What’s More Important in Growth? The Product, the Tools, or the Process?

In a world driven by tech it’s easy to fall in love with the product or the software tools used by leading growth teams. But is the technology really the most important factor in driving long term sustainable growth?

Sure, new features that wow influencers can deliver a short term bump, but typically that growth can be short lived. In my view,

sustainable, long term growth comes at the intersection of disruptive utility and joy.

To uncover that, requires a process that starts with a relentless focus on the customer/the user/a person — not the tech.

Too often articles and posts on growth and growth hacking focus more on the tools and the tactics (the “hacking”) than the process, not the approach and the thinking that led to the selection of the tools and the implementation of the tech. Growth tools provide insight on customer/user behavior and enable us to take action on that insight and ideally enable us to automate those actions for scale and efficiency. But they don’t create on their own a high-growth product or service.

Every business is different, and yet the same. They may be focused on B2B or B2C, they may monetize with ads, or via subscription. But all serve a compelling and motivated addressable market (i.e. customer) need. In high growth companies, the customer need and demand for that need to be filled is typically the greatest driver of growth — not the tech.

The recent growth of enterprise messaging tool Slack is a good example. Despite Slack founder Stewart Butterfield saying at a recent conference that he had “no fucking idea” why Slack had taken off while his last two startups hadn’t, he also told VentureBeat that,

“enterprise software is a mess and a field of huge opportunities. And while it seems like chat has been around forever, he said, mobile and cloud services are creating new openings for new services like Slack to be more useful to a wider array of employees and businesses.”

More “useful”! Now, you might say, “well that’s the product and the tech”. Yes, but that discovery and the development of that product came from a process that focused on the needs of users. Butterfield has become known as “the poster boy of Pivots”. To pivot effectively requires a process where you are open to the feedback from the market and can react quickly.

The lean startup movement applies this thinking and despite some detractors, the process focuses on developing business models that are proven and validated by customers, users, and people. Insight from real-world use validates continued product development and prioritizes new features and functionality.

The same process can (and should) be applied to marketing and growth. Without a methodical approach to identifying the optimal marketing channels and testing different strategies within them, costs will skyrocket and time will be wasted — neither of which most organizations can afford.

The new marketing paradigm “hacks” growth long before any outbound activities are undertaken. It starts with deep customer insight into the needs and desires of an underserved, yet motivated market.

Once you’re ready to scale, the disruptive utility and joy that your users get from a product or service fuels that growth and it’s the growth team’s job to capitalize on that, amplify the success and find hidden opportunities optimize the process.

For my purposes I use a model summarized by the acronym G.O.O.D. — for goal oriented and opportunity driven — what I call a GOOD Growth Engine. The process starts with a relentless focus on the key customer segments and users and prioritizes goals and opportunities in a continuous effort to test and refine the right channels and the right strategies that yield the greatest growth.

The right process typically yields the best products. What’s yours?