How to Know If Your Product Has a Growth Problem

TL;DR

Growth issues don’t start with falling revenue — they start with silent symptoms inside your funnel, user behavior, and operations. This guide breaks down the three core types of growth problems: acquisition, activation/conversion, and retention. You’ll learn how to spot early warning signs like rising CAC, onboarding dropoff, unclear value prop, verification friction, and servicing issues — and how to use these signals to diagnose and triage your product’s growth health.

Most teams don’t realize they have a growth problem until revenue stalls, CAC spikes, or conversion starts to fall off a cliff. But those symptoms show up late. The real signs appear much earlier and are hidden inside your funnel, your product usage patterns, or your operational workflows.

Areas where Growth Problems exist

Most product growth issues will fall into one of the below categories. Once a growth issue is identified, the next step is to take action to triage. 

Acquisition Issue - your product is not attracting the right users or the right amount of them. This could manifest as an awareness issue if your product’s target persona is not aware of your offering or if the target persona is too small. It could also be that you are spending more on advertising and bringing in more traffic but are not seeing the same lift in click-through-rates (CTR) or mobile app downloads. More broadly, if your Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) is high compared to industry or rising, then you may have an acquisition issue.

• Value proposition + audience alignment

• Channel + audience alignment

• Narrow target personas

• Landing page content strategy

• SEO strategy

Activation/Conversion Problems - users are not completing your funnel once started in order to experience the value of your product and generate revenue. There is significant drop-off at sign-up completion, identity or income verification, or accepting final terms to, for example, fund an account or fund a loan. “Activation” is when the consumer experiences the value of your product. It is usually a specific step in the funnel. While “conversion” is more granular and transactional - the completion of a desired action at a particular step in the funnel. I group these together here for the ease of conversation, however, understanding how they are different and how they relate will be key to unlocking your funnel’s growth potential. 

• Lengthy or friction-heavy sign-up/onboarding process

• Post Sign-up/onboarding friction (Operations Workflows creating friction)

• Value proposition isn’t communicated early or clear enough

• Time-to-value is too long

• Confusing step(s)

• Low commitment building

• Pricing issue

• Terms issue

• Missing feature(s)

Retention Problem - once converted, users don’t stay with you for long. In FinTech, customers could either not create primacy with you, balance transfer their loans to another lender, or not think of you for a later need. The customers vote with their feet and defect. The post-origination strategy is just as important as the origination strategy for product-led growth and creating viral growth loops. A key area to look out for is customer support trends - where do customers need the most support while using your product?

• Product is hard to use or not intuitive

• Customer support volumes are high

• Servicing has friction

• Lacking a post-conversion/activation value proposition

Want Help Diagnosing Your Growth Problem and Creating a Triage Plan?

At Lowe & Co Growth Advisors, we help fintech and consumer product teams run growth diagnostics, set a growth strategy, build high-conversion experiences, and ship experiments that drive measurable revenue. Creating a Growth Experimentation Strategy can be a competitive advantage and we are here to help. We can even be a partner to help execute on the growth strategy. Reach out today to learn more!