How customer growth and retention work hand in hand
Have you ever tried to fill up a bucket with water only to find out there are holes in the bottom? This is what can happen when the focus is on growing users without considering retaining them long term. Often when teams talk about growth, they only reference getting more users. It’s easy to celebrate app downloads, spikes in site visits, or other acquisition campaigns; however what happens after people join or visit for the first time?
Growth and retention often live with different teams, and I saw firsthand how disconnected that could get. In one case, the growth team was building content while the retention team shifted priorities because their roadmap lived elsewhere. This created delays and confusion about priorities. To solve this problem, I organized a cross-team review to map each squad’s goals to a shared metric. Once teams aligned around a common goal, the vision was clear and delivery speed improved. I learned that proactively facilitating alignment can prevent miscommunication and unlock faster, more focused delivery.
As product managers, we sit right at the intersection. Our job is to build products that users enjoy, find helpful, and solve real problems so they return again and again. The best companies design for both at once because these metrics are inseparable.
Redefine what growth actually means
Most teams define growth by new users, downloads, or signups which are helpful and extremely valuable, but only part of the story. Companies can grow fast and still struggle if new users don’t find long lasting value.
It’s easy to chase numbers that look impressive, but sometimes you need to look at the bigger picture. User counts can increase while engagement drops week over week. Understanding why people are leaving is the key to fixing the holes and building something users want to return to.
In one of my past roles, we measured retention by whether users returned within a specified timeframe after seeing a feature. If we launched something meant to improve retention, we would track when someone first interacted with the feature and whether they came back. Working with the data analytics team, a value amount was assigned to each user that came and visited the app in the specified timeframe to quantify their value.
This small shift forces teams to think about the long term vision and a different perspective on what success looks like. When growth includes retention, you build for long-term value and not just temporary spikes in growth.
Design retention into your growth strategy
Growth hacks like discounts or giveaways can attract a quick surge of users, but they rarely last if the core product doesn’t deliver. Instead, it’s important to focus on durable ways to make early interactions genuinely valuable.
When I shifted my focus to improving retention, I added product discovery content into the experience. The idea was to make the platform a place people came to for inspiration and to make purchasing decisions, rather than leaving to browse another platform. At first, I was hesitant and concerned that adding product discovery content to the platform would distract users from making a purchase, taking them out of the shopping journey, and decreasing conversion. However, the tests showed the opposite. Users were actually more confident in their decisions after spending time exploring, as we saw clear lifts in both retention and conversion. This uncovered a new customer need, enforcing the impact product discovery content had on customers, leading towards higher resource allocation, and being prioritized in organizational roadmaps.
I also worked closely with personalization teams to make these experiences feel more relevant to each customer. We used data signals like search history, location, and existing algorithms to tailor what people saw. When people feel like a product understands them, the whole experience becomes smoother and more enjoyable. Personalization doesn’t have to be complicated, and even small adjustments can make users feel more connected and increase the chance users will return.
Adding inspirational content and encouraging personalization are retention techniques that can be built into a growth strategy. That’s why it’s important to think of growth and retention as one continuous system. Every decision you make for one impacts the other. Keep in mind not just growing users, but to ensure they keep coming back to the platform for a successful long-term growth strategy.
Cross-team collaboration for growth and retention
Retention succeeds when it becomes a company-wide mindset. Everyone, including product, marketing, research, design, engineering, analytics, and more, plays a big part. Teams need to agree on what success actually means. If marketing is focused only on acquisition, while product cares about engagement, they’ll pull in different directions. Shared goals like “active users after 30 days” or “repeat purchase rate” keep everyone aligned.
In order to enforce alignment on retention, I scheduled regular alignment meetings between marketing, product, research, design, and engineering teams to ensure we weren’t making isolated decisions and that every team’s work supported a consistent, retention-minded user journey. Before this, teams were often asked to complete tasks with little context. For example, in my previous experience, research was often asked to run studies based on narrow, isolated questions. Once the research team understood the broader retention goals, their work became much more insightful and actionable. That shift influenced the broader organizational roadmap and helped everyone make better long-term strategic decisions.
Retention isn’t just a product problem – it’s a company-wide mindset. When every team feels ownership over the user journey from the first touchpoint to long-term engagement, the result is a more cohesive experience and stronger, lasting growth.
Measuring growth and retention
Once growth and retention are connected, measuring them becomes much clearer. Numbers help you see what’s working and where to adjust.
For growth, the most important things to track are:
- Activation rate- how many users reach their first meaningful milestone
- Conversion rate- how many visitors or free users become engaged or paying users
- Organic vs paid growth- whether people come on their own or through campaigns
For retention, focus on:
- Retention rate- how many users return after their first day, week, or month
- Churn- how many stop using the product
- Engagement- how consistently users interact with core features
- Customer lifetime value- how much value a user brings over time
One area where I grew the most was in how I approached engagement metrics. Early on, I only tracked whether users clicked the main entry point, which left many questions about how they were actually using the feature. To get a clearer picture, I partnered with analytics and engineering to log which elements users viewed and interacted with. These deeper insights revealed what parts of the experience resonated, where users hesitated, and what needed simplification. Acting on them, we made targeted changes that directly improved retention. That taught me engagement isn’t a single metric, but it’s a reflection of the user journey and requires curiosity, collaboration across teams, and a willingness to question assumptions.
Metrics aren’t just for reporting. They should help guide decisions, shape experiments, and show where to focus next.
Bringing it all together
When I started in product management, everyone talked about growth. Retention wasn’t part of the conversation, and I didn’t fully understand how much it mattered. Over time, I learned they are not two separate goals, but two sides of the same coin. Growth gets people in the door. Retention keeps them engaged and builds long-term success.
As product managers, we connect the dots across teams, data, and user experiences. We help shift the conversation from “How do we get more users?” to “How do we keep delivering real value so people want to stay?”
That mindset is what turns one-time visitors into long-term customers. It’s not about filling the bucket faster. It’s about fixing the leaks so it actually stays full.
