Most CTV growth work happens outside the app – acquisition spend, upfront decks, positioning. We work inside it: the browse rows, the onboarding steps, the paywall moment, the ad frequency dial. That's where retention and reactivation actually get won or lost.
The product decisions nobody owns
Discovery surfaces are merchandising tools, not growth loops
Browse rows, Continue Watching, and search get treated as a content calendar problem instead of a product problem. Nobody is running tests on row ordering, cold-start recommendations for new viewers, or how fast a returning viewer gets back into a show they already started. The result is a discovery layer that looks fine in a demo and does nothing for D7 retention.
Onboarding was designed for a touchscreen, not a remote
Ten-foot UI navigation with a D-pad is a fundamentally different interaction model than mobile, but most CTV onboarding flows are ports of a phone experience – too many screens, too many selects required before the first piece of content plays. Every extra click on a remote costs more drop-off than the same click on a touchscreen, and most teams don't have the instrumentation to see where viewers give up.
Paywall and trial placement is a finance decision wearing a product costume
Where the paywall sits – before browse, after a preview, at episode two – gets decided in a revenue-forecasting spreadsheet, not through testing against actual viewer behavior. A hard gate placed too early kills trial starts before anyone sees enough content to want to convert; a soft gate placed too late trains viewers to expect free access. Almost nobody is testing this deliberately.
Ad load decisions optimize the wrong window
Ad sales and finance set frequency caps to hit a quarter's CPM targets, without cookies to fall back on for capping precision, and without anyone on the product side modeling what that ad load does to session length or reactivation three months out. Short-term ad revenue and long-term retention are in tension, and right now the ad team wins that argument by default because no one else is at the table with data.
How We Help
We start with an assessment of the app as a viewer actually experiences it, not as it appears in a product roadmap doc. That means walking the 10-foot UI on the actual platforms your audience uses – Roku, Fire TV, Samsung, LG, Vizio – and mapping every step between app launch and first play, every discovery surface a viewer touches in a session, and every place the app asks for money or an account.
From there we build a strategy that ranks the product changes most likely to move retention and reactivation, not the ones that are easiest to ship. That usually means reordering discovery surfaces around cold-start and returning-viewer states, cutting onboarding steps down to what's load-bearing for personalization, and building a testable hypothesis for where the paywall should sit relative to content consumed.
Execution is embedded, not advisory. We work inside your existing product and eng cadence, writing the specs, defining the experiment design, and sitting in sprint planning – not handing over a deck and leaving. For a CTV app that means coordinating around app store certification cycles on each platform, since a change to onboarding or paywall placement usually means a new certified build on Roku and Fire TV before you see a single data point.
Measurement is built in from day one, not bolted on after launch. We define the metrics that matter for growth product work in a subscription streaming app – time-to-first-play, Continue Watching return rate, trial-to-paid conversion by paywall variant, session length by ad load tier – and instrument them before we ship changes, so every recommendation gets a verdict instead of a guess.
What makes this different from a typical product hire or agency engagement is the fractional operator model. You get someone who has made these tradeoffs before – discovery versus monetization, ad load versus retention, onboarding speed versus personalization data collection – working at the pace your team needs, without the ramp time of a full-time hire or the distance of a strategy-only consultancy. We're in the backlog, not just the strategy doc.
We also don't treat this as separate from the rest of your growth stack. Product changes to onboarding and paywall placement get coordinated with whatever acquisition and lifecycle work is already running, so a win in trial conversion doesn't get erased by a mismatched ad campaign promising something the app doesn't deliver in the first ninety seconds.
What we deliver
- Full discovery-surface audit across browse rows, Continue Watching, and search with prioritized test plan
- 10-foot onboarding redesign scoped to remote-control navigation constraints
- Paywall and free-trial placement test plan with defined success metrics
- Ad load and frequency governance model balancing revenue and retention
- Time-to-first-play and habit-loop instrumentation plan
- Quarterly product roadmap prioritized by retention and reactivation impact, sequenced around platform certification cycles
Every extra step a viewer takes with a remote in their hand costs more than the same step on a touchscreen – and most CTV onboarding flows still have the mobile version's step count.
Our Methodology
We run this as a 90-day sprint structured in three phases: assessment, build, and measure. The first two to three weeks are spent walking the actual app on the platforms your audience uses, pulling existing analytics, and identifying the two or three product changes most likely to move retention – usually somewhere in discovery, onboarding, or paywall placement, since those three surfaces touch nearly every viewer in the app.
Weeks four through eight are execution: specs written, experiments designed, changes built alongside your engineering team, and builds submitted through each platform's certification process. Because Roku, Fire TV, Samsung, and LG all run their own review cycles, we sequence changes to minimize the number of certification round-trips rather than shipping one variant at a time and waiting on each one.
The final weeks are measurement and handoff: reading results against the metrics defined at the start, deciding what ships permanently, and documenting what to test next. By day 90 you have shipped product changes with a clear before-and-after read on the metrics that matter, plus a backlog of what to run in the next sprint – not just a set of recommendations.
How We Work
The first 30 days are the assessment phase described above: app walkthrough, data audit, and a ranked list of the highest-impact product changes, delivered as a working document your team can act on even if the engagement stopped there. Days 31 through 60 are build and ship – specs, experiment design, and hands-on work with your product and engineering team to get changes through platform certification. Days 61 through 90 are measurement, readout, and planning for the next cycle.
On the team side, you get a fractional growth PM embedded in your existing sprint cadence, not a separate workstream running in parallel. We join your standups, write in your product tracker, and work off your existing data stack rather than standing up parallel tooling. If your team already has a product manager, we work alongside them on the growth-specific surfaces – discovery, onboarding, paywall, ad load – freeing them to own the rest of the roadmap.
Cadence is weekly at minimum: a working session to review what shipped, what the data shows, and what's next. For CTV specifically, we build the roadmap around each platform's certification and release windows, so nothing gets scheduled that assumes a same-day push the way a web product might.
Clients should expect to bring us real data access from day one – streaming analytics, ACR data if you have it, whatever subscription and churn reporting exists – and a direct line to whoever owns app store submissions on each platform. The tighter that access, the faster the first shipped change happens.
- Improved time-to-first-play and reduced onboarding drop-off
- Higher trial-to-paid conversion from tested paywall placement
- Better Continue Watching and browse-row return engagement
- Ad load decisions grounded in retention data, not just CPM targets
- A standing instrumentation layer for future product decisions
If your ctv / connected tv company needs growth product management leadership, we should talk.
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Frequently asked questions
How much does growth product management for a CTV app cost?
Engagements typically run $15K-$35K per month depending on scope and how much of the product and engineering lift we're doing directly versus advising your existing team. A 90-day sprint is the standard starting engagement.
How long until we see results?
The 90-day sprint is built to ship at least one or two tested product changes with a measurable read by the end of it. Some changes – like an onboarding step cut – show up in the data within a couple weeks of a certified build going live.
Do we need our own product manager, or does Winston Francois replace that role?
We're not a replacement for a full-time product organization. Most clients either don't have a dedicated growth PM yet or have a PM stretched across the whole roadmap with no bandwidth for discovery, onboarding, and paywall work specifically.
What makes this different from a general product consultancy?
We work fractionally and embedded, not as an outside advisory team dropping off a strategy deck. Everyone on this is an operator who has shipped inside streaming apps and understands platform-specific constraints – certification cycles, 10-foot UI navigation, ACR data limitations – that a generalist product consultancy usually has to learn on your dime.
How do you measure ROI on this kind of work?
We define the metrics before we ship anything: time-to-first-play, onboarding completion rate, trial-to-paid conversion by paywall variant, and session length or reactivation rate by ad load tier. Every product change gets tied back to one of those numbers, so the readout at day 90 is a before-and-after comparison, not a narrative.
Is this a fit for our company stage?
This is built for CTV and streaming companies roughly $5M-$100M in ARR, Series A through growth stage, where the app has real viewer volume but the team hasn't yet built out a dedicated growth product function. If you're pre-launch or still validating whether you need an ad-supported tier at all, start with our strategy or product services instead – growth PM work needs live viewer data to run against.
