Field Note #005: The MVP → GA Speed Trap
Shipped it. Now, why did adoption flatline?
This field note came out of a few conversations with founders, PMMs, and growth leads. It’s not a critique. It’s an observation. One that keeps surfacing, even inside highly capable orgs.
In many launches, PMMs are asked to lead but start without full context. They’re handed documents, maybe sit in on a few PM meetings, and are expected to make sense of it all. What often follows is a sequence of deliverables: blog post, press pitch, email, one-pager. All intended to position the feature externally. But without a clear model of what adoption looks like after launch, it turns into a checklist, not a system.
The result often looks like this:
Spike on launch
Flatline by week two
No sustained usage. No movement in retention.
Code shipped. Announcements made. But nothing stuck.
Familiar? Read on.
The Problem
Despite reaching “GA,” there’s no sign that usage lifted or that value is compounding.
What Actually Happened
Teams often treat delivery as the goal. But users don’t adopt code.
They adopt behavior.
Without a supporting go-to-market loop, GA becomes a dead end.
Users miss the feature
The blog post gets clicks, but doesn’t convert
Internal teams can’t explain it, so they ignore it or file a retro and move on
Why This Happens
Product launches stall when GA is treated like a destination. As Itamar Gilad writes in his recent article The Product Operating Model Explained:
“Product discovery, product delivery, and go-to-market are parts of one continuous effort to deliver value to the customers and to the company.”
But in practice, these steps are often split. Discovery ends before launch. Delivery wraps with handoff. GTM is treated as a promotion window, not a continuation of the work.
When teams don’t share inputs, goals, and learning rhythms, GA becomes a technical milestone, not a moment of delivered value.
Shipping code isn’t the same as shipping behavior. And most teams still don’t have a system in place to support it.
No defined “Aha” moment
No embedded reinforcement
No alignment across surfaces
The common pattern: a launch driven by parallel teams with no shared timing, no shared trust, and no clear loop to help the feature land.
What High-Trust GTM Teams Do Differently
Trust changes how teams approach launches. People stay in sync because they share context early. Not because someone is stitching things together late.
In the strongest teams I’ve worked with, this showed up as tight cross-functional pods aligned on a single metric, with shared ownership and trust built into the rhythm.
Here are a few of the patterns those teams follow, they:
Define the first meaningful action before GA
→ “User invites 3 teammates and runs a report within 24 hours.”
This becomes the reference point for what adoption actually means.Build around usage flow
→ Entry points, follow-through, and reminders are part of the plan, not left for later.Shape product surfaces to support adoption
→ Tooltips, nudges, and onboarding flows are considered part of the experience, not external to it.Bring narrative decisions into the build process
→ Everyone reinforces the same core story, adapted to the medium. The message stays consistent even as the format shifts.Test weekly quickly after GA
→ Adjustments are based on where users drop or stall, not just on what gets clicked.
Where trust is present, people surface what they’re learning. PMs flag what’s not landing. PMMs don’t wait for permission to close a gap. The loop stays live while the window’s still open.
Final Note
If GA is the endpoint, growth becomes hard to sustain. The work isn’t just to ship features. It’s to help people adopt behaviour that creates real value.
Coming Soon: The GrowthFuel Launch Audit
I’m building a GTM scorecard and tool for tracking post-launch adoption. A companion to the hypothesis tool from last month.
Subscribe at growthfuel.ca on Substack to get early access, free subscribers will get it first as many other articles and resources monthly.