Leading a GTM team

Who should own activation: product, growth, or customer success?

The short answer

One team owns the number and everyone else owns an input. In practice the growth team should own activation because they can ship changes to the signup path and the lifecycle emails, which is where most of the leverage sits. But account-level activation, the moment a whole team rather than one user starts working in your product, is usually customer success work and needs its own owner. The failure mode to watch for is activation becoming a shared goal, which means nobody wakes up responsible for it. Put it in a company level objective so it cannot be traded away in a planning meeting, then name one person, and give them the ability to change the product rather than only the emails around it.

Go deeper, your way

4 hand-picked resources, 1 India-specific, 4 link-checked. Pick how you want to dig in.

The same ground, at another level

How activation and onboarding reads from a different seat.

Terms in this answer

People also ask

Everyone says find your aha moment. What is it actually, and how do I find ours? It is the first moment a new user gets something real out of your product, and you find it by looking at what people who stuck around did in their ... Breaking into GTM 4 resources → Our activation rate is 18 percent. Is that terrible, or is that just what it is? It is below average but not alarming. Across 500 plus products the average activation rate sits around 34 percent and the median around 25, with Sa... Breaking into GTM 4 resources → What should a brand new user see in the first minute after they sign up? Something that already works. The best first screens hand the user a filled-in example rather than an empty box, because a blank canvas asks a stra... Breaking into GTM 4 resources → Almost nobody finishes our onboarding flow. Is that an onboarding problem or a product problem? Look at where they stop. If people drop at the same screen every time, it is an onboarding problem and usually a specific one: a required field the... Breaking into GTM 4 resources → How do I pick one activation metric when the product supports five very different use cases? 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 ha... Doing the work 4 resources → How do I cut time to value when the product genuinely needs setup work before it does anything useful? Invert the order. Instead of configure everything then use the product, give people a working demo environment with realistic sample data so they s... Doing the work 4 resources →

Also in Starting Up

The same ground, over in Grow & market, our Starting Up track.

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