Objective Tagging: Pirate Metrics (AARRR)
Charting the Customer Voyage from First Click to Profit
Dave McClure uttered “AARRR” at a 2007 SeedCamp workshop and product managers have been talking like pirates ever since. More than a catchy acronym, the five-stage funnel—Acquisition, Activation, Retention, Referral, Revenue—offered the first end-to-end, metric-centred view of how a product creates compounding value. Today, tagging roadmap items with AARRR lets SaaS teams pinpoint which leaky bulkhead sinks growth, frame board conversations around numbers not vibes, and slice investment by lifecycle stage with a single glance in RoadmapOne.
I’ve always had a soft-spot for Pirate Metrics; ever since the amazing Dave Slocombe introduced me to them back in 2015. They’re a super helpful thinking tool and a great way to ensure a balanced portfolio of initiatives.
1. From 500 Startups to Boardrooms
McClure’s original goal was brutally practical: help early-stage founders show traction to investors without burying them in vanity metrics. The genius was its universality—e-commerce, marketplaces, DevTools, even regulated fintech can map work to the same five questions:
| Stage | Key question |
|---|---|
| Acquisition | How do users find us? |
| Activation | Did they reach a first “Aha!”? |
| Retention | Will they come back? |
| Referral | Will they spread the word? |
| Revenue | When do we get paid? |
Boards love it because each stage pairs naturally with a single north-star metric—CPC, Time-to-Value, Logo Churn, Viral Coefficient, LTV-CAC.
2. Deep Dive into Each Stage
2.1 Acquisition: Winning Qualified Attention
Acquisition spend usually dwarfs the rest, but mis-tagging hides it. By labelling every roadmap item that touches lead flow—SEO schema fixes, LinkedIn ad integrations, co-marketing landing pages—as A-Acquisition, a PM can contrast cost per signup with engineering hours. If CPC drops while dev spend spikes, the board understands why.
Example tag:
AARRR: Acquisition ∙ SEO Rich-Snippets
2.2. Activation: Speeding Users to “Aha!”
The most common SaaS pitfall is celebrating signups while 60 % never realise value. Activation work includes guided tours, default templates, empty-state illustrations, and API quick-starts. Tagging clarifies how retention forecasts depend on activation velocity, making slow onboarding a portfolio-level problem rather than UX’s side quest.
2.3. Retention: Fighting the Rust of Indifference
Support tooling, performance hardening, and behavioural emails all serve Retention. Yet because they feel “maintenance-y”, they’re often dumped under Run/BAU and down-prioritised. AARRR tagging reframes them as revenue compounding: a 2-point churn drop on a £50 m ARR base equals £1 m in new ACV without a single sales call.
2.4. Referral: Bottling Delight
Virality rarely appears spontaneously—engineers must expose sharable artefacts, product-led prompts, or partner webhooks. By tagging these items clearly, PMs surface the trade-off between brand reach and core feature velocity. Boards grasp how a “Share workspace” button, though tiny, can shift the funnel’s entire cost base.
2.5. Revenue: Extracting Value, Not Just Visitors
Pricing-plan paywalls, metering logic, Stripe tax localisation—every line of code that turns usage into cash belongs here. When the CFO challenges freemium expansion, the CPO can filter RoadmapOne by R-Revenue tags to show explicit capacity assigned to monetisation versus vanity metric pursuits.
Funnel Analytics Meet Tag Analytics
Case: A B2B collaboration startup noticed CAC rising 40 % YoY. Tag analysis revealed <12 % of quarterly capacity went to A-Acquisition while the paid-media budget ballooned. Rebalancing to 22 % capacity on Acquisition (SEO automation, referral programme) halved CAC within two quarters.
Anti-Patterns to Avoid
- Stage Soup – Tagging a single epic with every stage defeats prioritisation. Stick to the earliest funnel stage the work affects.
- Blind Spots – “We have no Referral work because virality isn’t critical.” If your NPS is 60+, referral should be inevitable—the absence of tags is a risk signal, not a shrug.
Board-Level Storytelling
Imagine presenting this slide:
“Next quarter 35 % of engineering hours target Retention. Cutting £200k here merely shifts churn from 6 % to 8 %—wiping £1.4 m ARR. Conversely, a £100k bet on Referral tags has a 3× LTV multiplier.”
The numbers align because the tags align. The board debates strategy, not accounting codes.
Key Takeaways
- AARRR tagging turns an abstract funnel into a living investment ledger.
- Boards and growth teams see the same slice of effort, killing funnel blame games.
- In RoadmapOne, tag-driven charts replace spreadsheet archaeology, letting pirates steer by clean stars, not cloudy tea leaves.
