Sean Ellis did mention that the problem with stagnant growth is when organisations have silo pillars formed between Software Engineering, Product Marketing, Marketing and Sales teams. These teams are only responsible for their own area of work. In a typical scenario, the Product Team writes and defines the requirements, Software Engineering team works to deliver the feature and the Marketing team would be asked to promote it in their channels, likewise Sales are asked to sell the ready-made product.

This “efficient” way of working gets things done but does not drive Growth. 

Management teams would very quickly find out that the teams are more reactive to market pressures rather than creating innovative features to drive market growth. It’s important to put Growth as the focal point.
Facebook CEO, Mark Zuckerberg is said to have written one word “Growth” to emphasize how important it is to meet the then objective in his organisation. But running growth initiatives takes more then just a written word and I’m pretty sure the Facebook team has put on their thinking caps and worked hard in experimenting on tactics that drive growth after getting that mandate.

What about you, how would you pioneer growth in your organisation? This is what we are working on.


1. Lead people to believe in Growth – so much it should be embedded as a culture.

2. Understand what defines Growth; according to Sean Ellis

Growth Hack = Rapid market growth through high-speed experimentation

Sean Ellis, Hacking Growth

3. Creating Growth Teams – assigned from different teams ranging from marketers, product and engineers

4. Define Ways of Working with Growth Teams

5. Practice the Growth Cycle; data analysis, ideation, prototyping, experimenting, re-iterating. Understanding that experimentation failures are also part of a learning process.

It takes a lot of discipline and re-organizing to get this working as we combine a few methodologies from Lean Startup, Design Thinking and Growth Hacking playbooks to suit our organization culture.