I've sat in hundreds of growth reviews across HP, Lennox, Citi, PayPal, Lenovo, Criteo, and Astound. And in almost every one, the team arrives with the same confidence: we know where the problem is.
They're usually wrong. Not about the data — the data is almost always right. About which data to look at.
The bias towards the top
Growth teams overwhelmingly optimise acquisition. It's the most visible metric, it moves fastest, and it's the one most directly tied to marketing spend — which means it's the one leadership asks about most.
But acquisition optimisation with a broken middle or bottom of funnel is one of the most expensive mistakes a growth team can make. You're filling a leaking bucket.
The most common growth problem isn't that not enough people are entering the funnel. It's that too many people are leaving it at a stage nobody is watching closely enough.
The diagnostic I use
When I audit a growth programme, I start at the bottom and work up. Always.
Step 1: What's the retention rate at 30 days? If this is below 40% for a SaaS product, acquisition spend is largely wasted. You need to fix retention before you can scale acquisition.
Step 2: What's the conversion rate between trial and paid? I've seen companies with excellent trial start rates and catastrophic trial-to-paid conversion — and a 10% improvement here is worth 3x what the same effort would yield at the top.
Step 3: What does the first session look like? Time to value is the most underanalysed metric in growth. If users don't experience the core value in session one, you're not a retention problem — you're an onboarding problem wearing a retention mask.
What the data usually shows
In my experience across 20+ growth programmes, roughly 60% of the performance gap lives in the middle of the funnel — activation and early retention. About 25% lives in acquisition inefficiency (wrong channels, wrong messaging). And about 15% lives in genuine product problems that no amount of marketing will solve.
Most teams spend their time and budget in the inverse of this. They pour into acquisition, do moderate work on activation, and treat retention as something the product team owns.
The fix
Instrument the full funnel. Not with vanity metrics — with behavioural signals that predict retention. The specific actions that correlate with 30-day retention in your product are the ones that should be driving your activation design.
Find yours. Build your onboarding around them. Then, and only then, scale acquisition.
The funnel isn't lying to you. You're just asking it the wrong question.