Product growth · Ted Truscott · 15 October 2026
Before you buy more acquisition, find the growth constraint
A practical approach to product-led growth diagnosis: connect acquisition, activation, retention and economics before choosing what to build or test.
Start with the decision, not the dashboard
A team asks for a growth strategy. Marketing wants more traffic, product wants better onboarding and sales wants a new segment. Each can be reasonable. The useful question is which constraint, if changed, would create the most valuable growth. A diagnostic should help the team choose, rather than produce a longer list of possible improvements.
Follow customers through to value
Map the path from discovering the product to experiencing its value, using it again and paying. For a B2B product, distinguish the account that buys from the people who use it. An apparently healthy account can contain many inactive seats. An activation event is useful only if there is evidence that it represents customer value or predicts a meaningful downstream outcome.
Break the averages apart
Compare cohorts, acquisition sources, account sizes and use cases. A blended conversion rate can hide a promising group with a solvable obstacle, or a large volume of customers whose economics will never work. The useful question is whether a different view of adoption would change where the team directs its attention.
Prioritise potential solutions, not just problems
Once the constraint is clearer, compare different ways to address it. The answer may involve the proposition, pricing, onboarding, distribution or the product itself. Estimate the affected population, plausible improvement and commercial value. Make uncertainty explicit. A small test can be valuable because it resolves an expensive assumption, even if the immediate revenue effect is limited.
Leave with a decision the team can act on
Agree the opportunity, the assumptions, the evidence required and who owns the next step. Include the instrumentation needed to learn, and set a review date. The output should make execution easier and establish what would cause you to change direction. It should not require another workshop to interpret it.
I work with product and leadership teams in London and the Midlands on growth diagnosis, experimentation and how teams operate.
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