If retention is on your roadmap, there are 2 underrated metrics you should be tracking:

Let me walk you through point 2 today — scroll to the end if you want to skip to the video.

A head of product had just set up a weekly pulse on Thrive — Zendesk ticket trends cross-referenced against PostHog data to watch for shifts across their accounts.

A few days later, Thrive flagged Ridgeline Partners (name redacted). One of their steadiest, highest-value clients. No complaint or ticket that week. Just their biggest single-week usage drop on record.

After mapping the 6-month picture with Thrive, he found the reason.

Over the past 2 months their users had growing frustrations around a search feature, with more escalations and tone shifts picking up just a couple of weeks earlier. Now the users had started building workarounds instead. The usage drop followed — and so did the drop in tickets.

He had a meeting the next day and knew exactly what to address.

Power users are your biggest churn risk. They hit the ceiling of your product before anyone else. They've tried everything, filed the requests, found the gaps. At some point they just stop trying new things and settle into a stable subset of features. That's the plateau. That's when the search for alternatives quietly begins.

On your dashboards, a drop in support tickets might even be a positive signal. But then the usage drop starts, until one day they’re gone (and they take those referrals with them). This is why product leads need a consistent, connected picture across usage and support tickets.

In this video, I walk through the full Ridgeline story — the alert, the timeline Thrive built, and what that pre-meeting conversation actually looked like.

Thrive processes 200k+ product signals daily to surface patterns like this. If retention is on your roadmap, this is where I'd start.

— Ishwar, ThriveAI

PS Want to set this up with your own data? DM me and we'll do it together.