You’re Not Ready for a Head of Growth: Run This Founder-Led Growth Playbook Instead

Founders are responsible for figuring out how their business is going to grow. Use these tactics — specifically designed for founders — to uncover your most impactful growth levers.

Don't let these be the reasons you wait on growth

When writing “ Growth Levers and How to Find Them” Lerner’s editor posed a question he couldn’t immediately answer. “One day, he asked me to explain the big reasons a startup fails in language simple enough that a 12-year-old could understand.” The answer seemed straightforward with obvious issues like lack of product-market fit and poor management skills. But as Lerner thought more about it, he looked back at lessons from his own career and found that often, a startup fails because a founder gets in their own way of learning useful information as fast as they can. These founders often fall into three buckets:

• The overthinkers: “Founders who debate, theorize, strategize and talk to other smart people all day long and think things through, but never execute,” Lerner says.

• The underthinkers: “These founders’ philosophy is to build, build, build. But if you’re just building off your sense of the market, and your product isn’t working, adding more features that your customers don’t need just adds complexity.”

• The hire-and-delegaters: These are founders who come from a senior role inside a big company who rely on hiring experts for leading functions. “But those outside experts don't have the right context,” he says.

Ultimately, founders need to actively figure out how their business is going to grow.

The three-step process for finding your growth lever

Lerner works with founders to uncover their “growth levers”: the highest-leverage tactics for growing their businesses. “The 10% of work that's going to bring 90% of the results as quickly as possible,” he says.

Step 1: Map the customer journey

Use data to find the bottlenecks where customers are dropping off.

Step 2: Dive into customer motivations

Interview your customers to understand what’s driving (or stalling) actions using Jobs to be Done.

Step 3: Run rapid experiments

Pinpoint a specific “lever” you want to test, designed to tackle these bottlenecks and optimize growth.

Step 1: Mapping the customer journey

Identify the bottleneck, understand the customer, and experiment:

1. Identify the bottleneck: app store listing page.
2. Understand the customer: a misconception about the meaning of “easy.”
3. Experiment: test different words to convey the value.

Step 2: Understand your customer

Conduct interviews to uncover your customer’s mindset. Ask questions to peel back the layers of a customer’s goal:

1. Tell me in your own words, what did you buy?
2. What would that enable you to achieve?
3. Why is this goal important to you?
4. Who else cares about this outcome?

Step 3: Running rapid experiments

Document your experiments. For each growth idea, create an experiment document. Evaluate results after running the experiment and iterate based on findings.

If you’re stuck, identify shared outcomes among your customers

Focus your interviews on finding patterns among customers. Look to understand the outcomes customers hope to achieve with your product.

Remember: Your growth levers won’t always be novel

Don’t shy away from using existing tactics. Consider how other companies have successfully approached similar growth problems.

Tactics for getting the whole team into a growth mindset

Overcome the “strain of mental resistance”

Encourage public accountability on growth experiments. Allow your team to vote on which hypotheses to test.

Put growth in everyone’s job description

Make growth a collective effort with all team members aligned to support it.

Bring on the right people at the right time

Identify when it’s the right moment to add dedicated growth personnel.

Wrapping up: Prioritizing growth will always pay off

Understand that discovering growth levers provides invaluable insights. Founders should remain actively involved in the growth process, contributing to their overall learning about the business and its market.