Growing a B2B product
Structure Cloud
Joined as an engineer, stepped into the product role when there wasn't one. Led the product for 5 years — grew it from launch to $20M+ ARR.
My approach
Decomposing ARR
ARR = Trials × Conversion × (1 − Churn) × PriceHere's the formula. Now find the levers. I broke this down into a metric tree — business metrics at the top, product metrics (leading indicators) underneath. Aligned with leadership on allocation: 70% on churn, 30% on conversion.
Churn — 70% of effort
The biggest lever. Customers migrating from Server to Cloud had established workflows — specific setups, specific jobs they relied on. I built relationships with our largest accounts, walked through their actual workflows step by step, and learned what Cloud wasn't covering.
This wasn't survey data — it was individual relationships with our highest-value customers. The result was targeted feature work addressing their specific pain points. I tracked MAU per account and feature adoption as early signals — if those moved, churn would follow.
Conversion — 30% of effort
I set up a system to reach out to everyone who uninstalled — personal email, offered a call. Also joined solution team calls to see where new users were struggling firsthand.
The insight: non-technical users — PMOs, managers — had the same job as our power users but couldn't get past the complexity. They'd try the product and bounce in minutes. Huge market we were losing at the door.
I started small to prove the case to leadership — then earned investment for bigger bets:
Quick wins first (1–2) to prove the approach and earn investment for the big bet (5). Each step had a hypothesis and targeted a specific drop-off in the new user funnel.
The team grew from 10 to 30 engineers during this period. To avoid becoming a bottleneck, I introduced Epic Owners — engineers who led features end-to-end. I brought direction and customer context, they owned execution.