Getting Started with Growth Management Part 1

Getting Started with Growth Management Part 1

Growth management is the discipline of systematically organizing and directing a company's growth efforts. It goes beyond individual experiments and campaigns to create a structured, repeatable process for driving sustainable growth. In this first part of our three-part series (continued in Part 2 and Part 3), we cover the foundational concepts you need to understand before building your growth function. Whether you are starting from scratch or formalizing existing efforts, these foundations will set you up for success.

Defining Growth Management

Growth management encompasses the strategy, processes, and organizational structures that enable a company to grow consistently. It includes setting growth objectives, building the right team, establishing experiment cadences, and creating accountability systems that ensure growth remains a priority. Unlike traditional marketing, which often focuses on specific campaigns or channels, growth management takes a holistic view of the entire customer lifecycle and seeks to optimize every stage.

Think of growth management as the operating system for your growth efforts. Individual experiments are the applications that run on this system. Without a solid operating system, even brilliant individual experiments will not produce sustainable results because there is no framework for prioritization, learning, or scaling.

The Foundation: North Star Metric

Every growth management program starts with a North Star Metric. This is the single metric that best captures the core value your product delivers to customers. It should reflect genuine customer value, not just business revenue. For a streaming service, it might be hours watched per week. For a SaaS product, it might be weekly active users or key features adopted. For an e-commerce business, it might be repeat purchase rate.

The North Star Metric serves as the compass for your entire growth operation. Every experiment, every initiative, and every resource allocation decision should be evaluated against its potential impact on this metric. When the team is aligned around a single North Star, decision-making becomes simpler and faster.

Building Your Growth Model

A growth model maps how different inputs drive your North Star Metric. It is a quantitative representation of your growth engine that helps you identify the highest-leverage opportunities. A simple growth model for a SaaS business might look like this:

• Website visitors multiplied by signup conversion rate equals new signups.
• New signups multiplied by activation rate equals activated users.
• Activated users multiplied by trial-to-paid conversion rate equals new paying customers.
• Existing customers multiplied by retention rate equals retained customers.
• Retained customers multiplied by average revenue per user equals recurring revenue.

By mapping these relationships, you can see which inputs have the biggest impact on your output. If your signup conversion rate is 2% and your activation rate is 80%, improving the signup rate has far more leverage than improving activation. The growth model makes these priorities visible and helps you allocate resources where they will have the greatest impact.

Setting Growth Objectives

With your North Star Metric defined and your growth model mapped, you can set specific growth objectives. These should be ambitious but realistic, time-bound, and directly connected to your growth model. Instead of vague goals like "grow the business," set specific targets like "increase weekly active users from 10,000 to 15,000 within 90 days by improving the onboarding activation rate from 30% to 45%."

This level of specificity makes it clear what success looks like, which inputs need to change, and by how much. It also makes it possible to evaluate whether your growth experiments are working or whether you need to change your approach.

Starting Small

You do not need a large team or a complex infrastructure to start with growth management. Begin with a clear objective, a small team with cross-functional skills, and a simple process for generating, prioritizing, and running experiments. The key is consistency. A small team that runs experiments every week will outperform a large team that runs experiments sporadically. Start with what you have, prove the value of the approach, and build from there.