There’s a product analytics company, they’re five years in, and growth has plateaued.
The team is heavy on product people – smart, capable folks who genuinely care about what they’re building. When you ask them about customers, they’ll tell you the same thing: “Customers love the product.”
But here’s the problem: love doesn’t pay bills. Love doesn’t create daily habits. And love sure doesn’t explain why adoption isn’t where it needs to be.
It’s a classic trap we see with mature companies.
The product team hears “love it” from a small handful of users who poke around, maybe connect an API or two, and then… nothing. They don’t come back. They’re not making it part of their workflow.
Hearing feature love, not job progress, are two very different things – and it’s probably the source of low product adoption.
“Customers love it” is killing your growth
Let’s say I’m talking to the CEO of this business. Here are the initial questions I’d ask her:
- “Walk me through the last three customers who signed up but didn’t stick. What did they say when they quit?”
- “What’s the top complaint you hear from sales or CS about why deals stall?”
- “If you had to pick one job customers hire you for versus spreadsheets or Mixpanel, which is it?”
- “Your team is product-heavy; so who owns chasing weird customer signals right now? What’s the strangest behavior you’re seeing?”
These aren’t gotcha questions.
They’re mainly about finding the struggling moment. The struggling moment is where you find the real Jobs to be Done. And the real Job is almost never what you think it is.
From low product adoption to consistent growth starts with understanding your customers
So, after we chat, I dig that little bit deeper as product development consultants, we find there are usually a few things that surface.
The product team says customers love the product, but the adoption rate tells a different story.
And that gap (between what people say and what they do) that’s where the gold is.
If I was this CEO, I’d grab ten recent signups who connected APIs but aren’t active daily, and I would run them through three paths:
- First, their baseline. How do they do analytics today? Spreadsheets? Manual dashboards? What’s that look like? Time it. Where’s the friction?
- Second, your product’s first use. Same task, but in your tool. How long does it take? What’s their confidence level? What’s missing?
- Third, a repeat use simulation. Week two, new data comes in. Are they still checking the old tool? Is there habit friction?
You’re looking for where they bail. Is it the mapping? Is the value not showing up fast enough? This is the stuff that matters; the stuff you need to double down on.
We did something similar with InVideo. They’d plateaued growth despite initial healthy signups. The product team kept hearing customers say they loved the features. But when we dug in, we found they’d built for too many Jobs.
There were different jobs, all creating tension with each other – the source of the products overall low product adoption. We helped them drop the tension one, and they went from plateau to $25 million in six months. Not because they added features, but because they got clear on the Job.
How to navigate this with your team
Product teams fall in love with features because they built them. That’s human.
But the job of the head of product is to help them fall in love with the customer’s progress instead.
Here’s how I’d navigate it:
Start with their story and certainly don’t lecture. In this instance, I would say, “Hey team, love hearing customers say they love the product. Tell me about the last three who said that but didn’t integrate APIs. What happened next?”
Next, I’d hunt for the gap. I’d pull ten recent signups, and ask “See where they bail? That’s the struggle we own. Not the features they poke once.”
Reframe the win as this: “our job isn’t feature love. It’s creating daily habit. It’s progress. What Job are we really solving here?”
The real question is this: What’s the top feature your team thinks customers love most?
Now ask yourself: Do customers repeat that behavior? Or do they do it once and disappear?
If you’re being honest, you probably know the answer. And if the answer is “they don’t repeat it,” then you’ve found your smoking gun.
The product team is hearing feature love because that’s what they’re listening for. But signals – and I mean real signals – say there’s an onboarding gap or an ongoing use gap. Multiple API integrations killing completion. Evaluation stage stalls. Whatever it is, the signal is there: you just have to listen for it.
The Job is never the product.Once you see the hole you’re trying to fit into – the problem, the struggle, the progress your customer is trying to make – building the right product becomes a whole lot easier.
So what’s one weird signal that’s been bugging you most? Start there.