Ultimate Guide: Activation

The hardest product team out there

The History of Activation

Activation had always been something that core product teams focused on.

To get users to use a feature, you have to make sure they try it and understand the value. As a result, for years, activation was a topic for core PMs. It existed under different names - trial, adoption, and aha - but it was omnipresent.

It’s not as if activation was just invented. But it did all change due to one company: the subject of so many of our product growth histories, Facebook. Once Facebook established its growth team circa 2008 and identified the magic moment as a key component of its model, activation became a subject of growth.

In 2013, Chamath shared his learnings on activation at Growth Hackers 2013:

After all this testing, you know what we realized?

Get any individual to 7 friends in 10 days

That’s it.

—Chamath @ 21:15

He ignited the activation rocket ship, and slowly, the ideology has swept throughout the Valley and global growth landscape.

• Before 2011, you couldn’t even find a mention of activation in the context of product on the entire internet. Even then you just find people talking about a feature being ‘activated.’

• It’s not until 2012 until you really see it out in the wild (all in the context of Facebook). And it’s not until 2013, after Chamath’s talk, when real content came out about it. But, thereafter, activation had become a key chapter in growth hacking texts.

• Then, activation saw a meteoric rise. More and more growth teams picked up activation: Dropbox to start, with many more to follow over the years. You see an explosion of content everywhere on the web from 2014-2017.

• Most recently, in the past few years, the rise of Reforge and creators like Elena Verna have given the concept a final boost. Elena goes so far as to say activation is, “the foundational piece that makes B2B growth possible.”

Activation has become a ubiquitous growth concept.

So when my manager at Affirm shared in 2021 that he was thinking I should make growth’s entire focus at Affirm activation, I wasn’t surprised.

Activation has become a core assignment for growth teams the world over: B2B and B2C.

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What is Activation?

So it’s funny how many people are confused about what activation is. If you talk to your average GTM counterpart outside growth, they probably will give you a different definition. I heard all of the following at Apollo:

• Sales: “So what actually is activation? Is that when we turn their account on?”

• Security: “They’re activated when they confirm their 2FA device.”

• Research: “So is our definition of activation when they make the purchase?”

These are all completely plausible misconceptions. Different fields have different activations. But, when we’re talking about activation in product growth:

Activation is when a user completes actions that result in their enduring use of the product.

They “get it.”

For years, product leaders would just assert these aha moments based on their own intuition. But eventually, rival executives wisened up and demanded the data. These days, the best activation moments are supported by the data. They represent an action that puts a “kink” in the user’s retention rate:

So when teams talk about activation, they talk about the product steps teams can focus on to move users towards retention.

Setup, Aha, and Habit

The most typical way to do this is three steps:

1. Setup: Users setup the feature so they can use it

2. Aha: Users achieve the magic moment

3. Habit: Users make the magic moment a habit

It can be hard to understand without an example. Let’s go back to our Facebook example with Chamath.

• Setup: Upload contacts

• Aha: 1 friend in 7 days

• Habit: 7 friends in 10 days

Activation is then the the measurement of the rate of users the product team can get to these setup, aha, and habit metrics over a certain timeframe.

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Activation is Hard!

Activation is one of the hardest things to move in product. Numerous product teams have floundered in moving the metric.

If we could all suddenly just get users to do what we want, we wouldn’t need activation teams, after all.

3 factors make activation harder than many other product problems:

1. Your typical constraint is the core product functionality remaining the same

2. It’s role in retention means that it has an outsized “Eye of Sauron”

3. As more people use a technique, its effectiveness is diminished; and, most the techniques are not rocket science

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Activation Couldn’t Be More Important

Once you build a great product, acquisition just tends to happen by word of mouth. The problem flips from acquiring users to retaining them.

This is where everyone tends to return in “The Firsts Problem.”

What is the Firsts Problem? All metrics drop off after a user’s first:

• Their first visit

• Their first session

• Their first day using the product

• Their first month using the product

So you really have to make the best use of these “firsts” as you can. That’s where activation comes into play.

It’s the best way to move retention, because it focuses on the segment of your group that has the biggest drop-off in retention.

“You never get a second chance to make a first impression.”

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Today’s Deep-Dive

To make your activation journey a bit easier, we’re going to cover 3 main topics:

1. How do you actually define each of the three activation moments?

   • Examples from several of the top activating B2C & B2B companies

   • What makes a good moment vs a bad moment

   • User activation vs account activation

2. How do you improve activation?

   • A discovery plan

   • The top 10 features that work

   • It’s not all about the product experience

3. How do you structure the team around it?

   • Core product vs growth

   • Aligning the org around it

It’s all the takeaways from my time on activation at ScoutForce, thredUP, Epic, Google Affirm, and Apollo.