How do good product metrics look like in 2025?
What's good Acquisition, Engagement, Activation and Retention?
I love reading bigger reports with quantified data on how our industry works and how “good” looks like. I can measure it up against the narrow view I have from my line in advising around product & growth, which relies a lot on intuition and pattern matching.
Often, the learnings are not as groundbreaking as they used to be. The concept of Growth or Product-led Growth, for instance, is not that new anymore. However, to see the gap that separates the great from the not-so-good ones expressed in numbers is nonetheless fascinating.
I wanted to outline a couple of broader points from the 👉 Amplitude Product Benchmark report thats worth a read:
First impression & speed matter the most
For instance, the data shows clearly that 69% of the top performers are activating their customers within one week. (And those also have the best three-month retention)
Activation in general means how long it takes to get a prospect from being clueless about your product to “get” your value for the first time, so they can make an informed decision whether to trial/purchase your service further.
Silo organizations and why they don’t perform
Think about it from the perspective of a company that has salespeople to sell their pipeline, along with a growth department for PLG.
Let’s assume that the company has a great CRO (Chief Revenue Officer) and a Head of Growth (for PLG).
The CRO knows that speed matters. So they will optimize their sales processes as much as they can, quicker call-backs, better lead assignments to the different salespeople, and so forth.
The Head of Growth also knows that speed matters, so they optimize the onboarding of the products by experimenting with the flows, optimizing the time it takes for users and accounts to fulfill their onboarding.
Taken by itself, each one of those people is doing the right thing, but overall, they leave a lot of money on the table. Why?
Because the best way to activate your customers is not always done through either sales or a product, but sometimes a mix. The way we activate customers should be dictated by what’s best for the customer, not what the function dictates.
But most companies cannot deal with that fact.
First, know what you want the prospects to know / experience. Then think about what the best way is to do that as fast as possible.
For instance, you might discover that sales reports to you “every time our prospects see function X in a sales call, we have a high chance of selling.” You might think, hey that’s great, let’s focus on this differentiator in every sales presentation, earlier rather than later.
But maybe the correct way would be to drive this differentiator through with dedicated marketing and interactive demos that prospects can look at themselves before they get into a call with sales.
Or, this particular differentiator is so complex that there has to be a sales call first to show it, but no more than that, but then after the accounts can trial the product for a given time and return to sales whenever they’re ready.
Both of these possibilities are a mix between self-serve and high touch, and neither the growth nor the sales department is used to understanding and coming up with ideas like those.
The top performers have simply managed to have a growth department that thinks further than just experimenting with self-serve flows. They have an intimate understanding of how high-touch sales work in their company and when to use them, and when not to is actually faster.
This also applies at scale:
The top 10% large organizations outdo their counterparts across all materics if they manage to show value to their users fast, in whatever way that is. As long as it’s fast and focussed it wins.
Activation - not Acquisition - to Retain
Straight from the report is also this gem:
“…solely focusing on the top of the funnel won’t guarantee you repeat customers. [...] There’s no correlation between acquisition and retention.”
In other words, just because you have a fast growing acquisition doesn’t mean that you retain them better (aka having a better product) than your competition.
I’ve started to talk about top of funnel in this context differently, as most Marketing functions seem to still struggle with the concept of a new reality:
Marketing’s “new” job can be summarized in bringing traffic that is willing to spend time with us (and subsequently try a freemium, trial or interactive demo). If you tell Marketers to bring you traffic that can be converted into leads straight away, it will usually devolve into a useless spray-and-pray effort where they over-focus on pumping traffic numbers, optimizing ad budgets, and creating low-intent leads.
I’ve had more success with teaching companies to measure marketing on traffic that reaches their activation moments rather than the absolute number of how much traffic is created at the very top.
This works great with products that have trials or freemiums because enough of the traffic reaches the “Aha!” moment, so we can experiment with enough traffic around it with Marketing.
It also creates a clearly defined space for Growth to take these accounts that need to be activated and optimize their journey with whatever method is necessary. Marketing and Growth are now naturally incentivized like that to work together because growth flows only work if they have marketing traffic in them that’s relevant, and vice versa.
In any case, it’s good to remember the limits of user acquisition and that it cannot compensate for a bad product or lackluster activation:
“New user growth brings activity, not loyalty”
- Amplitude Benchmark Report 2025
Enterprise expansion and retention
Enterprise companies and their products often suck at retaining their accounts where there’s no natural retention due to the size of the account.
The data could not be any clearer:
“By the three-month mark, top-performing enterprise products retained 25% of users, while the median held onto just 3.5%”
This is a stark 7x gap, and it’s the biggest opportunity for enterprises that they should focus on.
The main reason for that is that there is almost always no clear overview of where and why users drop off before they buy.
Accounts and users go through different stages between being a complete stranger and becoming paying customers, yet most enterprise reporting I’ve seen only starts to care about users after they are part of a paying account, because the monetary value gives a false sense of control.
While it’s correct that only paying customers can expand later on, there’s a clear connection between onboarding ideal customer profiles efficiently and how your retention in the end looks, even if it takes a very long time to materialize:
The best enterprises I work with understand their product-led growth motion not as separate from sales but as a distribution method to get some future accounts years before they are really valuable.
Try to grab enterprise value before it becomes enterprise value. They can retain and serve their product and services to very small teams, which then grow over time while still using the same service.
A great example of this is HubSpot. A team of 3 salespeople is essentially still using the same suite from HubSpot that an expanded company with hundreds of users is.
In some extreme cases, this can also mean dropping certain customer groups from your strategic focus simply because they expand poorly. (Like Solopreneurs or specific industries that tend not to grow into bigger accounts)
Further Reading
The Amplitude report provides more detailed information and includes a segment on Activation, Retention, and Engagement, with a special focus on enterprises for each.
I highly recommend checking it out:
👉 https://amplitude.com/resources/product-benchmark-report