Company Context

Frontier is building AI-powered consumer financial products, with growth driven through owned surfaces like the Frontier app onboarding flow, lifecycle messaging, referral prompts, and paid acquisition landing pages. The company has early product-market fit in a few core user segments, but leadership wants to separate campaigns that create lasting user value from those that only pull demand forward.

Problem

A recent Frontier growth campaign drove a 28% increase in weekly new account activations and a 19% lift in first-week transactions. However, 6-week retention for campaign-acquired users is only slightly above baseline, and some users appear to engage heavily during the incentive window and then go inactive. The Growth, Product, and Finance teams disagree on whether the campaign should be scaled, redesigned, or shut down.

You are the Product Growth Analyst partnering with the PM for Frontier's activation and retention surfaces. Your task is to assess whether this campaign is creating durable product value or just temporary spikes in top-of-funnel and short-term engagement.

Deliverables

1. Define what “durable product value” should mean for Frontier in this scenario, including the user behaviors that indicate real value creation.
2. Identify the user segments you would analyze separately and explain why campaign impact may differ across them.
3. Propose a framework to evaluate the campaign across the full user journey, from acquisition through retention and habit formation.
4. Recommend what Frontier should do next: scale, iterate, narrow to specific segments, or stop the campaign.
5. Describe the key trade-offs you would make between short-term growth efficiency and long-term product health.

Constraints

• You have 2 weeks to provide a recommendation to Frontier leadership.
• Frontier cannot wait 6+ months for perfect longitudinal evidence before making a budget decision.
• The campaign uses incentives that improve conversion but reduce short-term unit economics.
• Engineering support is limited, so any follow-up changes should be feasible through existing Frontier growth surfaces and analytics instrumentation.