How Growth differs at different stages

Growth looks very different at different stages - this is one of the biggest challenges companies face. 

Having worked for many years at early stage companies, scale-ups and enterprise I have experienced this pain myself - as well as the personal challenge of trying to understand why what worked in a previous job didn't work anymore. 

There are three distinct stages: Pre-PMF, Post-PMF and Scale. 

At each stage a mixture of skills are required to succeed, but based on my experience of working with over 30 companies over 20 years, there is a pattern of what the key skills required are, based on the most important area of work. 

Pre-PMF is all about finding PMF, so that requires understanding your customers, what is the value you deliver and how to best communicate it. (Some people will not define this as Growth, but it's nonetheless a necessary step to get there).

Post-PMF is about getting traction and growing quickly: this requires mastering experimentation on the product and strong channel expertise to gain momentum.

Scale is about optimisation, managing resources and knowing when to optimise existing growth loops vs exploring to find new ones. This requires mastering operations, top-notch analytics to inform decision making and the ability to navigate uncertainty. 

As these are significantly different skills, team often reach a stall point in growth as they are not familiar with the new challenge they face. 

We must define our goal to know what tools we need. These are the goals at different stages:

1. We get customers to be happy to pay for our product and show meaningful retention: this is the pre-pmf goal

2. We find a channel that allows us to acquire new users consistently: this is the post-pmf goal 

3. We accelerate new customer acquisition and overall revenue: this is the scale goal

Shifting from one kind of work to the next isn't easy, knowing when it's time to do that, (particularly from step 2 to step 3), is even trickier. Being aware of the differences can help us overcome the obstacle by either hiring, renting or learning new skills.