Do not force one event. Model activation in three stages instead, setup, aha and habit, and let the aha event differ by use case while setup and habit stay common. Then report a single blended activation rate for the company and the per-use-case breakdown for the teams doing the work, so leadership gets one number and the people fixing things get a usable one. Resist the urge to pick the event that is easiest to instrument, and resist the urge to change the definition next quarter, because a metric that keeps moving teaches the organisation to ignore it. If two use cases turn out to have wildly different activation rates, that is not a measurement problem, that is your roadmap.
5 hand-picked resources, 5 link-checked. Pick how you want to dig in.
Why we picked it Mixpanel works through defining and instrumenting activation for products where the path to value is not single track, which is the hard part when five use cases each have a different aha. Hands on, with the setup and habit stages treated separately.
On Mixpanel 57 min
Why we picked it Goes past the single aha metric to a three stage model (setup, aha, habit) with Apollo.io and Appcues case studies, plus the failure modes: no retention correlation, and changing the metric every quarter.
From Product Growth by Aakash Gupta and Ramli John 25 min read
Why we picked it A three step method (brainstorm milestones, regress against retention, then experiment to prove causation) with worked examples from six companies. The third step is the one most teams skip.
From Lenny's Newsletter by Lenny Rachitsky 15 min read
Open lennysnewsletter.com →Why we picked it It defines time to value precisely enough to instrument: a start event, a value event, and the gap between them. The insistence that logging in is not value is the point most teams need to hear.
From Amplitude 12 min read
Why we picked it Benchmarks from 500 plus products: 34 percent average, 36 percent for SaaS. If you have ever wondered whether your number is bad or normal, this is the answer, and it is free.
From Lenny's Newsletter by Lenny Rachitsky and Yuriy Timen 12 min read
How activation and onboarding reads from a different seat.
The same ground, over in Grow & market, our Starting Up track.
