
How to sequence your growth squads

The key here is that acquisition only truly makes sense after you’ve solved activation and monetization. Otherwise, you’re pouring water into a leaky bucket. But once those foundations are in place, acquisition becomes a high ROI lever. You’re feeding more users into a system that you already know can activate and convert.
Elena Verna • How to sequence your growth squads
Here’s a tight list of 5 core responsibilities for the Activation Squad:
- Define and measure activation: Identify the real "aha" moment and track the behaviors that lead to it.
- Optimize onboarding: Design flows, prompts, emails, and guided experiences that get users to value.
- Shorten time-to-value: Remove friction in setup, offer templates, and surf
Elena Verna • How to sequence your growth squads
Fix activation, and suddenly monetization improves, retention goes up, and acquisition loops actually start to work. Truly, like magic.
How to sequence your growth squads
You can spend all day driving traffic and launching pricing experiments, but without activation, it’s just churn with extra steps