How to align User Acquisition and Product Development : 5 expert strategies

For many user acquisition specialists, their responsibilities don’t end with the last step of onboarding. The role of the UA team is increasingly cross-functional touching retention, purchases, in-app experience, and the lifetime value of users. This means it is increasingly important for app growth teams to eliminate silos, especially when it comes to the marketing and product teams.

But it can be a challenge to establishing team dynamics that boost communication without bogging the team down with endless meetings. To find out some strategies that are working, we asked UA experts to share how they’re closing the gap between acquiring new users and accomplishing the bottom of the funnel goals. Check out their insight below. 

How do you connect with your product development team?

“A recent experience with our app Fintonic emphasized to me just how important it is as a marketer to understand and invest your time in your product and product team. Especially when the company is at an early stage or opening in new markets and the focus is on finding out how to deliver value to the user.

I’ve been focused on growing our user-base in Latin America and it’s been a challenge to increase conversions. At Fintonic, a user conversion is defined as someone who synchronizes at least one bank with the app. But what I was finding was there were many new users that wanted to try the app who were hesitant to connect their bank accounts. Speaking with product, we decided to make a “demo bank” that would generate fake movements for 7 days, to simulate how the app works.

What we found was that the modification grew user curiosity and the demo transactions made them more comfortable with connecting their real accounts. It ended up increasing the conversion rate by 12% and more importantly, got a lot more people to start to organize their personal finances with the help of our app.”- Raimundo Llao, Growth Marketer Latam at Fintonic.

“At Innogames, marketing is involved from the early stages of game development. We realized it helps everyone if Marketing is kept up to date and can give valuable input to the different stakeholders. Since we monetize with in-app purchases, down the funnel KPIs play a key role in how we approach marketing activities. This requires having a very precise analytical model in place that allows us to estimate the expected payout of each cohort from the very start of their playtime. The model allows us to successfully plan accordingly and achieve our goals.”- Pau Quevedo, Senior Programmatic Advertising.

“I think that all too often companies have an environment that feels like Marketing vs Product instead of accepting that it really has to be Marketing & Product. In every company, it is important to define – from an early stage – that the two departments need to work together, and not one in function of the other.

In my experience, I have seen many dysfunctional team dynamics that result. For instance, a simple decrease in registrations can become a confusing blame game. The product team will say it’s because the UA team acquired bad users. But of course, from the marketing side, the cause will appear to be that the app functionality is not clear, and is causing our “excellent users” to drop off at registration.

These kinds of situations can be toxic for the company. Instead of finding out what the real cause is, the two teams’ main goal is to beat the other and come out as “Right”.

The main benefits of Marketing and Product working closely together is that they can look at the same set of data and see it from two different sides. If they learn from each other instead of blame each other or feel competitive, they can be a powerful force. And similarly, if they work together, when the product team launches a new feature, the marketing team can better communicate the message and benefits because they are more intimately familiar with the product features.

In the same way, if the marketing team is struggling to get users to do a specific action, they can suggest a specific feature or onboarding to improve the situation. In that way the marketing team becomes the product ambassador, communicating the product clearly. They have to be the one who knows how the audience perceives the product. And I believe, as marketers, it’s our responsibility to use that knowledge to make better products.”- Lorenzo Rossi, app marketing freelancer and consultant.

“At Social Point, we are working very closely with the product to make sure we are aligned in terms of goals and geo’s we are focusing on. Month over month we analyze LTV’s per geo and per platform to make sure we are spending our marketing efforts in the best possible and most profitable way. Also, since ad monetization is playing a much bigger role these days, we are working closer than ever before to make sure the user experience is at its best.“ –Michael Jessen, User Aquisition Specialist at Social Point.

“For me, a big positive shift towards uniting marketing and product has come from beginning to view conversions in terms of loops instead of funnels. The linear funnel is usually divided into Top of the Funnel (owned by marketing), Middle of the funnel (owned by sales), and the rest beyond is the responsibility of the product team. But this traditional view inadvertently creates silos, pushing teams to invest in linear activities. The idea becomes “the more you pour into the top of the funnel the more you harvest in the lower part of it”.

But if you shift to the concept of conversion loops, the dynamic changes. The key question becomes “how does each cohort of users lead to another cohort of users”. This way of thinking has powerful consequences for the entire team, as the mindest shifts to “the more users we bring who convert, the more revenue we have to reinvest in ads, which in turn will bring more users”. The loop concept keeps the big picture clear and everyone is able to align and work towards the company’s real goals for growth.” –Arturo Camargo, Head of Growth in LATAM at Headway.