The two kinds of growth you can drive

Are you Team Burj or Team Tide?

If you drive growth, you need to be able to point to a graph and say:

“I did that.”

But what does this look like in practice?

There are two very different kinds of growth you can drive.

Numbers synthetic; insights real.

This write-up is for founders, growth, and marketing professionals driving results, and finance leaders forecasting and tracking outcomes.

We’ll typify the two modes of growth, and clarify misconceptions about each.

1. The Burj Khalifa

These are the astronomical spikes that blow everything else out of the water.

Then dry up in a few weeks.

Think:

• PR / going viral

• Product launches

• Raising prices

Myth → Busted

These gains last → They generally don’t

It’s easy to be tricked into believing one-off bursts will yield a long-term trajectory change.

They rarely do.

Spikes usually linger, then simmer down.

If the underlying driver was promotional, these spikes might even pull forward growth, creating a post-burst lull. This is visible in the graph above.

There are two scenarios where one-off bursts do last:

• When your growth engine is built on network effects. Then, short-term bursts do contribute to sustained growth.

• When you distribute and capture extraordinary new value all at once. An example is launching a higher price tier, packed with new features. This lets you migrate existing customers (the Burj Khalifa) and see ongoing upgrades from future customers (the Rising Tide).

Of course, bursts that last should be top of your growth priority list.

Not repeatable → Entirely repeatable

If you’re seeing Burj Khalifas in your historic data and questioning whether you can recreate them: you can.

The height of these spikes are driven by reach and resonance. Both are tractable.

Resonance is art of understanding human emotion. What feels like magic? What stops someone in their tracks? What compels them to share? The ability to deliver resonance is a skill that, with sustained effort over time, can be developed.

Reach is the science of understanding spread. Resonance certainly aids reach in the form of word of mouth. But there’s more. Understanding social media algorithms. Optimizing share paths. Playing with incentives.

Develop resonance and reach and these spikes will become more and more frequent.

Growth drives → Marketing drives

Assuming the company is big enough to have both teams, these one-off bursts are typically driven by Marketing.

To execute spikes requires “campaign” mentality.

This is something Marketers tend to be excellent at. Meanwhile, most Growth people are miserable in this execution mode, as they prefer to ship changes that drive impact forever.

When planning, get the right people on the right things.

One team can own it → Takes several teams

On the flipside, I’ve seen the mistake of believing that one team, or worse, one individual exclusively can pull off huge spikes.

Marketing drives the effort, but meaningful spikes usually need a blend of Product, Growth, and Marketing, to build, optimize, and distribute value. Marketing distributes but, usually, isn’t building.

The best bursts are built on real value, which usually takes several teams. So, plan accordingly.

2. The Rising Tide

These are gains built slowly and surely over time.

Driven by high-velocity experimentation.

Think:

• Optimizing referrals

• Improving activation

• Driving network density

Myth → Busted

Takes weeks → Takes quarters

As a chronically impatient Growth person, I’ll be the first to admit I hate when anybody tells me something will take multiple quarters.

But this is the reality of creating a Rising Tide.

The fundamental bottleneck lies not in your ability to conceive of, design, or build experiments. Nor in your ability to analyze data. (Though these certainly can slow things down.)

The fundamental bottleneck is in a high enough volume of customers experiencing the change. Whether you’re observing changes pre vs. post, A/B testing, or testing qualitatively, waiting for users to flush through is just slow.

Even if you have a huge amount of traffic, there’s good reason to let tests run for 1-2 weeks. Amongst other things, this flushes repeat visitors and captures weekends.

And if you have low traffic, you might need to pipeline tests to actually learn anything.

It’s reasonable to expect to work on a metric for 2 quarters, perhaps longer.

If that sounds like it’ll leave you twiddling your thumbs — add other areas to work on in parallel.

High specificity → High stochasticity

You will try 30 things, and only 10 of them will work. But at the outset, you have no idea what those 10 will be.

Furthermore, you have no idea what new ideas you will prioritize, based on those 10.

Where this myth causes the most friction is in creating plans — and evaluating performance versus plan.

Take quarterly planning. It’s common for teams to list quarterly initiatives. And as companies mature, it’s common to put impact estimates against each effort. These estimates collectively should surpass an overall goal.

This planning method more or less works if you deliver Burj Khalifas.

It’s mostly a shitshow if you deliver a Rising Tide.

You might estimate +$1M of incremental ARR each year from an idea. But there’s a 50%+ chance it doesn’t happen. (More precisely, there’s a range of potential dollar outcomes which, 50%+ of which won’t be exciting enough to keep the change around.)

What then, of initiative-level plans?

This isn’t to say you shouldn’t plan efforts or anticipate impact. Rather, the roadmap and its impact estimates should reflect the work’s stochasticity. They should be appropriately coarse vs. spuriously precise.

Meanwhile the best planning outcome is a team hellbent on executing and learning as fast as possible.

Just optimizing → Stacking gains

It’s common to dismiss this type of growth work as low-value on the basis of it simply optimizing the thing you have today.

“We don’t want 10% improvements, we want 10x improvements!”

Compound interest is hard to reason with, so a little illustrative math can ground us.

Many are familiar with “1% better every day”:

If you get one percent better each day for one year, you’ll end up thirty-seven times better by the time you’re done.

The business equivalent: a 10% improvement every week for 2 quarters does in fact deliver a 10x improvement (1.1x^26=11.9x).

So the question becomes, how do you deliver a 10% improvement every week?

Simple rule of thumb: if roughly 1 in 3 initiatives will succeed, launch 3 experiments each week.

Again, if you don’t have enough customer flow to do this for one metric, tackle multiple areas in parallel.

Takes a village → Takes one Growth pod

The beauty of this category of work is that it can be executed by a very small group of individuals.

The skills needed are relatively diverse: product, design, engineering, data. But find yourself a PM Who Designs, and an Engineer Who Analyzes, and you’ll be surprised what a tiny team of 2 can accomplish.

Of course, a pod of 2 is overly idealistic. A more typical growth pod structure is a Product Manager, Designer, Data Scientist, and 3-7 Engineers. But still, we’re talking a single Two Pizza Team that, with sufficient agency, can change business trajectory forever.

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Putting it together

The best plans combine frequent Burj Khalifas and rapid Rising Tides.

Both simply planning to make them happen at the same time. And better, prioritizing ideas that drive both growth modes. Examples:

• PR hype built on content that yields evergreen traffic

• Price changes that create ongoing user upsell

• Features that attract new audiences and lower existing churn