Situation
I have naturally practiced product growth strategies since before it was a known and named disclipline. First as the consulting lead for a live self-serve funnel that had to produce revenue, and again as a specialist in growth for software subscriptions.
In the first case, a high-consideration subscription business (thousands of dollars per year) had an audience but not a coherent product-led loop. Activation, packaging, pricing, and retention were treated as separate departments instead of one funnel.
In the second, a consumer hardware company wanted software subscriptions to grow on their own terms. Growth ideas already existed across teams. What did not exist was a shared operating system: a roadmap, a testing strategy, and a view of what was already in flight.
Constraint
You cannot “growth-hack” past disagreement about what growth is. At the software company, teams held different philosophies about who owned experiments and whether growth should be a department, a ritual, or a KPI owner. Alignment had to come before a testing factory.
At the subscription business, trust was the product. Testing velocity had to coexist with a serious customer experience. We could not ship hero tests that burned the community for a conversion spike.
Decision
I treat growth as an operating system: who holds the levers, what we measure, and how experiments become roadmap.
Stand up the practice. Evaluated current structure, the history of growth at the company, and who actually owned acquisition, onboarding, and billing. One-on-ones surfaced held views, features in progress, and testable opportunities. I consolidated experimentation concepts so product and subscription teams could argue from one list, then recommended how a cross-functional growth team should sit in the org with a bias toward alignment between product and the business rather than a siloed growth department.
Own the loop. On the live subscription business I owned the end-to-end self-serve funnel: acquisition, onboarding, activation, pricing experiments, conversion, expansion, and retention. I redesigned onboarding and purchase so first-time customers could activate without a concierge bottleneck, introduced new tiers, and ran structured pricing experiments across channels. KPIs lived at the product level. Customer interviews and behavior data found monetization opportunities instead of adding features by instinct.
Lifecycle as the product. In both contexts the work was the same: find friction in the customer lifecycle, instrument it, and decide what to test versus what to build. Growth was not a campaign calendar. It was how the subscription product got used, paid for, and kept.
Outcome
- A growth product roadmap and testing recommendations the organization could staff against, plus explicit trade-offs on virtual teams versus a dedicated cross-functional group.
- Premium subscription accounts grew from 2,000 to more than 7,000 in under two years.
- Subscription revenue doubled year over year through pricing experiments, funnel optimization, and lifecycle automation.
- New subscription offerings and tiers, with KPIs that balanced testing velocity against long-term revenue quality.
What I would do again
Discover philosophy first. If leaders disagree on whether growth is a team, a ritual, or a KPI owner, experiments will not save you. Then treat onboarding as a product surface: for high-ACV subscriptions, activation quality is the growth loop.
What I would change
I would have written the operating cadence as a one-page spec on day one, then staffed it as a weekly decision rhythm instead of a sequence of hero tests.