Understand, Identify, Execute
Instrument the data first, find the drop-offs, then build products to fix them.
- Difficulty
- Moderate
- Time to result
- ~months to results
- Steps
- 3
- Confidence
- 93%
A three-step growth operating loop: first understand the funnel by instrumenting every step, then identify the biggest drop-off opportunities from that data, then execute by building products to address them. Gleit's team paused their entire roadmap for a month of pure instrumentation because 'why guess when you can know.'
Origin
Coined by Gleit as one of her 'Naomi-isms'; originated on Facebook's growth team in January 2009.
Core principles
- 01Why guess when you can know — decisions need data, not intuition
- 02Instrumentation is worth pausing the roadmap for
- 03Drop-off points in a flow are concrete, rankable opportunities
- 04This applies a product-and-engineering lens to problems historically owned by marketing/business functions
How to run it
- 1
Understand — instrument the funnel
Instrument every step of your key flows (registration, onboarding, invites) so you can see exactly where users drop off.
Pro tip Be willing to pause feature work entirely to build instrumentation — Facebook froze its roadmap for a month in Jan 2009 to do only this.
Watch out Without data you're guessing at your biggest levers.
- 2
Identify — find the biggest opportunities
Read the instrumented data to locate the largest drop-offs and highest-leverage opportunities (e.g. 20% drop-off at email confirmation).
- 3
Execute — build products to fix them
Ship product changes that address the identified opportunities, treating growth as a product-and-engineering problem rather than a marketing one.
Pro tip Bring a product-and-engineering team to problems (growth, translation, social impact) that companies traditionally hand to business functions.
In the wild
In January 2009 the fledgling growth team stopped everything on its roadmap except data instrumentation, wiring up every step of the registration and onboarding flows. Alex Schultz famously wore a shirt reading 'why guess when you can know.'
→ They could see exactly where drop-off happened, which let them identify and execute the highest-leverage growth fixes.
Common mistakes
Treating growth as a marketing job
Assuming new-user growth comes only from marketing or comms; the bigger lever is often the product itself — the registration, invite, and onboarding flows.
Is it for you?
Best for
Growth teams and PMs establishing a rigorous, data-driven approach to a funnel that was previously run on intuition
Not ideal for
Teams that cannot afford to pause shipping, or products with too little traffic to instrument meaningfully
From the transcript
“one of my naom isms is really understand identify and execute”
“in 2009 in January we basically stopped doing anything on our road map except data instrumentation and that's when we you know instrumented every step…”
“Alex often wears a shirt that says why guess when you can know”
“having this data driven product driven approach to what I think historically was more of a business responsibility at a company was sort with the…”
From the episode
Meta’s Head of Product (and 29th employee) on working with Mark Zuckerberg, early growth tactics, why PMs are like conductors, and more
Naomi Gleit