Why the Best Growth Leaders Push Activation Into Product, Not Marketing

Ask most marketing teams what they own, and they'll rattle off acquisition channels, campaigns, and top-of-funnel metrics. Ask them about activation—getting a new user to experience value for the first time—and you'll see something strange happen. They'll claim it, but nobody believes they should.

This isn't a controversial take anymore. The debate is over. Activation lives in product. But why do the fastest-growing companies all land here? And what happens when you get it wrong?

Eight leaders who've driven growth at companies like Anthropic, Meta, Amplitude, and Mural offer an unusually clear answer: activation is where retention begins, where product-market fit reveals itself, and where no amount of advertising spend can paper over a broken experience.

The moment everything changed at Anthropic

When Amol Avasare joined Anthropic as head of growth, the company was already doing something unprecedented—scaling from $1 billion to $19 billion in ARR in just 14 months. But even at that velocity, activation was the constraint.

Activation is a really big challenge in AI. We are starting to look at how do we automate growth. Our growth platform team is driving this effort called CASH, which is Cloud accelerates sustainable hypergrowth. How can we use Cloud to automate growth experimentation? And it's delivering results.

— Amol Avasare, Head of Growth at Anthropic

The insight here isn't about AI tooling. It's about who owns the problem. Anthropic's growth platform team—engineers and product people—built systems to get users activated faster. Marketing didn't run campaigns to drive signups and hope for the best. Product instrumented the entire flow, measured drop-off, and automated interventions.

One of their "cleverest growth moves," as the host described it, was importing memory from ChatGPT. That's not a marketing play. That's reducing friction in the product itself to accelerate time-to-value. The delta between a user arriving and a user experiencing the product's core benefit collapsed—and that collapse happened in code, not copy.

What Naomi Gleit learned after 19 years at Meta

Naomi Gleit has been at Meta longer than anyone except Mark Zuckerberg. She joined as employee number 29 and helped build what became the most successful growth team in Silicon Valley history. When she talks about early Facebook growth tactics, she doesn't talk about ads. She talks about infrastructure.

The canonical Facebook growth story is about viral loops, invite mechanics, and the famous "7 friends in 10 days" activation metric. What gets lost is who built those systems. It wasn't a marketing team running referral campaigns. It was engineers and PMs instrumenting the product, testing hypotheses, and iterating on the core experience.

Gleit's emphasis on frameworks and canonical documentation reveals something deeper: activation requires cross-functional clarity that marketing teams aren't structured to provide. When five people give five different answers about a project, you don't have an activation strategy—you have chaos. Product teams enforce the discipline needed to define what activation means, measure it, and own the outcome.

The data infrastructure nobody talks about

Hila Qu, who led growth at GitLab and now coaches companies on product-led growth, cuts through the romanticism around PLG with a blunt assertion:

PLG, I always say, is actually fundamentally DLG, data-led growth. So when you give away your free product, what you want to get in exchange are two things. One is the broader reach because free product spread itself is lower barrier to entry. Two, you want to understand the usage behavior of those free users, which features do they use and which features kind of correlates with a higher conversion rate, retention rate, all of that. If you don't have a foundation of data and an understanding of how to analyze those data, you are giving away a free product for nothing.

— Hila Qu, EiR at Reforge

This is the activation argument in its starkest form. Marketing can drive signups. But the value exchange—understanding which behaviors predict retention, which features drive conversion—requires product analytics infrastructure that marketing teams don't build or maintain.

Laura Schaffer, head of growth at Amplitude, told a story that makes this concrete. At a previous company, her team inserted a few questions into the signup flow, expecting it to hurt conversion. Instead, signups improved by 5%. Why? Because asking users about their intent created clarity—for the user and for the product. That insight came from running a Navy test in the product itself, not from A/B testing ad creative.

I'm fully expecting, okay, this is gonna hurt our numbers, but maybe it won't be so bad. And I was totally wrong. We start to get the data for this thing. It improved conversion by like 5%. Like just improved signups. And it was one of those like, what? Like, okay, this, like, what is going on here?

— Laura Schaffer, VP of Growth at Amplitude

The activation lever wasn't acquisition volume. It was product experience informed by user behavior data.

Where the disagreement actually lives

Not everyone puts activation entirely in product. Elena Verna, now head of growth at Lovable, believes that the playbook has "fundamentally changed" for AI companies—and that includes rethinking traditional activation boundaries.

I feel like only 30 to 40% of what I've learned in the last 15 to 20 years of being in growth transfers here because we just need to invest in such bigger bets and innovate and create new growth loops here. Everybody and their mother is starting a vibe coding business nowadays, and we need to figure out how to be ahead of them. And to be ahead of them is not optimization of the problem. It's reinvention of the solution.

— Elena Verna, Head of Growth at Lovable

Verna's strategy at Lovable includes building in public, founder-led social, and giving away the product liberally. On the surface, these sound like marketing tactics. But look closer: the "growth secret sauce" is removing barriers to entry in the product itself. Free credits for hackathons aren't discounts—they're activation accelerants that let users experience value without friction.

The tension here is real. Verna argues that in hypergrowth AI markets, 95% of growth work is innovation, not optimization. That innovation includes distribution tactics that feel marketing-adjacent. But even in her framing, the activation mechanism is still product access, product quality, and product virality—not campaign execution.

Victoria Colombato, who built the growth team at Mural from zero, saw the same pattern. She describes Mural as her "product school," where the growth team's job was to identify where product-market fit was breaking down. Activation issues surfaced as data anomalies—user drop-off, feature adoption rates—that only a product-instrumented team could diagnose and fix.

Brian Balfour's retention-first doctrine

Brian Balfour, former VP of Growth at HubSpot and founder of Reforge, argues that most teams think about growth in the wrong order. They start with acquisition, move to activation, then worry about retention. He flips it:

At the end of the day, if you have terrible retention, the other parts of the engine don't really matter. The company with the best retention in any specific category is going to end up being the winner. Retention essentially interacts with all different parts of your growth model. The more customers you retain ends up driving your acquisition loops, viral-driven loop, or even a paid loop. The longer you retain a customer, the more interaction points to drive those specific loops.

— Brian Balfour, CEO at Reforge

This reframes activation entirely. It's not a step between acquisition and engagement. It's the beginning of retention. And retention is a product problem, not a marketing one. You can't retention-market your way out of a product that doesn't deliver value.

Balfour's framework puts product teams at the center of the growth engine. Activation metrics—time to value, aha moments, feature adoption—are retention leading indicators. If those metrics are owned by marketing, you've structurally misaligned the team responsible for the outcome.

The product discovery tax that marketing can't pay

Teresa Torres, a product discovery coach, offers the clearest explanation for why activation must live in product: continuous customer feedback loops.

Her philosophy is simple—products are never done, and the only way to improve them is through fast, continuous feedback from users. Activation is where this feedback matters most. A user's first session is the highest-signal moment in their lifecycle. What confused them? What delighted them? What made them leave?

Marketing teams can survey users. They can analyze campaign performance. But they don't run the discovery process that turns user confusion into product changes. That requires embedding customer voice into product roadmaps, testing assumptions in-product, and iterating on the experience itself.

Torres talks about the "big shift from outputs to outcomes"—teams moving from building features to driving impact. Activation is the ultimate outcome-driven problem. It's not about shipping an onboarding flow (output). It's about getting users to value (outcome). And outcome ownership requires the authority to change the product, not just message it differently.

The org chart tells the truth

When Amol Avasare cold-emailed his way into Anthropic, the company didn't have a growth team. When they built one, they didn't hire marketers—they hired product people. The growth platform team at Anthropic automates experimentation in the product. Their activation wins come from product changes, not campaign optimizations.

The same pattern repeats everywhere. Naomi Gleit's growth team at Meta was full of engineers. Hila Qu's PLG work is rooted in product analytics. Laura Schaffer runs experiments in the signup flow. Victoria Colombato was hired as the first growth PM at Mural—PM, not marketer.

The org chart is the strategy. If activation is a marketing problem, marketing owns the team. If it's a product problem, product owns it. The companies growing fastest have made their choice.

There's a reason for this. Activation sits at the intersection of user intent, product capability, and behavioral data. Marketing can influence the first. Only product can change the second. And understanding the third requires analytics infrastructure that lives in product, not campaigns.

The clearest signal that activation has moved to product? When companies stop talking about "marketing-qualified leads" and start talking about "activated users." The former is a handoff. The latter is an outcome. And outcomes belong to the teams that can actually change them.