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If activation feels fuzzy in your company, you’re not alone.
In fact, Rodrigo Fernandez has seen the same pattern across hundreds of SaaS businesses: growth teams get handed “increase activation,” but no one actually owns what activation means, how it’s defined, or how it’s measured.
And when activation isn’t owned, it becomes a committee decision. It turns into noise. And your product data stops being useful.
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The uncomfortable truth: activation isn’t “discovered” but decided
Rodrigo’s most important point is also the most controversial:
“Activation is a metric that needs to be defined top down, not bottoms up.”
Most teams do the opposite. They start by looking at what users are doing, then try to reverse-engineer an “aha moment” from event data. That sounds data-driven, but it often creates chaos – because users don’t all want the same outcome, and your product likely supports multiple jobs-to-be-done.
Rodrigo’s metaphor nails it:
“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.”
Bottoms-up activation creates activity. Top-down activation creates direction.
Why most teams misdefine activation
Here’s what Rodrigo sees constantly: the person “in charge of activation” starts asking everyone else what it should be.
Sales says activation is when the user talks to sales. Customer success says it’s when they pay. Product says it’s the “aha moment.” Marketing says it’s completing onboarding.
The result:
“The person that’s quote unquote in charge of activation gets all these different answers and ultimately ends up in the same spot where they started – they don’t know.”
Then the dashboards fill up. Everyone has opinions. Nobody has accountability.
If you want a simple diagnostic: If activation is a debate instead of a decision, you don’t have an activation metric – you have an activation argument.
The activation myth: one event = value
A common activation shortcut is choosing a single event and calling it “the aha moment.”
Rodrigo calls out the classic Slack example:
“Some companies define activation as the aha moment… like… send 2000 messages as the activation aha moment.”
Single-event activation is appealing because it’s clean and easy to track. But it often fails because it measures activity, not value.
The fix: define activation as an equation, not a moment
Rodrigo’s alternative is more demanding, but far more accurate:
- Start with the value your product promises.
- Translate that value into the job-to-be-done.
- Define the set of critical events that indicate a user is actually on the path to that value.
- Track the journey between those events, not just page views.
What this looks like in practice
Instead of saying:
- Activation = “Created project”
You define something like:
- Activation = Created project and invited teammate and connected integration and shipped first output
Not every product needs multiple “planets,” but most do once you’re past a simple single-player workflow.
How to build your activation definition in 60–90 minutes
You don’t need a complex analytics setup to start. You need clarity.
Step 1: Write your value promise in one sentence
Example format:
- “Users come to us to ___ so they can ___.”
If this sentence becomes five sentences, your activation metric will too.
Step 2: Pick one primary persona
If you try to define activation for everyone at once, you’ll define it for no one.
Start with the persona that:
- drives the most revenue, or
- represents your best-fit customer, or
- has the highest retention potential
Step 3: Define the “activation equation”
List the minimum set of outcomes that prove the user is on the path to value.
Ask:
- What must be true for the user to say, “this works for me”?
- What must they set up?
- What must they complete?
- What must they see?
Step 4: Map the journey (don’t start in your analytics tool)
Rodrigo’s advice:
“Go to Figma Jam or Miro, and literally… draw boxes… start with value.”
Map:
- the key events (your planets)
- the steps to get to each event
- where the user can branch, get stuck, or drop
Step 5: Instrument only what matters
Avoid the “just track everything” trap. Rodrigo’s warning:
“Don’t just inject a product analytics tool and think that it’s going to track everything in the world because it’s not.”
Instrument:
- the key events that make up activation
- the steps that block users from reaching them
Everything else is optional until you’ve improved the journey.
The hidden reason teams stall at $10M
Rodrigo makes a blunt point: companies can get surprisingly far with messy instrumentation – until they can’t.
“We just onboarded a client, they’re a $10 million SaaS company… their data is terrible. And now they can’t go past.”
When you don’t have usable product data:
- you can’t diagnose drop-offs
- you can’t test improvements quickly
- you can’t explain why growth slowed
- you can’t confidently prioritize roadmap or onboarding changes
Growth becomes guesswork.
AI can make activation worse (if it doesn’t add value)
Rodrigo also shares a story many product teams should hear right now: a company added AI and saw a drop in activation.
Why?
“It happened because the AI never added value… Now the user loses confidence that your product can do anything because the product feels bloated.”
The lesson: AI doesn’t earn points for existing. It earns points for getting the user to value faster.
If your AI feature:
- adds steps,
- feels gimmicky,
- or produces low-confidence output,
it can reduce trust and slow activation.
A practical rule of thumb:
- If AI doesn’t remove friction from the activation journey, it probably doesn’t belong in the activation journey.
A simple activation scorecard you can use this week
Use this checklist as a quick self-audit:
- Ownership: Is activation owned by one person (not a committee)?
- Definition: Is activation written down as an equation (not a vague “aha”)?
- Value: Does activation reflect real user value (not internal preferences)?
- Journey: Do you have a mapped path (steps + key events)?
- Instrumentation: Are you tracking blockers, not just events?
- Iteration: Are you running experiments based on drop-offs?
If you answer “no” to more than two, your activation metric is probably not helping you scale.
Activation doesn’t stop at the product — it applies to your growth engine too
One of the biggest themes in this episode is ownership.
Activation breaks when no one owns it. Metrics fail when they’re disconnected from real value. And growth stalls when teams chase activity instead of outcomes.
That same pattern shows up outside the product, too — especially in paid acquisition.
Many B2B teams are pouring money into ads, watching CPL fluctuate, and arguing about attribution… without a clear definition of what “value” actually looks like on the other side of the click. The result feels familiar highlights chaos, noise, and dashboards that don’t answer the real question: is this driving profitable growth?
If that sounds familiar, this next session is worth your time.
Upcoming live session: Making paid ads profitable again
Running paid ads feels harder than ever? You’re not imagining it.
In this live webinar, Devin Littlefield (CEO at MarketVantage) will break down how top B2B teams are reducing ad spend while improving lead quality — by applying the same value-first, metric-driven discipline Rodrigo talks about in this episode.
