The interaction between growth and product

Growth is fundamental to business survival and long-term continuity. A concrete growth strategy is more than a marketing strategy or a sales plan; it is a strategically important puzzle piece to make the big picture complete.

At the beginning phase of starting a business, we usually think about our mission and vision, finance plan, and potential risks. How many of us review these plans regularly and make long-term strategic decisions? How often do we reinvest and plan future growth for our business? We tend to live in the moment and lightly think about the future as this is a good motto in everyday life, but if we look through the business side of view, we need to think more about the future than presence.

A growth strategy is what you need

So we know we need to develop these strategic plans for our growth. We need specialists to work with this development and implementation. But how do we start writing our growth strategy and the first steps to take on this road of growth. First of all, we need to start with our product validation from the early stages to see the potential and then think about the solutions we could implement. There are a lot of questions we need to find answers to and different ways to find solutions. Growth is a continuous process in which you need to keep optimizing your product or service to generate more revenue and make it viable for a long time.

We asked experts from rapidly growing international companies to share their knowledge on product growth and growth strategies. The first thing we wanted to know was about great ideas, and didn’t great products grow by themselves, or do they need some additional push forward?

“It is greatly beneficial to have a great product to grow faster, that’s true. But to start growing, you need to achieve product-market fit. That’s like a prerequisite; without that, you cannot grow. But I think a great product by default will not grow as fast as possible if it had an additional growth function within the organization. So you need to have a good product, a great product to grow. But just having a great product by itself will not be enough to grow exceptionally fast.” Daniel Marhel, Head of Product at Printify, says.

“Growth should accelerate at the speed that the product itself is ready for. But I think there’s a debate whether an additional growth team should be a different theme. In general, at least in my experience, mostly growth teams have been part of the product team. I wouldn’t draw such strong, divisive lines between one and another, and I would promote this cooperation. At least the key critical product teams are responsible for the growth of the business in general growth. So we shouldn’t isolate them.” adds Karlis Auzins, Group Product Manager at Bolt.

What about the separation between growth and product? Do they go hand in hand or help each other out when needed?

“I think it very much depends on the type of product you’re trying to grow. I would say the more deep tech and the more enterprise, especially for physical products, it’s very apparent. There is a more precise separation because a classical R&D team focuses on long-term product development. And then, the growth team is more akin to a marketing team plus some additional engineering resources to address specific needs that all our marketing teams now have. But for purely software products like Bolt, where the user journey starts and ends within the software layer of the product. I agree that product teams essentially need to be incorporating the functionality of growth in pretty much every single product team has an exception here and there. The team needs to know the whole journey. There is no perfect scenario. It’s clear that it’s a very blurry, right line, and growth and product teams need to collaborate a lot. No matter what, what the separation is.” says Daniel.

“Even if you have a separate, strong growth team in a company, there will be times when some growth projects that you want to implement are so large and so game-changing that you will need a lot of support from other domains in the company. While in reality, you would have a growth idea coming from the growth team, but the execution would lie outside, pure, not just on the growth team, but across the company.” Karlis adds.

If you focus on growth and opening new markets, there is still this fine line between doing it too quickly and adequately. So quality versus growth. Then when is the right time, and at what stage should you focus on growth?

“First of all, you need to reach some degree of product-market fit before you’re thinking about growth. That it’s not the time to start thinking about development if your product shows terrible conversion rates, so the first step would be making sure that your product is ready for the growth stage. And then, I guess it depends on the industry and the type of product, but there are various acquisition channels that you can start checking out. And initially, you will try out a few acquisition channels but quickly realize that there’s only one or two of them that are working quite efficiently. Then it would be best if you mainly focused on those before you start extending your batch of channels.” said Karlis.

“Once you have a product-market fit, you don’t need to stop the product development, you need to enhance, and you need to make your product-market fit more, enforce it more. Build better features that it is harder to copy. That is how you protect yourself against the competition, and it’s still the product development part you need to continue doing. But once you have the initial product-market fit with the target segment you identified for yourself, you need to start doing growth. At a certain point, you might reach a ceiling of product-market fit. Then it would be best if you did the product-market fit expansion, meaning as you’re expanding into a new geography or the new adjacent verticals or new audience. Then the standard growth approach also will not help them; you need to do pretty, you need to build another product-market fit, but usually, it will build on top of existing infrastructure. So, at a certain point, you also need to understand where growth is no longer applicable.” adds Daniel.

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