Founder of BreakGround and author of Design Alchemy. Practical writing on UX, user onboarding, activation, retention, and product design.
View all authorsRetention is the metric everyone talks about. Activation is the metric that decides whether retention even gets a chance to matter.
If a user signs up, opens your product, and doesn't get to the thing they came for inside the first minute, the rest of the funnel is academic. They don't churn — they evaporate. You won't see them in your retention dashboard because they were never there long enough to count.
Most product teams say they "know their users." Pressed for specifics, what they actually have is a vague sense of who's signed up — a sketch built from sales calls, the loudest voice in support, and the founder's gut. That sketch is not a mental model. It's a guess wearing the costume of a guess.
Real understanding is more boring than that, and harder to fake.
Walk into any SaaS product built between 2014 and 2022 and you'll meet the same houseguest: a five-step tour that interrupts you the moment you sign in, pointing arrows at things you haven't asked about and didn't know you needed.
The tour exists because someone — usually someone senior — argued, correctly, that users don't know how to use the product. Then someone else — usually someone in design — built the obvious solution: show them. The tour is the fossil of an honest impulse.
It still doesn't work.
Time-to-value is the most-cited metric in onboarding decks and the least-measured one in actual products. Almost every team can name it. Almost none of them have a chart of it open in a tab right now.
That gap is not an oversight. Time-to-value is annoying to measure properly, and the easy ways to measure it are the wrong ways. This is a primer on the measurement, not the concept.
Open any product on its first day of use and the first thing you see is a screen with nothing on it. No projects yet. No reports yet. No teammates yet. The empty state.
For most teams, the empty state is the last thing the design org thinks about and the first thing the new user sees. The math is bad.
NPS is the most influential metric in B2B software and one of the easiest to lie with. The lie isn't usually deliberate — it's structural, baked into how the metric is computed and where it gets sampled. Most NPS dashboards are reading their own noise.
Every product team can draw their activation funnel. Sign-up → email confirm → first action → activation event. Four steps, neat and rectangular, the kind of diagram that fits in a slide.
The actual activation funnel — the one that describes what happens to real users — is shaped nothing like that. Most of the leverage in activation is in steps that don't appear on the diagram, because they don't appear in your tracking either.
Tooltips are the most over-deployed and under-edited element in modern product design. Every product has hundreds of them. Most products would be improved by deleting most of them.
The reason tooltips proliferate isn't that they're useful — it's that they're cheap to ship. A tooltip is the answer the team gives when the interface isn't legible enough on its own and the deadline is too close to redesign it.