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This podcast will help you grow your B2B company quarter after quarter—with confidence, clarity, and data-backed decisions.
In each episode, you’ll learn proven strategies, practical frameworks, and first-hand insights from GTM leaders, RevOps pros, and seasoned B2B executives. They’ll walk you through how they use data to set smart targets, forecast accurately, overcome growth plateaus, and build high-performing sales and marketing engines.
You’ll hear stories of real challenges, real results, and the data-driven moves that made all the difference.
The best B2B companies don’t just look at metrics—they use them to take action. Move The Needle will help you do the same.
Ali, Databox (00:01.634)
Welcome to Move the Needle. Today we're joined by Rodrigo Fernandez. He's the chief product lead implementer at Product Lead. I hope you have heard of Product Lead. They are probably the most well-known organization, growth partner in the product lead or PLG space. I have learned so much from that organization. They've helped 400 plus SaaS companies generate over a billion dollars in self-serve revenue.
Rodrigo Fernandez (00:02.165)
And then we'll get to the next one.
Ali, Databox (00:23.264)
Rodrigo co-created the product led implementation program with Wes Bush. He's been the fractional VP of growth for companies like Zoom info. He is quite literally writing the book right now on data driven product led. Really, if you want to learn about product analytics, about user activation, Rodrigo is the person that you talk to. And that is exactly why we are talking with you today. So welcome, Rodrigo.
Rodrigo Fernandez (00:42.613)
Thank
Thank you. I'm super excited to be here.
Ali, Databox (00:49.336)
Great, glad to have you here. So we are gonna jump right in. We're gonna take the boxing gloves off a little bit because I love that you share a lot of, we'll call them hot takes on LinkedIn, but they are experience-based, they're data-based, but sometimes controversial, which tells me a lot of people don't know this stuff yet. They're not doing user activation and PLG correctly. Let's start with one recently you said the biggest mistake that you see growth teams making is discovering their activation metrics by
Can you tell me a little bit more about that?
Rodrigo Fernandez (01:22.257)
It's so common. You know, at the core, the biggest problem is that there is lack of accountability. So, you know, you have a founder and they'll say, okay, you know, we need to, we need to, let's hire a head of growth. Number one, they think is growth marketing. They don't think product growth, but let's just say that they do think that it's product growth. And so they'll say, okay, we need you to increase activation, right?
Ali, Databox (01:31.79)
time.
Ali, Databox (01:51.81)
Mm-hmm.
Rodrigo Fernandez (01:51.989)
problem is that they don't hold the person fully accountable because ultimately the decision maker becomes the founder or becomes someone else. don't let the head of growth own the activation metric. And so what happens is that growth person or whoever is in charge of activation begins to start going to the committee. So they'll ask sales and then they'll ask marketing, what do you think activation is? Right now,
many of them also get activation wrong and they don't even know what activation means. So some companies define activation as the aha moment, but then they stick to an aha moment. It was like a single type of event. Like, you know, they send 2000 messages. We always hear, you know, the Slack, you know, send 2000 messages as the activation aha moment, right? Or they think it's,
Ali, Databox (02:36.046)
Mm.
Rodrigo Fernandez (02:51.121)
is something else, but then they'll say, okay, so sales, what do you think is the aha moment or, or activation? And then sales will always say, well, the aha moment is when, when they speak to one of our sales team, right? And then they'll go to customer success and they say, Hey, customer success, what do you think is the aha moment? Right. And they'll say, well, when they actually pay, you know, so they'll, they'll think it's activation is, is a, is a customer. And what ends up happening is that 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, where it's like, they don't know. And then they try to make decisions around that. And then they look at the data and they see the data doesn't tell them anything because they're not really in charge of the activation. Activation is a metric that needs to be defined top down, not bottom sub. Let me explain what that means.
Bottom stop means you start with the customer in mind and so you look at the data. it's like basically, know, you have, imagine you have this lake and you say, all right, anybody who likes to swim, just go there. And if you like to dive, go there too. And you know, if you like to, you know, jump overboard, go to the lake as well. The problem with that is that, is that you get people swimming all over the place, diving all over the place and you know, it just becomes chaotic.
And that's what happens with our current approach. Bottoms up. We think that activation is at the, is, at the bottom of the pool somewhere. In reality, what we need to do is it stops down as the product owner, as the, as the, as the ones building the product, you need to decide what is the value that you're offering the customer and how to get to that value. So in the analogy of the lake, you got to say, all right, if we have this lake.
Ali, Databox (04:22.2)
Thank
Ali, Databox (04:39.939)
Mm-hmm.
Rodrigo Fernandez (04:47.923)
We're going to section off this portion for those that want to swim. We're going to section off this portion for those that want to do diving. And then we're going to section off this portion for those that want to do some other thing. And then you let the user know once you understand, hi, Mr. User. Are you a swimmer? Are you a diver? Or you're just here to play with your kids? OK, you're the swimmer. Go here. you're the diver. Go there. you're the one with the Denise Kitty Pool. Go to the Kitty Pool.
Ali, Databox (04:59.427)
Yeah.
Ali, Databox (05:16.216)
Yeah.
Rodrigo Fernandez (05:16.309)
And you dictate what value they're getting and how to get to that value. And today, a lot of organizations are not thinking that way. They think the bottom's up and they don't give the person assigned to improve activation the true ownership of that metric, of that KPI, which then turns into mass chaos.
Ali, Databox (05:37.262)
Yeah.
Ali, Databox (05:40.962)
Wow. I heard a lot of, I heard a lot of spots where people are going wrong in the process and what you just shared there. There's the ownership and too many cooks in the kitchen and accountability issue. And then I also heard, a bottoms up versus top down issue. within that, I felt like I heard as well, there's like an attempt to get a one size fits all activation metric instead of tailoring it to
the individual use case of the type of user that's coming in. Is that accurate?
Rodrigo Fernandez (06:13.747)
Absolutely, absolutely. And as I mentioned, activation is not a single metric. Take for example, the case of, know, there's a ton of like data nowadays, like sales data companies, like ZoomInfo, right? So I'll give you the example of ZoomInfo and companies like it, and this applies everywhere, okay? So for ZoomInfo at the beginning, and companies like it, because I've worked with a couple already, they say, okay, well,
Ali, Databox (06:18.552)
Mm-hmm.
Rodrigo Fernandez (06:43.933)
What is activation? What is the aha moment? Well, for assuming at the beginning it was whenever someone does a search and they click on the find so that the data can display of a particular lead. And I said, OK, once they click on find so that the data can be revealed,
what is the conversion from that point to them actually paying and becoming a subscriber? And they said, less than 5%. So I said, OK, well, do you really consider that you gave value? Why did the user come to ZoomInfo in the first place? Well, they came because they needed to find leads.
Ali, Databox (07:36.771)
Mm-hmm.
Rodrigo Fernandez (07:41.397)
okay. But beyond that, what is the value that they're trying to get out of finding leads? Well, they're trying to get more deals. All right. So then if you think of, of, of your app as, as a mechanism by which they're going to get more deals, then is it really clicking on a button and having that single event, the thing that's going to give them the more leads?
Ali, Databox (07:51.459)
Have you?
Ali, Databox (08:11.424)
Yeah, you're talking about like jobs to be done, right? Not the action they took, but problem they're trying to solve. Yeah.
Rodrigo Fernandez (08:11.58)
No, right?
Rodrigo Fernandez (08:15.989)
Exactly. Jobs to be done. So one single job or even two single jobs is not going to do it. So the big question is if an SDR of an AE in this particular scenario is coming because they need to source more deals and they need to fill their pipeline, which is something that potentially ZoomInfo or companies like ZoomInfo are not able to completely fulfill because the deal
opportunity comes outside of the product. But think of it also in your own product, right? What is it? What other things they need to achieve in order to, at the very least, reveal or perceive value? Well, they need to connect their CRM. They need to be able to sync with their CRM and update those leads. They need to make sure that their
that the lead is updated and they're able to track it. They need to send emails. And so when you start thinking that way, you start seeing that in order for the user to get value, depending on how complex your product is, you have to actually define multiple events. Here's a problem though. Each of these events may require a number of steps to achieve. So for example, all right, so
Ali, Databox (09:37.666)
Thank you.
Rodrigo Fernandez (09:39.697)
In order to achieve activation, you need to reveal a couple of leads, a couple of data points. OK, that's one thing. But then you also need to connect your CRM. Well, how complex is it to connect your CRM to the product? You need a couple of steps. And then you also need to send a couple of emails. Think of Apollo, for example, who's offering all of this. They're trying to be the all-in-one type of product.
Well, how many steps do you need to actually connect to your email and then connect to your CRM? then, right? So when you think of it that way, you think of it as a bit of a solar system. You have key events that are like planets. And then every other step is basically the journey to each of them. Once you complete the core events,
Ali, Databox (10:21.815)
Yeah.
Rodrigo Fernandez (10:38.185)
That's when you actually reach activation. And the key to that is to map it all out. Map all of the, of these events that lead to the, to, the equation of activation, map it all out with product analytics, and then follow it through. And again, this is not bottoms up. This is top down. You decide as a product owner, what those steps are, because now you understand who you're, who your persona is. You understand what value they're trying to get at.
Ali, Databox (10:51.118)
You
Rodrigo Fernandez (11:08.019)
and you decide how to do that. And so that's the way that you gotta think about activation.
Ali, Databox (11:13.962)
Okay, so that makes total sense and I can also imagine why people are not doing that because it's probably much quicker and easier to pick a single activation metric than to do what you just described, right? Even if it's not that accurate or useful. There's also the risk of maybe getting lost in too many metrics and it getting really complicated. And I know that's something you've spoken about as well. You've mentioned
kind of the dangers of trying to track everything. And you said recently that creates noisy dashboards and lazy teams instead of having that discipline to really focus on what matters. So how do you strike that balance of measuring what matters without oversimplifying?
Rodrigo Fernandez (11:59.541)
You know what? Activation is very difficult. If it was so easy, we would have million dollar companies. caught up with Yara the other day with the folks at Chartmobile. They came up with, I think it was 97 % of companies do not make it to 20 million in 10 years. So only 3 % really make it to 20 million.
Ali, Databox (12:28.174)
Mm-hmm.
Rodrigo Fernandez (12:28.447)
So if activation was easy, we would have that figure, 93%, to be much lower. We would have way more companies.
The biggest challenge is people don't have a, they have a misconception of how to set these things up. And the data, the product analytics companies, because their products can be so complex, they try to make it stupid simple to integrate with their products. And so they have all this like, just, inject our code and we'll do the automatic tracking for you.
Ali, Databox (13:06.956)
Mm.
Rodrigo Fernandez (13:07.039)
Problem is that none of these companies have really solved for the big problem, is defining activation and then defining the equation for activation and then tracking that. So they just do whatever is on the screen. That never works. It just creates a ton of noise. So if you're in that camp and you have implemented amplitude or post hog or mixed panel,
And I've been through many implementations of these products. I come in and they're like, yeah, we have Mixpanel, but we barely use it because we barely understand it. And we're just tracking some stuff, but we don't even understand that either. And so if you're there in that camp, you need to just wipe it all. Go to Figma Jam or Miro, and literally.
Ali, Databox (13:35.362)
Mm-hmm.
Rodrigo Fernandez (13:58.099)
draw boxes of what are like, decide number one, what is your aha moment? What is your active? What is the equation for it? Like, so start with value. What is the value that your product is offering? Okay. What are the jobs to be done that, that your product requires to get there? So what are those, that, that equation of, of events that are important and how to get there? Once you have that mapped out,
Ali, Databox (13:59.471)
Hmm.
Rodrigo Fernandez (14:28.797)
Then you say, all right, we're going to first track the big events. When, when this happens, we have now a, an event that gets fired and is sent to the product analytics tool. Map those out first. Then you also going to map out the steps that are literally required. And there's not, this is not a screen view. No, this is like user clicked on this and this other thing happened. Right. So map that out.
Ali, Databox (14:54.595)
Yeah.
Rodrigo Fernandez (14:58.429)
And now you have a beautiful map of the journey to activation. And that is what you follow. And that is what you test. And you may have to make some tweaks to the map as you learn and you gather data, but you're soon going to find that you're going to have drop-offs, that people are going to take the wrong path or maybe a different path. But then you'll be able to map those as well and optimize.
Ali, Databox (15:09.09)
Mm-hmm.
Rodrigo Fernandez (15:27.143)
each of those journeys. But you got to start like that. Don't just inject a product analytics tool and think that it's going to track everything in the world because it's not. And it's going to just create more noise than anything else.
Ali, Databox (15:39.192)
Yeah, wow. I was gonna ask you about why most companies don't do the plumbing work, but I think I know the answer from what you've described, because it's a lot of work, right, to actually map that all out versus just picking out simple numbers.
Rodrigo Fernandez (15:53.949)
It's a lot of work, but if you're investing on the team, do it well. Look, it's never easy, but if you're already, I'm talking about companies that are generating over a million dollars. So if you're already investing in a growth person or a product person,
Make sure that you tackle data early, product analytics early. Give it its time because when you give it its time and the priority, it pays in massive dividends down the road. If you start developing your product, but you're not getting the product analytics in place, you're going to fall off the cliff very quickly and it's going to prevent you from scaling. And you'll never know why because you don't have, you never gathered the data. So that should be the number one thing that you tackle first.
Ali, Databox (16:51.168)
Yeah, wow. How often is that the case in the companies that you work with?
Rodrigo Fernandez (16:56.277)
99 % of the time.
Ali, Databox (16:59.17)
that they are tackling it first or they're not.
Rodrigo Fernandez (17:00.597)
No, that they're not tackling it. I I talk to company, I talk to 10 to 20 companies a week. And it's one of the first questions I ask. I'm actually, we just onboard a client, they're a $10 million SaaS company. And they got to 10 million, their data is terrible.
Ali, Databox (17:10.136)
Mm-hmm.
Rodrigo Fernandez (17:22.837)
And now they can't go past, they can't even grow 10 % year over year because it just prevents them. Can you get to 10 million without the data? Sure. If you're lucky, but again, you're one of that, you're that 3%. They're not the 97%. You're the exception to the rule. Right. So start early. If you're in, if you're a million dollar company, if you're a $500,000 company, you're a tiny micro company investing data first.
Ali, Databox (17:29.848)
Hmm.
Ali, Databox (17:53.187)
Got it, makes sense. All right. I feel like we can't avoid AI. We can't get around talking about that. So I saw you shared a really interesting story recently that a company added AI to their product, as is everybody right now, and they saw a 20 % drop in activation. I know the answer because I read your post, but for those who didn't, why did that happen? What went wrong?
Rodrigo Fernandez (18:16.221)
It happened because the AI never added value. Here's part of the problem that I'm seeing. So AI is the thing right now, right? And everybody's trying to be an AI first company. when you're trying to disguise yourself as an AI first company, you're saying, well, how do I add AI? All right, I'm going to use the cheapest model that is going to cost me
You know, nearly nothing. And I am going to write the shortest prompt so that all I do is just, inject some sort of AI that appears cool to the user. The problem is that the user never had a, like number one, the user was not activating.
on their own without the AI first. Now you included some sort of AI that make it look gimmicky and is not working well. And now the user loses confidence that your product can do anything because the product feels bloated, which is exactly what happened in this particular case. For AI to work well, you need multiple agents. You need to provide value. So don't start with like, I want to be AI first. No, start with what value?
Is the customer trying to get from the product? And can we get to that value faster with AI? And how can AI support that value? That's the number one question. It's not a single prompt with the cheapest model. It's typically a number of highly, highly
Ali, Databox (19:36.013)
Yep.
Ali, Databox (19:42.594)
Mm-hmm.
Rodrigo Fernandez (20:00.231)
instrumented agents in the background that are thinking and processing information and getting that information to the user. Or it's typically also, I love this whole thing like AI onboarding. we're going to start using AI onboarding. All so how are you using AI in your onboarding? Well, we basically ask some questions.
Ali, Databox (20:10.35)
Mm-hmm.
Rodrigo Fernandez (20:23.773)
And we gather that and then we present the user with some data at the end of their journey. And I'm like, well, no, that's just the wrong approach. You want to use AI during the onboarding, ask your questions, and then personalize the entire product. Set up the entire product for that customer so that they don't have to worry about setting that up. They can get to value super quickly.
Ali, Databox (20:50.092)
Mm-hmm.
Rodrigo Fernandez (20:51.795)
Don't be lazy about it because the consumer that is using your product, the end user already knows it and they have very high expectations of your use of AI.
Ali, Databox (21:04.61)
Yeah, that's good advice. Timely. Timely for us as all, the things that we're developing and with the race.
that it feels like right now and everybody developing AI, I think it's such good advice. The user is discerning and they are comparing products that have maybe AI features that are described similarly, but the proof is in the value they actually see when they get in there. Good points. Are there any ways, any other ways besides activation where you see that AI has fundamentally changed how the product-led motion is working?
Rodrigo Fernandez (21:41.791)
Completely. Even on the analytics side, I'm working with a client right now. They bring 1.5 million visitors to their website every single month across any, I don't know, 40 or 50 different countries. It's pretty cool. And one of the things that we worked on with them was hooking up a cursor to their data warehouse.
So we patched ClickHouse and their product analytics into a data warehouse. And then we got Cursor to understand and connect to their database and all the different tables. And we just began to ask questions. And so the AI basically was going through all the tables, was doing all the queries, and then reporting back and building reports for us.
Ali, Databox (22:18.51)
Okay.
Rodrigo Fernandez (22:38.057)
And so we would ask the craziest questions that it's so difficult to get from, from even a product analyst, because then a product needs a product, a data engineer to actually run the queries, to report it back. And if it's a very cumbersome process, AI works beautiful that way. It's, it's, it's not the end of it is just a process. It just makes it simpler. And for someone, most growth leaders are not very technical.
Ali, Databox (22:42.958)
Yeah.
Ali, Databox (23:05.923)
Yeah.
Rodrigo Fernandez (23:06.117)
Most marketing leaders are not very technical, but also the ones making the decisions today about the future growth of the organization empower them with those tools so that they can ask the questions and be able to move in the right direction. It changed the way that this client is operating now.
Ali, Databox (23:17.592)
Mm-hmm.
Ali, Databox (23:27.406)
It's pretty cool. I didn't ask for it, but you kind of described the data box value prop in a nice little summary there. So what we're trying to do too. Yeah. Yeah. It's really focusing on that, that non-technical user, whether it's executive functional leader, product marketing sales, across the board who, you know, doesn't have time to do that level of analysis, doesn't have the technical skills, doesn't have a data engineer. AI is going to unlock that in really a whole new.
Rodrigo Fernandez (23:33.673)
Rick!
Ali, Databox (23:56.8)
really pretty impressive way. It's very cool.
Rodrigo Fernandez (23:57.097)
Yeah. We're living in a beautiful time right now. It's tons of uncertainty, know, tons of craziness, but it is the best time to move faster and do it smartly.
Ali, Databox (24:13.944)
Yeah.
All right, three minutes left. I'm going to ask you, out of all of your pet peeves and hot takes, what is your biggest pet peeve? If there is one thing you could sink into the brains of the people you talk to around product lead, what would it be?
Rodrigo Fernandez (24:29.909)
You know what? I'm going to stick to activation is a tops down decision. If there's something that I am trying to talk a lot more and I see it all the time is exactly that. You are the product owner. You created the product. You are trying to solve for a very particular problem. So,
The one thing that you gotta do is understand who the customer, who the person is that's getting to your product and what is it that they're trying to solve for the value? What's the value that they're actually trying to get? Don't think of it as from a product perspective. Imagine that your product just didn't exist. What is it that they're trying to solve? And then,
Ali, Databox (25:21.059)
Yeah.
Rodrigo Fernandez (25:22.867)
do a handshake with them and say, right, we're going to solve this problem, but we're going to dictate how we're going to solve that problem in our product. And we're going to show you that journey. If you are able to connect that, tops down, you make the decision, you take the ownership. Okay. And as a founder, give that owner, if you're not going to take it because you you have outgrown that role, give it to your head of growth and give them full autonomy.
and decision-making power and power them to do that. Map that out. And I promise you, you're going to scale like no other company out there.
Ali, Databox (26:04.598)
Amazing. Awesome. This is a recording I will definitely be sharing around with our own team internally too, Rodrigo. I've really learned a lot. I know our audience will as well. Thank you so much for coming on today. Alrighty. Have a great day.
Rodrigo Fernandez (26:15.689)
Happy to join.
Thank you.