"How would your approach change, if your goal was to DOUBLE our activation rate?

A previous manager asked me this question ☝️

Me (gulping): “you serious?”

Manager: “Yeah. The goal isn't changing. But, just for fun, let’s talk through it. Would you change anything?"

At the time, I was leading an onboarding project that later became our growth team.

Our goal was to increase activated accounts by 15%

So we were redesigning pages. And reworking flows. And identifying segments we thoughts had potential. Running lots of a/b tests. You know, doing all the "growth" things.

And we did increase our activation rate. A little bit here & a little bit there.

But, we weren’t really moving the needle in a substantial way. We had a lot of experiments live. But in retrospect, they were small bets.

We needed to think bigger. My manager knew it.

Me (after thinking a while): “I'd take some bigger swings to move the needle more."

Manager (smiling): "Why not do that anyway?"

He was right.

We started brainstorming bigger ideas. Not optimizations. Serious changes. Ideas with potential to move the number in meaningful ways.

It was a huge lesson for me. Swing big. And next time, don’t wait for your manager to suggest it.