What happens when a mobile game builds an entire feature because an ad for gameplay that didn’t exist outperformed every other creative in the portfolio? Or when a music platform turns listening data into a cultural moment that generates 630 million social shares and drives its own acquisition?
These aren’t hypothetical scenarios. They’re real examples of what happens when mobile teams stop treating the funnel as a one-way sequence from product to marketing and start letting market signals shape both.
Our CEO Andy Carvell’s recent piece on Signal-Led Growth made the case that the next era of mobile growth won’t be product-led or marketing-led, but signal-led: driven by continuous feedback loops from real-time user and market data. This article picks up where that argument left off. If growth should be signal-led, what does that actually look like in practice, and what can we learn from the companies already doing it?
To explore what this looks like in practice, Ferdinand Nordemeer, Senior Marketing Consultant at Phiture, joins us throughout this piece to share his frontline insights on execution.
What a cohesive funnel actually looks like
Think about the last time your paid team launched a campaign. They probably chose the messaging, set the targeting, and sent users to the store page. The ASO team had already set up that store page without knowing what the ad promised, while the CRM team built an onboarding flow without knowing what either of those teams had said. And the product team built the features on a roadmap that none of these teams had much input into.
Each team did good work. But the user experienced something fragmented: an ad that said one thing, a store page that emphasised something else, and an onboarding flow that introduced a third set of priorities entirely. Nobody planned the disconnect. It emerged naturally from the way the teams were set up.
A cohesive funnel closes those gaps. In Andy’s Signal-Led Growth framework, the point isn’t just that teams should communicate more. It’s that data from any part of the funnel should be available to reshape any other part, including the product itself. When Product and CRM data about which users stay longest reaches the paid team, targeting improves. When store page conversion data reaches the creative team, ad performance improves. And when all of that reaches the product team, what gets built next starts reflecting what real users actually respond to, rather than what a roadmap predicted they would want six months ago.
When misleading marketing becomes product strategy
Perhaps the most provocative example of marketing signals shaping product comes from mobile gaming. Over the past few years, the “fake ads” phenomenon has become one of the industry’s most talked-about trends, and for good reason.
The pattern works like this: a gaming studio runs ads that show gameplay mechanics that don’t actually exist in the game. The classic example is the “pull the pin” puzzle: ads for games like Homescapes and Gardenscapes showed players solving pin-pulling puzzles, even though the actual game was a match-3 puzzler. The ads were misleading, and they were wildly effective. According to Segwise, misleading playable ads now account for over 30% of all playable ad impressions in mobile gaming.
What happened next is the interesting part. Players who downloaded these games because of the pin-pulling ads were disappointed that the mechanic wasn’t in the actual product, and reviews and retention suffered as a result. The Advertising Standards Authority even banned some of Playrix’s ads for being misleading. But rather than abandon the approach, some studios did something unexpected: they built the advertised gameplay into the product.
Games like Royal Match and others started incorporating the exact mechanics that had only existed in ads, pull-the-pin puzzles, rescue scenarios, and fail-state decision points, as actual in-game features. The ads had effectively served as large-scale product research. Millions of users had shown, through their install behaviour, that they wanted this kind of gameplay. The marketing signal preceded the product decision, and the product adapted to match.
This is Signal-Led Growth in its rawest form, and it raises real ethical questions about misleading advertising. Apple and Google have both tightened their policies around deceptive ads in 2025 and 2026, but the underlying pattern is significant: marketing data told teams what users wanted before the product team had built it, and the teams that listened grew faster than those that didn’t.
From the practitioner: Ferdinand Nordemeer, Senior Marketing Consultant at Phiture: “This dynamic has evolved to the point where new gameplay concepts can be tested for popularity before being implemented in the game itself. UA teams now routinely run multiple versions of fake gameplay creatives to identify which concepts resonate most with players, and the strongest-performing concepts get developed into actual in-game features and mini-games. This setup puts the marketing and UA team at the forefront of user experience research and even game development. Integrated UA and Product teams lead to quicker user insights, quicker turnarounds, and quicker implementation of winning concepts inside the game.”
Beyond fake ads: cleaner examples of signal-led funnels
The fake ads case is extreme and ethically complicated. Still, the underlying principle, using marketing signals to shape product and create funnel cohesion, can show up in much cleaner forms across the industry.
ReciMe offers one of the most straightforward examples. The app’s smart recipe importer emerged as the most-loved feature based on behavioural data. Rather than continuing to build around their original broader vision, the team scrapped everything else and rebuilt the app around that single user action. The result: more than 500,000 users, tripled retention over six months, and a 20x increase in subscribers after introducing subscriptions. The signal came from user behaviour. The product followed.
Spotify Wrapped turns first-party listening data into a product, a brand moment, and a distribution engine simultaneously. In 2025, Wrapped drove more than 300 million engaged users and over 630 million social shares globally. Every share is both content and acquisition. Every data point is both a product feature and a marketing asset. The funnel isn’t a funnel at all. It’s a loop where product experience generates the distribution that drives the next round of acquisition.
Rocket Money (formerly Truebill) turned a potentially risky rebrand into a growth opportunity by aligning every surface of the funnel around the same signal. During the transition, the team used Custom Product Pages and matched ad creative to capture users still searching for the old brand name, reducing friction and keeping the message consistent from ad to store page to onboarding. The result was a 17% increase in Apple Ads ROAS and a 5x surge in installs from top category keywords.
In each of these cases, the signal shaped the system.
Ferdinand says: “A good example from the gaming world is Wooga’s June’s Journey. The team implemented a block puzzle mini-game after testing multiple different ad formats featuring similar mini-game styles. This format resonated the best with their audience and was then built into the game itself, both to improve in-game KPIs and to give the UA team more gameplay angles to work with for acquiring new users who might not have been interested in the initial core gameplay.”
Why most teams struggle with this
If signal-led funnels are so effective, why aren’t more teams building them? The reasons tend to be organisational rather than technical.
Product and marketing still report to different leaders with different priorities in most companies: while the former are measured on feature delivery and user satisfaction, the latter are measured on installs and cost efficiency. Neither team is measured on how well the handoff between them works, which means nobody owns the connection.
Speed is another factor. Product development operates on quarterly or even annual cycles. Marketing operates on weekly or daily cycles, and when teams discover that a specific message or promise is resonating with users, the product team may be months away from being able to respond. By the time the feature is built, the market may have moved on.
There’s also a cultural barrier. The idea that marketing should influence what gets built still makes many product leaders uncomfortable. Andy addresses this directly in his piece: “The old sequence, product first, growth later, now means delay where you need feedback, opinion where you need evidence, and silos where you need connected growth loops.” Letting go of the conviction that the product team is the primary source of truth is the hardest part of the shift, and it’s the part that separates companies that talk about integrated growth from those that actually practice it.
Ferdinand says: “What often happens in practice is that misalignment between Product and Marketing teams leads to misunderstandings and a blaming game. The Product team points the finger at Marketing for acquiring users at too high a CPI or bringing in users that aren’t valuable enough.
Meanwhile, Marketing points at Product for an app that doesn’t monetise well enough. Well-integrated teams understand the strong interdependencies between product and marketing signals. They recognise that different user segments require different creative messaging, onboarding experiences, and engagement strategies, and that these segments can have very different LTVs. A shared understanding of key signals, metrics, and objectives across both teams enables more effective collaboration and makes it much easier to communicate challenges and opportunities in both directions.”
What cohesive funnels look like in practice
For teams ready to move toward more cohesive, signal-led funnels, a few principles tend to matter most:
Treat every surface as a signal source. Ad performance, store page conversion, onboarding completion, push notification engagement, retention curves, and review sentiment all generate data about what users want and how they respond. When that data flows across teams rather than staying in silos, patterns emerge that no single team could have spotted alone.
Let marketing test before product builds. Smoke tests, landing pages, Custom Product Pages, and high-volume creative testing can validate demand for a feature or positioning before engineering resources are committed. The most efficient way to learn whether users want something is often to see whether they respond to it in an ad or a store page variant.
Close the loop between acquisition and retention. If the paid team doesn’t know which users stay and which churn, they can’t optimise for quality. If the CRM team doesn’t know what users were promised before they installed, they can’t deliver on that promise during onboarding. The most impactful improvement many teams can make is simply connecting these two data sets and sharing them regularly.
Make funnel cohesion someone’s job. If nobody owns the connection between acquisition, store, product, and retention, it will remain a gap. Whether that person is called a growth lead, an integrated growth manager, or something else entirely, someone needs to be responsible for making sure the funnel tells one coherent story from first ad impression to Day 30 retention.
What’s next
The line between product and marketing will continue to blur. AI is accelerating the pace at which marketing teams can generate, test, and learn from creative experiments, which means the feedback loop from market signal to product decision will only get faster. The teams that embrace this, that let signals flow freely between acquisition, store, product, and retention, will build funnels that compound performance over time.
As Andy puts it in his Signal-Led Growth framework: “The companies that win will not be the ones with the strongest ideology. They will be the ones that learn fastest, connect signals best, and let that signal shape both what they build and how they grow.”
At Phiture, we help mobile teams build these connected systems. Our integrated growth approach brings paid, organic, creative, CRM, and product into one system. PressPlay generates market signals through automated creative testing, and Catchbase optimises how those signals translate into acquisition spend. If you’re interested in building a more cohesive funnel, get in touch.
FAQ
What is a cohesive user funnel?
A cohesive user funnel is one where every stage, from ad to store page to onboarding to retention, tells a consistent story and shares data with the other stages. Rather than operating as a handoff chain where each team works independently, a cohesive funnel works as a connected system where learnings from one stage inform decisions at every other stage.
What is Signal-Led Growth?
Signal-Led Growth is a framework introduced by Phiture’s CEO Andy Carvell. It argues that growth should be driven by continuous feedback loops from real-time user and market signals, rather than by internal product conviction alone. In SLG, marketing and product are both subordinated to evidence.
What are fake ads in mobile gaming and why do they matter?
Fake ads are mobile game advertisements that show gameplay mechanics that don’t exist in the actual game. While ethically controversial, they revealed an important signal-led pattern: some studios used the install data from these ads to identify what users actually wanted, and then built those mechanics into the product. It’s an extreme example of marketing data shaping product decisions.
How can marketing signals influence product development?
Through creative testing, ad performance data, store page conversion data, and user behaviour signals, marketing teams can identify what users respond to before the product team builds it. Smoke tests, fake-store testing, Custom Product Pages, and high-volume creative experiments can all validate demand for features or positioning without committing engineering resources.
What prevents teams from building cohesive funnels?
Organisational structure is the biggest barrier. Product and marketing typically report to different leaders with different metrics and different timelines. Product cycles are slow, marketing cycles are fast. Cultural resistance to letting marketing influence what gets built also plays a role. Overcoming these barriers requires someone to own the connection between acquisition, store, product, and retention.
What is the first step toward building a more cohesive funnel?
Connect your acquisition and retention data. If the paid team can see which users stick around and which churn, and the Product team can see what users were promised before they installed, both teams can make better decisions immediately. Regular cross-team syncs and shared dashboards are the simplest way to start.
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