Growth Is a Chain of Behaviors
A customer journey, seven handoffs, and a more useful way to think about Growth.
The easiest way I know to explain Growth is to follow one person through a product.
Imagine someone looking for a financial app. Maybe they want to understand where their money goes. Maybe they want to make a transfer without visiting a branch. They hear about an app from a friend, search for it, and land on its website.
The website makes a promise: this product can help.
So they begin enrollment. They enter their information, verify their identity, create an account, and download the app. Then they open it, sign in, connect an account, and finally do the thing they came to do.
That final part matters. The customer did not wake up wanting to complete enrollment. They wanted a useful outcome. Everything before that outcome was merely the cost of getting there.
If the product continues to help, they may pay for it and return. If it does not, they leave. A successful signup screen on a dashboard does not change that.
This entire journey is where Growth operates.
The funnel is a debugging tool
Now imagine that 10,000 people visit the website in a month.
- 3,200 begin enrollment.
- 1,800 complete it.
- 1,100 successfully enter the app.
- 620 complete a first useful action.
- 280 become paying customers.
- 140 return and continue using the product.
These numbers are illustrative. The point is not the exact percentages. It is that fewer people continue at each step. Only 1.4% of the original visitors remain at the end.
The useful question is where people are leaving, why they are leaving, and what the team should investigate first.
Suppose 1,800 people finish enrollment but only 1,100 enter the app. Seven hundred people disappear during one handoff. Perhaps the download link fails. Perhaps identity verification completes on the web but the app does not recognize it. Perhaps users have to sign in again and cannot remember the password they created thirty seconds ago (a small masterpiece of accidental friction).
In that situation, buying more traffic may increase the number of people who reach the broken handoff. It does not fix the handoff.
This is the distinction I find useful: Growth is not synonymous with acquisition. Acquisition brings suitable people into the journey. Growth asks whether the entire system helps those people reach value and return.
Marketing is therefore part of Growth, but not the whole of it. Marketing may help the first 10,000 people discover and understand the product. Once they arrive, the work crosses product, design, engineering, data, operations, support, and sometimes risk or compliance.
The engineering work becomes obvious as soon as we name the failure. A broken app link, a slow verification service, a confusing setup flow, missing notifications, or unreliable event tracking cannot be repaired with a new campaign. Growth Engineering builds and improves the product flows, integrations, experiments, and measurement that make the journey work.
Try the funnel
I built the model below so the argument is not trapped in prose. Select a stage to see how many people continue and how many leave. Then switch to Simulate and change one handoff.
When the share of enrolled customers who enter the app rises from roughly 61% to 70%, the final number of returning customers rises from 140 to about 161. Nothing else changed. One repaired handoff preserved 21 more customers all the way through the remaining journey.
Interactive model
Seven behaviors, one journey.
Select a stage to inspect the loss. Then switch to Simulate and change one handoff to see its effect on everyone downstream.
Interactive customer growth funnel
Swipe to follow the full journey
Stage 4 of 7
Enter
“I can get into the product.”
The web-to-app handoff works and the new customer can sign in without starting over.
61% of enroll users reach enter.
Conversion
61%
1,100 of 1,800
Drop-off
700
39% don’t reach enter.
The model is deliberately simple. Real funnels branch, loop, differ by customer segment, and take place over time. A person who leaves today may return next week. A paying customer may never experience the core value. A retained customer may never pay directly.
Still, even a simple model forces a useful question: where is the journey failing suitable customers right now?
Growth lives between teams
Companies usually divide the journey into areas such as acquisition, enrollment, activation, monetization, retention, and expansion. The labels vary. The boundaries are the interesting part.
The website team can successfully complete enrollment and still send the customer into a broken app experience. The app team can build an excellent first-run flow that few people reach. Marketing can deliver qualified traffic to a product that does not keep its promise. Each team can hit its local metric while the customer loses.
This is why Growth teams are often cross-functional. A team working on activation may include product, engineering, design, data, lifecycle marketing, and operations. Their shared job is not to optimize one screen. It is to improve a meaningful portion of the customer journey.
The measurement should follow the same logic. “Completed signup” is useful, but it is a proxy. The stronger question is whether the person reached the first outcome that predicts continued value. For the financial app, that might be connecting an account and understanding spending, completing a transfer, or funding an investment account. The right event depends on what the product promises.
There is no universal activation metric hiding in a slide deck somewhere. A company has to examine what successful customers actually do, how soon they do it, and whether that behavior predicts retention. Then it can design the journey around helping more suitable customers reach that point.
The goal is value, not throughput
A funnel can make teams focus only on moving more people to the next stage.
That is not the goal. Some visitors are not the right customers. Some will understand the product and decide that it does not solve their problem. A trustworthy product should make that decision easier too.
Good Growth work removes avoidable friction for suitable customers. It clarifies the promise, shortens the path to a useful outcome, and makes the value repeatable. When that happens, the business benefits because the customer journey improved. It does not benefit because the company became better at trapping people inside it.
So my working definition is this:
Growth is the work of helping more of the right people find a product, reach its value, and return. Growth Engineering builds the experiences and systems that make that journey possible.
The funnel is simply a way to see the system: who continues, who leaves, and which handoff deserves investigation next.
The rest of this series will examine each part of that journey, from discovering the product and completing enrollment to receiving value and returning.