What is Growth? [2024 Edition]

At the beginning of last year, I consolidated my thoughts on the topic of “What is Growth”, from the definition made by Sean Ellis and Brian Balfour to the growth competency model by Adam Fishman to the general difference between growth, marketing, and product on this post.

So one year passed, and I think it’s a great time to refresh my definition of growth. Having said that, I am now even more confident to say that everything I shared previously is accurate in describing what we do. In this article, I will add more layers to the definition to make it even more closer to the actual growth work.

Growth is a mentality of growing with uncertainty

One key learning this year is that very different perspectives and skill sets are needed in each of the growth stages, from 0 to 1, 1 to 10, to 10 to IPO. Even working on projects with similar settings you had, your learning might not be useful just because of a slightly different context. And there can be a load of failure, even massive wins look small when it's just in place.

So growth is a mentality to embrace ambiguity, keep fast experimenting, and reiterate until fixing the problems and observing the traction. Acknowledging that there are millions of ways to push the boundaries with no absolute right and wrong answers, you have to be both lean and agile with strong belief and enormous patience to break through the limit.

I would love to better illustrate the mindset shift as follows. For a 0 to 1 project, we're striving to bring the business to the tipping point of the growth curve, this requires us to focus on finding effective growth loops while fixing fundamental growth puzzles, including use case mapping and narrative development. As for a 1 to 10 stage, with great early growth traction, the target will be doubling down on acquisition, optimizing the funnel conversion rate, and giving more love and care to retention. Last but not least, when pushing a global business from 10 to IPO, it will be about how to defend the market position in mature markets, capturing more market shares in growth markets, and going to market in new countries and cities.

Growth requires both strategy and alignment

Growth is still a relatively modern role, it will exist in different forms depending on the organization structure. The relationship of Growth with Product, Marketing, Revenue, and Finance functions has made it challenging for growth leaders to build influence and make a true impact.

Lots of effort is needed to grow a business with huge uncertainty as if walking in the dark. Without a good amount of trust and support from key stakeholders, you will be highly restricted by many unnecessary blockers, distracting you from focusing on the most important tasks. So only either being empowered to make crucial business decisions or having excellent communication and relationship cross-functionally, you can unleash the full potential to map the way out. I always believe there is no bad growth strategy, but being led by a growth leader who either cannot guide the team in the right direction or has bad communication with top management and cross-functionally.

I was in a role that very well fit with my ideal definition of growth, optimizing for revenue growth, working on growth marketing and product projects, and looking for scaling markets globally. However, there was a lack of trust between the growth and product teams, the focus of revenue growth has been shifted to be a pure acquisition problem because the product team is not highly supported on funnel optimization on the product, and not even the pricing page as somehow it's being regarded as a "product thing". This fundamentally changed my perspective of how a growth team should look, not only knowing how to grow but having a great alignment with all key functions, especially top management.

Growth is an endless journey of learning

We need general skills and knowledge of how to grow a successful business, from Reforge to the sharing of Lenny's Newsletter, Acquired , BRAVE Southeast Asia Tech Podcast , and much more. But to truly widen our lens of the world, we should expose ourselves to a wide range of topics, not limited to the world economy, history, and all different domains of knowledge tied to our interests and passions.

Take my experience in a global acquisition team as an example, obviously most of the time we were strategizing how we could grow stronger by looking at the channel opportunities and competitor movements. However, the interesting part of doing a global business is to dive into the culture, such as designing promotions for local festivals to capture seasonal demand. And also local news of the markets, say during Covid, all countries have different lockdown policies and restrictions, so we have to respond in different ways to minimize the loss and embark on the opportunity.

Growth is full of opportunity

Amazon, Netflix, and Google were founded and went IPO around the year 2000, while Airbnb, Uber, and Doordash were founded around 2010, and went IPO around 2020. In 2024, we are lucky enough to stand on the shoulders of giants, learning from the growth leaders from all these amazing companies, and having them pivot the ways how growth folks can contribute, be it as educators, advisory, fractional & interim executives, full-time practitioners, founders, and investors. Growth folks should no longer limit themselves to doing one thing at the same time but building a portfolio growth career to accelerate their learning path and contribute to the ecosystem.

The interesting part of growth is that formulas can only be successfully applied with great customization, as the context of businesses keeps changing, from driving revenue growth to maintaining profitable status as the priority, to the huge evolution of AI technology.

I'm happy to brainstorm growth-related topics about your businesses and projects, click here to book 30 mins. Hope you find this a great read, and see you again next week : )