Casey Winters: Growth Is Still in Its Early Stages at Large Companies

Casey Winters: Growth Is Still in Its Early Stages at Large Companies

Casey Winters, who led growth at Pinterest and Grubhub, has a nuanced perspective on how large companies are adopting growth practices. His view is that while many large organizations have created growth teams, most are still in the early stages of truly embedding growth into their operations. The gap between having a growth team and having a growth culture is significant, and most large companies have only addressed the first part.

Where Large Companies Stand

According to Winters, most large companies have adopted the surface-level elements of growth: they have growth teams, they run A/B tests, and they track key metrics. But the deeper elements, like a true culture of experimentation, executive fluency in growth concepts, and organizational structures that support rapid iteration, are still developing. The result is growth teams that look good on paper but are constrained by the organizations they operate within.

Many large company growth teams spend more time navigating internal politics, waiting for engineering resources, and building alignment across stakeholders than they spend actually running experiments. This organizational friction is the primary bottleneck, not a lack of ideas or talent.

Common Challenges

• Growth teams often lack the dedicated engineering resources they need to run experiments at a meaningful pace. Sharing engineers with the core product team means growth experiments are perpetually deprioritized.
• Executive leadership does not always understand how growth works, leading to unrealistic expectations (demanding guaranteed results from experiments) or insufficient support (cutting growth budgets when short-term results are not immediately visible).
• Existing organizational structures create friction that slows down the experimentation cycle. Approval processes, legal reviews, and brand guidelines all add time to each experiment.
• Short-term financial pressures can cause companies to cut growth investments before they have time to mature. Growth is a long game, and companies that expect immediate returns often abandon the effort prematurely.
• Incentive structures reward individual departmental performance rather than cross-functional growth outcomes, discouraging the collaboration that effective growth work requires.

The Opportunity

Despite these challenges, Winters is optimistic about the potential for growth at large companies. The companies that solve these organizational challenges will have enormous advantages over competitors. A large company that can experiment at the speed of a startup while leveraging its existing customer base, brand, and resources can achieve growth rates that startups can only dream of.

The Path Forward

Winters recommends that large companies take several concrete steps to accelerate their growth maturity. Invest in growth education at the executive level so leadership understands and supports the experimental approach. Build dedicated engineering capacity for growth teams so they can run experiments without competing for resources. Create incentive structures that reward long-term experimentation and learning over short-term results. The companies that make these investments now will have a significant competitive advantage as growth practices become table stakes in their industries.