The reading room / Issue 01
A better question.
A clearer decision.
Ten guides to the mechanisms, measures, and tradeoffs behind product growth.
- 01Strategy / Practical guide
Build a product growth model your team can use
Map the customer journey, reconcile the numbers, and identify a growth constraint your team can test.
- 02Retention / Practical guide
Read a retention curve before deciding what to build
Interpret cohort maturity, return events, and curve shape before turning retention data into a roadmap.
- 03Monetization / Practical guide
Choose between freemium, free trial, and reverse trial
Choose a free access model around time to value, recurring use, cost, and a credible reason to upgrade.
- 04Strategy / Practical guide
Where a product-led journey needs help from sales
Identify when sales can remove a buying or adoption obstacle, then define a useful and measurable handoff.
- 05Strategy / Practical guide
Prioritize acquisition, retention, and monetization work
Compare growth opportunities through a shared outcome, plausible constraints, and the evidence needed to choose a bet.
- 06Strategy / Practical guide
Turn customer discovery into a testable growth opportunity
Translate customer evidence into a specific opportunity, a falsifiable mechanism, and a proportionate experiment.
- 07Retention / Practical guide
Distinguish healthy engagement from activity without value
Define engagement through successful customer outcomes, appropriate cadence, effort, and the quality of repeated use.
- 08Monetization / Practical guide
Choose a pricing metric that tracks customer value
Evaluate pricing units for customer value, predictability, incentives, measurement, and service economics.
- 09Strategy / Practical guide
Decide when to use a growth loop or a funnel
Use funnels to diagnose transitions and loops to test whether customer outputs create the next cycle of growth.
- 10Monetization / Practical guide
Evaluate upgrade prompts without sacrificing retention
Test upgrade messages with stable eligibility, retained paid value, and safeguards for the core customer task.