Been pushing AARRR across product, marketing, and dev teams but everyone keeps optimizing for their own metrics.
How do you actually get different teams to think beyond their silos when using pirate metrics for growth alignment?
I found success by creating shared goals that cut across all teams instead of individual metrics.
For example, instead of marketing chasing downloads and product chasing DAU, everyone works toward the same monthly revenue target. Then you break down what each team needs to contribute to hit that number.
When everyone gets bonuses based on the same outcome, the silo thinking disappears pretty fast.
Regular dashboards help. Everyone sees the same numbers and where things break down between stages.
Make each team own a specific metric but tie their success to the next stage in the funnel. Marketing owns acquisition but gets judged on activation rates. Product owns activation but gets measured on retention. Dev owns retention but tracks revenue impact. This forces them to care about quality handoffs instead of just hitting their own numbers. Run weekly cross-team reviews where each group reports how their work affected the downstream metric.
Skip frameworks. Just share revenue numbers with everyone weekly.
The real issue is nobody talks about what happens between the metrics. Teams hit their numbers but users still drop off.
What worked for me was running monthly sessions where we walked through actual user journeys together. Marketing shows the ads that drove signups, product demos the onboarding flow, dev explains technical issues they’re seeing.
When marketing sees that their ‘great’ acquisition numbers came from users who churned in week 1, they start caring about quality over volume. When product sees that their activation flow breaks on certain devices, they loop in dev faster.
Here’s a solid deep dive on using data to build that cross-team alignment:
Make it about real users hitting real problems, not just moving numbers up and to the right.