If activation feels vague or muddled at your company, you’re in good company. Rodrigo Fernandez has seen the same pattern play out in hundreds of SaaS organizations: growth teams are told to “improve activation,” but nobody truly owns what activation is, how it’s defined, or how it’s tracked. When no one owns activation, it gets decided by committee. It turns into background noise. And your product data stops being actionable. Watch the full episode https://youtu.be/EHb8Ar34XFg
The uncomfortable truth: activation isn’t “found,” it’s chosen
Rodrigo’s core argument is also the most provocative: “Activation is a metric that needs to be defined top down, not bottoms up.” Most teams flip this. They start by analyzing user behavior and then try to back into an “aha moment” from event logs. That feels data-driven, but usually leads to confusion – because users pursue different outcomes, and your product probably supports several jobs-to-be-done.
Rodrigo’s analogy captures it perfectly: “Imagine you have this lake and you say, all right, anybody who likes to swim, just go there… People are swimming all over the place, diving all over the place and it just becomes chaotic.” Bottom-up activation generates motion. Top-down activation creates focus.
Why most teams get activation wrong
Here’s the pattern Rodrigo sees over and over: the person “responsible for activation” starts by polling everyone else on what it should mean. Sales insists activation happens when a user talks to sales. Customer success says it’s when they start paying. Product calls it the “aha moment.” Marketing defines it as finishing onboarding. The…