understood as his account, not an independently established “first.”
Revenue still mattered, but it was evaluated against the broader objective. An advertising format that generated immediate income yet drove people away could undermine the company’s purpose. Schultz cites “homepage takeovers” as an example of an intrusive format that might have produced substantial short-term revenue but damaged user experience and usage, making it a poor choice under the connect-the-world objective.
That example does not prove that engagement should always outrank revenue. A company must eventually convert value into cash to survive. It shows instead how a declared primary outcome can expose a damaging trade-off that a short-term sales target would hide.
The “second-most-important goal” problem
Schultz’s strongest warning is that the greatest threat to a North Star is often the second goal. If leaders alternate between “grow and stay independent” and “maximise near-term sale value,” teams receive contradictory instructions. Budgets split, departments lobby for priority and neither objective receives enough commitment.
He presents Facebook’s near-sale discussions with Yahoo this way: some executives allegedly viewed the company as a startup to grow, sell and monetise, while Mark Zuckerberg’s stated priority was independence and the larger mission. Schultz interprets subsequent leadership changes as helping create greater strategic clarity. This is Schultz’s recollection and interpretation, not a complete, independently verified account of every negotiation or its causes.
The practical lesson is not that every organisation must reject a sale or choose growth over cash. It is that leaders should name which objective wins when objectives collide. If every priority is “number one,” the organisation still has no North Star.
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How to choose a North Star
1. Define the desired outcome
Complete this sentence in plain language: “If this organisation succeeds, what meaningful change will exist for customers, users or society?” Start with the change, not an available figure such as revenue, clicks or app opens. “Increase MAU” is a measurement choice; “help people connect meaningfully” is an outcome.
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2. Identify the primary beneficiary
State who benefits: customers, members, patients, students, employees, shareholders or the public. A goal designed only around organisational extraction can produce growth that is profitable but not durable or legitimate.
3. Choose the closest measurable proxy
Test a candidate metric against five questions:
- Does it reflect value actually delivered?
- Can it rise without improving the underlying outcome?
- Does it capture quality as well as quantity?
- Is its time window appropriate to the business?
- Can teams see how their work affects it?
Define terms such as “active,” “retained,” “customer” and “quality” precisely. A metric that different teams calculate differently cannot coordinate decisions.
4. Add guardrails
Guardrails stop optimisation from creating unacceptable damage. Depending on the organisation, they may include retention, complaints, refunds, safety incidents, quality scores, privacy violations, employee turnover, regulatory breaches, profitability or cash-flow limits.
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Use real decisions rather than slogans. Would the metric support a price increase? Reward low-quality acquisition? Encourage spam? Justify a product change that increases activity but reduces trust? Sacrifice long-term retention for short-term growth? If the answers are uncomfortable, revise the metric or strengthen the guardrails.
6. Clarify decision rights
Specify which decisions teams can make independently and which require executive review. A North Star is most useful when it decentralises execution while preserving strategic coherence; it is least useful when it is merely a slogan or a pretext to silence objections.
Why one metric is not enough
In a 20VC interview, Schultz emphasised that a metric never perfectly describes a goal and argued that retention is especially important before product-market fit. Continued use can be stronger evidence of product value than acquisition alone, but retention is not automatically the right North Star. Enterprise contracts, switching costs, long billing periods and unavailable alternatives can all make retention misleading. The relevant retention window also differs by product category.
Use one primary direction with a measurement system around it:
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- Quality measures: whether the experience is useful, safe and satisfactory.
- Segment views: whether an aggregate result hides poor outcomes for a key group.
- Economic measures: whether the model can fund continued operation.
- Risk controls: privacy, safety, legal and ethical limits.
Without these checks, teams can optimise the proxy instead of the outcome. Volume may rise while quality falls; a target may become gameable; and a healthy average may conceal harm to a vulnerable segment.
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North Star, KPI, OKR and dashboard: the difference
| Concept | Purpose |
|---|---|
| North Star | The organisation’s dominant strategic direction and desired outcome. |
| North Star metric | An imperfect indicator of progress toward that outcome. |
| KPI | Any important performance indicator; an organisation can have many. |
| OKR | A goal-setting method pairing an objective with measurable key results. |
| Dashboard | The reporting interface that displays metrics. |
OKRs, KPIs and dashboards should support the North Star, not compete with it. A company can track dozens of indicators while retaining one overarching direction.
Illustrative North Stars outside social media
| Organisation | Possible primary outcome and proxy | Essential guardrails |
|---|---|---|
| Subscription software | Customers achieving recurring value; a defined retained-and-successful account measure. | Support burden, adoption quality, cancellations and gross margin. |
| Marketplace | Completed valuable transactions, not merely listings or clicks. | Fraud, cancellations, delivery failures and buyer/seller satisfaction. |
| Non-profit | Verified improvement for beneficiaries. | Safeguarding, equitable access, cost per outcome and donor restrictions. |
| Media organisation | Loyal, engaged readership that returns for useful journalism. | Accuracy, corrections, trust, privacy and revenue sustainability. |
| Internal operations | Reliable service delivered to colleagues or customers. | Quality, resolution time, employee workload and compliance. |
When a single North Star can fail
- Multiple non-negotiable stakeholders: hospitals, universities, public agencies and regulated firms cannot reduce safety, rights or legal duties to one outcome.
- Easy-to-game metrics: compensation tied directly to one number can encourage manipulation or harmful shortcuts.
- Conglomerates: fundamentally different businesses may need separate strategic objectives.
- Crisis conditions: a company may need simultaneous survival priorities such as liquidity, safety and continuity.
- Changing lifecycle: the best measure before product-market fit may differ after monetisation and at scale.
- Suppressed dissent: leaders can misuse a North Star to dismiss evidence that the goal itself is wrong or harmful.
A North Star should be stable, not permanent. Revisit it when the mission, market, product, regulation or stakeholder obligations materially change.
What the book is—and is not
Click Here: The Art and Science of Digital Marketing and Advertising is a 400-page book from Little, Brown Spark. The U.S. publisher lists a $32.00 hardcover, a $15.99 ebook and a $27.99 audiobook download; prices can change and should be confirmed at checkout. The book is aimed at readers seeking a broad guide to digital marketing, channels, creative testing and incremental measurement. It is not a neutral academic textbook devoted solely to organisational design, and buying it is not required to apply the framework above.
Schultz says the book’s own North Star is becoming a textbook for the current era of advertising. That is his stated aspiration, not an independently measured result.
Bottom line
The durable lesson is not “pick one number and ignore everything else.” Choose one clearly articulated outcome, select a metric that approximates it, publish the guardrails and make competing priorities explicit. That combination can free teams to act quickly without allowing a convenient proxy—or a short-term revenue target—to define success by accident.
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