A Corrective Lens for Funnel Myopia

Most marketers and product teams can recite their funnel metrics by heart. Awareness, consideration, conversion. The ratios are tracked, the dashboards updated, the slides refreshed.

But ask those same teams why customers move (or don’t) through those stages, and the conversation usually thins out.

That’s what we refer to as funnel myopia — the habit of staring at flow without seeing the forces that drive it. It’s an obsession with movement, not meaning.

Funnel myopia narrows your view of customers into transactions and drop-offs, not lives and decisions. It tells you how many people are converting, not why they cared in the first place or what keeps them loyal after they do. It creates an illusion of precision — you can measure every click, every stage — while missing the deeper question: what’s worth being part of in the first place?

The Limits of Conversion Logic

When everything is viewed through a funnel, customers become anonymous particles being pushed along a path. The focus becomes one of optimization — shaving seconds off sign-ups, adding frictionless nudges, tightening copy. Those things matter, but they rarely change the game.

What changes the game is understanding what gives the product utility and meaning in customers’ lives — not just what drives the next conversion event. Catalytic Customers are your corrective lens here.

The Catalytic View

Catalytic Customers sit close enough to the product to know how it fits (or fails) in context. They’re not just aware or considering — they’re engaged. They use, adapt, and critique. They expose the limitations of funnel thinking because they don’t move linearly through it. They live in loops of discovery, use, and reflection. They reveal what’s missing in your understanding of why people stay, not just why they buy.

When you bring them into your process — in interviews, in prototypes, in feedback cycles — you start to replace funnel data with directional insight. You stop chasing percentages and start designing around purpose. You begin to see patterns of meaningful engagement, not just conversion milestones.

Beyond the Funnel

A healthy business doesn’t just fill the funnel; it expands the circle of people who find the product genuinely useful and worth recommending. Catalytic Customers help you build that circle. They don’t just tell you what to optimize; they show you what to elevate.

Once you move past funnel thinking, growth starts to feel less like engineering a pipeline and more like tending a relationship that keeps evolving.

---

Postscript: The idea of escaping funnel myopia and seeing growth through the eyes of your most engaged, constructive customers is one of many explored in my recently published book, The Catalytic Customer: Accelerating Innovation and Growth from the Outside In.

Learn more at www.catalyticcustomer.com.