| skill_id | growth-diagnostics-for-stalled-products |
| name | Growth Diagnostics For Stalled Products |
| description | Diagnose stalled SaaS or product growth with an ordered retention, pricing, expansion, channel, and strategic-growth framework. Use when a founder, PM, marketer, or agent needs to find the highest-leverage growth constraint before proposing tactics. |
| skill_type | combo |
| categories | ["product-strategy","sales-and-growth"] |
| path | docs/research/youtube-library/skill-drafts/growth-diagnostics-for-stalled-products/SKILL.md |
| status | registered |
| promoted_to | apps/web/src/lib/services/agentic-chat/tools/skills/definitions/growth_diagnostics_for_stalled_products/SKILL.md |
| last_promoted | 2026-06-10 |
Growth Diagnostics For Stalled Products
Use this skill when growth has slowed, plateaued, or become harder despite continued product and marketing effort. The agent must diagnose the constraint in order. Do not skip to acquisition, experiments, or new features until earlier constraints have been checked.
When to Use
- Diagnose stalled SaaS, subscription, marketplace, or product-led growth
- Find why new marketing or feature work is not moving revenue
- Audit retention, cancellation, activation, pricing, expansion, or channel saturation
- Decide whether to keep pushing growth, optimize for profit, build a second product, sell, or stop
- Turn vague growth advice into a prioritized operating plan
Do not use this skill for one-off campaign copy, early idea validation before any customers exist, or mature experimentation programs that already have trustworthy retention, pricing, NRR, and channel diagnostics.
Diagnostic Order
Work through these questions in order. The first broken layer usually makes later work low leverage.
- Are customers leaving?
- Is pricing and positioning correct?
- Are existing customers growing in value?
- Are acquisition channels saturated?
- Do you actually need to keep growing this product?
1. Check Logo Churn First
Calculate the growth ceiling:
maximum customer base = new customers per month / monthly cancellation rate
Example: 100 new customers per month with 5% monthly cancellation creates a hard ceiling near 2,000 customers. The larger the customer base gets, the larger the cancellation count gets. Marketing flow does not automatically grow with the customer base, so churn eventually overpowers acquisition.
Inspect:
- Monthly logo churn and cohort churn
- When cancellations happen: first week, first 30 days, first 60 days, first 90 days
- Cancellation reasons with raw responses, not only summaries
- Negative reviews, bad word of mouth, support escalations, inactive accounts, missing setup data, and customers who never reached first value
- The delta between successful customers and failed customers, not only traits shared by good customers
Cancellation research rules:
- Ask "What made you cancel?" instead of "Why did you cancel?"
- Prefer free-form responses over fixed dropdowns.
- Randomize dropdown choices if they must exist.
- Do not accept "too expensive" at face value. Ask what changed after purchase or what promise failed.
- Use AI to cluster themes, then require specific details, customer IDs, and links to original responses.
