Founder of BreakGround and author of Design Alchemy. Practical writing on UX, user onboarding, activation, retention, and product design.
View all authorsNPS 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.