Product growth · Ted Truscott · 15 October 2026
Bring product growth in before growth becomes a rescue job
When to involve product growth: before acquisition, onboarding and roadmap decisions become expensive to unwind. Bring the judgement in early, not the bureaucracy.
Growth is already being designed
You do not need a growth department on day one. But someone is already making decisions about who the product serves, how people discover it, what they experience first and why they return. Those are growth decisions, whether the person making them has growth in their title or not. Waiting until the business needs a growth specialist does not postpone them. It lets them accumulate without necessarily being considered together.
The expensive part is what gets built around an assumption
Imagine a product buying more traffic while too few users experience its value. The immediate cost is wasted acquisition. The larger cost can be the sales targets, hiring plan and roadmap built on the assumption that more traffic is the answer. By the time retention gets attention, several teams may be committed to making the wrong plan work. This is an illustrative situation, not an argument that acquisition should always wait: sometimes distribution is precisely what needs testing.
Get involved before the decision becomes a dependency
Useful moments include choosing an initial market, designing onboarding, committing to a paid acquisition channel, introducing pricing or setting the next quarter’s roadmap. Ask what behaviour has to change, why that would improve the business, and which assumption is most likely to break the logic. If a later result could invalidate several months of work, that assumption deserves attention now. The aim is not to make every decision certain. It is to avoid making uncertainty invisible.
Early growth work is not an endless stream of A/B tests
In a new product, traffic may be too low for a useful controlled experiment. The right work might be customer conversations, a prototype, a small distribution test or following the first users through the experience. Define what each can establish. A conversation can reveal why someone hesitates; it cannot establish a conversion uplift. As volume grows, introduce experiments that can credibly estimate impact. Quantitative discipline includes knowing when the numbers cannot yet answer the question.
Look for the warning signs
The team cannot explain what meaningful activation looks like. Different functions describe different target customers. Acquisition is judged on sign-ups while nobody owns repeat use. A roadmap has many plausible features but no clear account of which constraint they address. Reports keep getting longer while investment decisions stay unchanged. None proves the business is broken. Together, they suggest that bringing the pieces together would be more valuable than adding another specialist output.
Start with a decision, not a department
Choose one consequential question. Agree the customer, the desired behaviour and the commercial outcome. Bring product, engineering, data and commercial knowledge into the same discussion. Compare possible interventions, identify the evidence needed and give someone ownership of the next step. A small team can do this without a new hierarchy. Keep the record short enough that people actually use it: what we believe, what we are doing, and what would change our minds.
The point is to preserve options
My work across product growth, analytics and product leadership has made me wary of treating diagnosis as something that happens once execution has disappointed. Growth thinking should help choose the work in the first place. Involve it while changes are still cheap and the team can learn without defending a large sunk investment. Bring the judgement in early. Add process only where it helps that judgement turn into action.
I work with product and leadership teams in London and the Midlands on growth diagnosis, experimentation and how teams operate.
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