The Growth Trap
You’ve got a nice thing going.
You’ve got customers in good fit segments. You’ve got product capabilities those customers will pay for.
Basically the product does what it needs to do to meet the needs of your customers. Nothing more, nothing less.
Pure supply and demand zen. (or not, no judgement)
Your product and marketing teams create efficient growth
Marketing is doing their thing. They create efficient growth by getting better at driving top of funnel and converting opportunities. They find good fit segments who will adopt the product without requiring any big changes.
Product is doing their thing too. They create efficient growth by adding capabilities to help customers get their Job Done better, cheaper, faster. They move the efficient growth needle through incremental changes required to win in the good fit segments.
✅ You know your customers well. You talk to them, understand their needs, their language, their context, their JTBDs.
(or not, no judgement)
But there is a problem
Actually there are two problems. Sorry.
Sometimes marketing gets out ahead the product. They’re so good at adapting the message to new segments that they attract customers who can’t quite get the job done with the product as is.
Product is good at better cheaper faster enhancements, but sometimes those capabilities gets out ahead of revenue's ability to sell. They end up adding capabilities and features that don’t create enough value for your current segments to justify the investment.
Efficient growth is hard enough. But sometimes efficient growth isn't enough.
Eventually ambition (or outside pressure) pushes you beyond the what you can accomplish with efficient growth
TAM expansion and product innovation won't come through improved win rates and better/cheaper/faster product iterations.
Adjancent growth requires net-new segments of customers who have different Jobs to be Done and net-new product enhancements to meet their needs.
But the things that make you good at efficient growth are a gravitational force holding you back from limit busting growth work.
Welcome to The Growth Trap!
All that tacit knowledge your team has about current customers is bias and assumption when you are trying to work in new segments.
The research practices and conversation guides and survey templates and product metrics you depend on to increase your knowledge of a well known domain limit your ability to learn new things in this green space.
The very things that make efficient growth possible block you from new-new growth.
The growth trap is not like a bear trap. There is an easy(ish) way out.
The good news when you are stuck in the growth trap is that no one is on their way to eat you. You can be caught in the growth trap, but its power is artificial and its limits are self-imposed.
Escaping the growth trap requires something called Explore and Exploit.
This gentleman offers a good model for exploring (and you can click the image to watch his stunning 1 minute presentation).
But you can't f*ck around and find out forever.
This little dot is the passageway for driving exploratory work back into the comforts of efficient (exploitative) growth processes.
Next time we will mash these two things together
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