You run product at an online pharmacy delivering prescription and over-the-counter medicine. Leadership currently tracks orders per month, which is up 30% year on year. Chronic-condition patients reordering monthly are 22% of customers and 58% of revenue. Average delivery time is 14 hours. Prescription verification rejects 6% of orders. Gross margin on OTC is 22% and on prescription medicine 9%.
Propose a north-star metric, break it into input metrics a team can move, and name the guardrails. Say what you would do if two of them disagreed.
100 points, 60% to pass.
Orders per month is a vanity metric here because it treats a one-off vitamin purchase and a chronic refill as equal when one is 58% of revenue. A defensible north star is something like refills delivered on time to chronic patients, which captures the value actually delivered — continuity of medication. Inputs: patients on a refill schedule, refill adherence rate, on-time delivery within the promised window, verification pass rate. The guardrails matter unusually much on this surface: verification rejection must not be optimised downward, because that is a safety control, and OTC mix must be watched since margin pressure would push the business away from the chronic patients it just declared central.