Heather Dopson on Growth in Larger Organizations

Heather Dopson on Growth in Larger Organizations

Heather Dopson has spent years helping large organizations adopt growth practices that were originally developed in the startup world. Her insights reveal the unique challenges and opportunities that come with driving growth at scale. While startups can move fast with small teams and minimal process, large organizations face a different set of obstacles that require adapted approaches and realistic expectations.

The Enterprise Growth Challenge

According to Dopson, the biggest challenge in large organizations is not a lack of resources or talent. It is organizational inertia. Large companies have established processes, risk-averse cultures, complex approval chains, and competing priorities that slow down the experimentation cycle. The growth team's first job is often to earn the trust needed to operate with speed and autonomy within the existing organizational structure.

This inertia is not irrational. Large organizations have more at stake. A failed experiment at a startup is a learning opportunity. A failed experiment at a Fortune 500 company that affects millions of customers can be a reputational or financial risk. Understanding and respecting these concerns, while still pushing for the speed and experimentation that growth requires, is the core challenge for enterprise growth teams.

What Works at Scale

• Start with small, low-risk experiments that demonstrate value and build credibility within the organization. Early wins create the political capital needed for larger, more ambitious experiments later.
• Align growth objectives with the metrics that executives already care about. Speaking the language of the C-suite, revenue, customer retention, market share, builds support faster than introducing new growth-specific metrics.
• Invest heavily in documentation and communication to keep stakeholders informed and supportive. In large organizations, what you communicate about your work is almost as important as the work itself.
• Build relationships with teams across the organization who can either enable or block your work. Engineering, legal, compliance, and product teams all have the ability to accelerate or stall growth initiatives.
• Create a governance framework that allows fast experimentation within defined guardrails. This gives the organization the risk management it needs while giving the growth team the speed it requires.

The Role of Culture

Dopson emphasizes that sustainable growth in large organizations requires cultural change, not just process change. Leaders need to create environments where experimentation is valued, where failure is treated as learning, and where teams have the psychological safety to challenge established assumptions.

Cultural change in large organizations is slow and requires patience. It typically starts with a small team that demonstrates results, which attracts interest from other parts of the organization. As more teams see the benefits of experiment-driven growth, the culture gradually shifts. This organic spread is more sustainable than top-down mandates, which often face resistance and fade over time.

Key Takeaway

Without this cultural foundation, growth teams in large organizations become isolated pockets of innovation that struggle to influence the broader organization. The goal is not just to run experiments within a growth team, but to transform how the entire organization thinks about growth, experimentation, and learning. That transformation takes time, patience, and consistent results that prove the approach works.