If growth feels stuck while you and your team ship features non-stop — or you're just not sure which part of the product to fix first while users complain it's too hard to use — this is the exercise we run. We use the AARRR framework (Acquisition, Activation, Retention, Referral, Revenue), but with a twist: we don't treat it as a simple funnel. We lay it over the whole user journey. That gives founders and product teams three things: a clear view of the friction points that hurt growth, a shared understanding across the team of what activation and retention actually mean for their product, and a map to prioritise experiments that move the needle.

Start by mapping the journey

We map the user journey using story mapping — activities (the high-level tasks users do), the backbone (the narrative of what's happening), and granular user tasks at each step. (It's also a good way to define MVPs and release phases.) Take a product where users create a job post, select and review candidates, and make an offer. The journey runs through a discover phase (how people find you — outbound, inbound), a learn phase (website, demo, landing pages, blog posts), account creation, onboarding (questionnaire, company setup, first job post), and ongoing engagement (checking the dashboard, reviewing candidates, managing offers).

Then overlay AARRR — with touchpoints, objectives, and metrics

For each stage we add touchpoints, objectives, and metrics, with open questions below. Under acquisition, we want to understand how people discover the product — touchpoints like the sales team, ads, website, and landing pages; the objective is to convert to demo and create an account; the metric, the percentage who create an account. Activation is where people experience real value: onboarding, first job created, first candidates reviewed. This is where the team's debate starts — what counts as activation versus retention? In our view, value isn't just posting a job; it's getting one, two, three candidates and seeing it actually works. The metric: the percentage of accounts that create their first job. Retention covers reviewing candidates, managing offers, and creating a second job — the objective being to hire the right candidate and come back; metrics like percentage of jobs with an offer sent, percentage that end in a hire, or accounts with more than two jobs created. Referral is inviting colleagues, sharing posts, bringing other companies in. Revenue is the subscription and boosts.

What you end up with is a map of everything happening in the product — how users move from one point to the next, what the touchpoints between your business and the customer are, what their objectives are at each step, and the metrics you want to grow. Think of the whole thing as a funnel: how many from acquisition reach activation, how many reach retention, how many refer. That overview is what tells you where to run your next experiment instead of guessing.

Want help mapping your funnel and finding where users leak? Get in touch.