If every function hits its targets, is the Growth Engine working?

Marketing hits its pipeline target. ✓

Sales hits bookings. ✓

Product hits adoption. ✓

Customer Success hits retention and NRR. ✓

So everything should be fine, right?

Not necessarily.

I've touched on this earlier in the series: every function can perform well without the Growth Engine working as well as it could.

But that raises a more practical question:

If that's true, how do we actually lead the whole?

Take expansion

Let's say we want more revenue from existing customers.

It would be quite easy to make that a Customer Success target.

But what if customers aren't expanding because they haven't adopted enough of the product?

Or because our packaging makes the next step unattractive?

Perhaps onboarding means customers take too long to see real value.

Perhaps Sales is focusing on the wrong expansion opportunities.

Or perhaps we acquired customers with limited potential to expand in the first place.

Suddenly, “increase expansion” isn't really a Customer Success problem.

It's a growth problem.

The same applies to winning new customers.

If we aren't winning enough, more demand may be the answer.

But it could also be Brand. Product. Customer advocacy. How we sell. Pricing.

Or we may simply be trying to win customers we shouldn't be trying quite so hard to win.

And that, I think, changes the question.

Someone still has to make the trade-offs

Because at some point this becomes very practical.

Budgets are limited. So are people and time.

If the biggest thing holding back growth right now is Product adoption, should we put another euro into generating demand?

If better onboarding would improve adoption, retention and expansion, is that a Customer Success investment or a growth investment?

And if one of those things would make a bigger difference than something already high on another function's list, who gets to make that trade-off?

CMO? CRO? CCO? CPO? CEO?

I'm not sure there is one right answer.

Different companies will do this differently.

What matters to me is whether someone can actually look across the business and say:

Right now, improving this will have a bigger effect on growth than improving that.

And then do something about it.

Move resources. Change priorities. Stop something. Invest more somewhere else.

Otherwise, we can talk about a Growth Engine as much as we like while continuing to divide money, people and priorities mainly by function.

And then there is measurement

I'm certainly not suggesting we stop measuring pipeline, bookings, adoption, retention or NRR.

We need them.

But they mostly tell us how different parts of the business are performing.

If we want to understand whether the Growth Engine itself is getting stronger, we also need to understand what happens between them.

Does better adoption actually improve retention and expansion?

Do customers who get more value recommend us more?

And if they do, does that create more, or better demand?

Does higher trust make Sales more effective?

Does what Sales learns actually change Product, positioning or the offer?

Some of these things are easy to measure.

Others are much harder.

But that doesn't make them less important.

We need to understand what makes the next thing stronger

I think that's where I'm starting to land.

We need the numbers for each part of the business.

But we also need to understand whether an improvement in one part makes something else stronger.

Because that's what tells us whether growth can start to create more growth.

Better Product gives more customer value which gives higher retention and expansion which gives stronger advocacy which gives better demand which results in easier acquisition.

Not every business will have that exact loop.

And reality will obviously be considerably messier than the arrows make it look.

But understanding our loops might be more useful than adding another KPI to each function's dashboard.

And perhaps that's also how growth needs to be led.

Not by choosing between Marketing, Sales, Product and Customer Success.

But by repeatedly asking:

Where in the business will the next investment make the biggest difference to growth as a whole?

I think that's a good place to stop for now.

In the next and final post, I'll try to bring all of this together: what does it actually mean to build and lead a Growth Engine when we start treating growth as a system?