You are the PM for a private-market investing platform used by founders, limited partners, and fund operators to discover deals, share updates, and manage relationships. Your team recently launched a new collaboration feature that drove a 22% increase in weekly active users and a 35% increase in invitations sent over the first 3 weeks, and leadership is excited about rolling it out more broadly. However, similar launches in the past produced short-lived spikes that faded within 6 to 8 weeks, with little impact on cohort retention or monetization. You need to determine whether this feature is creating a self-reinforcing growth loop or simply pulling forward activity that would have happened anyway.
How would you evaluate whether this feature is generating durable growth versus a temporary spike, and how would that assessment shape your recommendation on whether to invest further, iterate, or scale it?