Define Goals and a North-Star Metric for Shopify's Third-Party App Marketplace

Shopify lets outside developers build apps that extend its platform and meet needs its merchants have. Your team owns the Shopify App Store, the marketplace where merchants find and install those apps to help their businesses grow. What goals should this marketplace have, and which metrics would tell you it is succeeding? ```hint Ask what an install is worth The store sits between merchants and developers, and Shopify cares most about merchant success. Before picking a north star, decide which observable event shows that a merchant actually got value from an app, not just that a listing was clicked. ``` ### Clarifying Questions - Should I rank the goals of merchants, developers and Shopify, or treat merchant success as the primary goal? - Is the store new, so we need launch metrics, or mature, so we are optimizing an existing funnel? - Do paid apps bill through Shopify, so the store can see subscriptions, cancellations and developer revenue? - Should the metrics differ for new stores still setting up and for established high-volume merchants? ### What a Strong Answer Covers - Goals for each side of the marketplace (merchants, developers and Shopify) and which one leads - A north-star metric that reflects realized merchant value rather than raw installs, with the alternatives it beats - Input metrics along the funnel: app supply, discovery, install, activation, retention and monetization - Guardrails for app quality, storefront performance, data security and fair exposure for new developers - How the metrics could be gamed, and how to check that apps truly help merchants grow ### Follow-up Questions - After a ranking change, installs climb, but so do uninstalls within the first week. What happened, and what do you do? - How would you estimate whether apps cause merchant sales growth rather than merely correlating with it? - How do you keep the north star from rewarding a few large developers at the expense of new ones?