The Product Death Cycle

Most products follow a predictable arc: launch, get some initial traction, then flatten. The instinctive response is to ship more features. It rarely works.

The levers that actually move growth often sit outside what product managers are trained on: adtech integrations, signup funnel testing, notification optimization, price testing, cohort analysis. Nobody owns them, so nobody pulls them.

Chen's answer is to treat growth as its own discipline, with its own org structure, workflows, and skillsets, the same way design thinking or agile engineering became disciplines.