When churn climbs, the instinct is to look at the product. Add the missing feature, fix onboarding, ship faster. Lemkin's diagnosis starts somewhere else. Before you treat churn as a product gap, ask whether the number is normal for the customer you actually signed. A 3 to 4 percent monthly churn rate is endemic to very small businesses; the same number from an enterprise book of business means something is badly broken. The rate only means something relative to the segment, and most teams never set that baseline. They benchmark against a number from a blog post instead of against the buyer sitting in their own pipeline.
The reframe matters because the two diagnoses lead to opposite work. If churn is a product problem, you build. If churn is a customer problem, you change who you sell to, which is positioning and go-to-market, not roadmap. One is a quarter of engineering; the other is a different sales motion, price point, sometimes a different buyer. Lemkin's pattern from years of investing is that abnormally high churn almost always traces to the second cause. Small businesses cancel everything the day the spend stops paying back. That is not a bug you can patch. It is the economics of the buyer you chose.
So the framework is a triage, not a fix. Establish what churn is normal for your ICP, compare your actual number to that baseline, segment the cohorts so the blended average cannot lie to you, and only then decide whether you are looking at a weak product or a wrong customer. Most of the time, Lemkin's view is that you are looking at the wrong customer wearing a product costume.
