Growth operating system

The operating system for running compound growth. Set up your growth model, find your bottleneck, build your 90-day plan, and run the weekly cadence that keeps it all on track.

Growth operating system

Introduction

I've helped dozens of B2B companies define their go-to-market strategy, and almost every time, the execution problems they came to me with traced back to four decisions they'd never made explicitly.

Your ideal customer profile, your positioning, your unit economics, and your growth motions. These four things shape everything downstream. When they're unclear, you end up targeting the wrong people, spending too much to acquire them, and running campaigns that sound good but don't convert.

This playbook helps you get those decisions right before you start spending. It's not about theory. It's about sitting down, being honest about who your best customers really are, what makes you different, and whether the numbers actually work. Get this right and everything else gets easier.

Chapters

1

Growth motions

Most B2B companies pick a growth motion by accident and wonder why scaling feels so hard. Learn how to deliberately choose between founder-led

2

ICP and persona

Vague targeting wastes budget and confuses your team. Get specific about which companies to pursue and who within them actually makes buying decisions so every growth activity has a clear target.

3

Positioning

Your prospects compare you to alternatives whether you like it or not. Control that comparison by deliberately choosing your category and articulating why you win against the options they are already considering.

4

Unit economics targets

Growth without guardrails burns cash. Set the CAC to LTV ratio and payback period that determines how aggressively you can scale and what constraints your growth engines need to operate within.

5

The Growth OS (Operating system) explained

If you're joining a team that runs this operating system, you need to understand how it works without reading every chapter. This is the short version: what to expect from each cadence, how decisions get made, and how to contribute from day one.

6

Quarterly planning

Annual goals mean nothing without quarterly targets that break them down. Learn how to work backwards from revenue through conversion steps and set the assumptions your team will execute against. By the end of this chapter, you'll have a model that turns ambition into arithmetic and gives every team a number they own.

7

Monthly planning

Spreading effort across everything means making progress on nothing. Learn how to pick one metric to focus on each month, select initiatives that will actually move it, and create the conditions for step-change improvement rather than incremental tweaks. Walk away with a clear focus and a short list of initiatives that matter.

8

Weekly scorecard

Monthly is too slow to catch problems before they become misses. Learn how to run a 60-minute weekly rhythm where each person reports their metric, surfaces issues early, and leaves with clear actions. Stop being surprised at month-end and start fixing problems in week one.

9

Pressure-test ICP against real data

Compare your ideal customer profile to last quarter's closed deals to find gaps between who you think you are selling to and who actually buys.

10

Revisit positioning as market shifts

Check whether your positioning still differentiates you from competitors and resonates with how buyers think about their problem today.

11

Update unit economics with actuals

Replace your original assumptions with real revenue data and recalculate whether your growth model is financially sustainable.

12

Weekly data review

Learn which numbers to check each week, how to spot early warning signs, and what to escalate before small problems become big misses.

13

Monthly review

Most teams look at dashboards without knowing what to do with the numbers. Learn how to diagnose what actually happened, separate signal from noise, and make course-corrections while there's still time to recover. Turn data into decisions instead of just reporting.

14

Quarterly review

Quarterly targets hit or missed are just the starting point. Learn how to assess whether your assumptions about the business were right, extract learnings that compound, and set up the next quarter with a model grounded in reality. Close one quarter and open the next in a single session.

15

Reassess growth motion fit

Use conversion data, CAC trends, and team capacity to evaluate whether your current growth motion is still the right choice.

Growth operating system

tools

Notion

Notion

Flexible workspace for docs, wikis, and lightweight databases ideal when you need custom systems without heavy project management overhead.

Rating

Rating

Rating

Rating

Rating

From

12

per month

Google Sheets

Google Sheets

Google Sheets is a cloud-based spreadsheet tool for data analysis, collaboration, and automation. It's free, works in your browser, and integrates with the entire Google Workspace ecosystem.

Rating

Rating

Rating

Rating

Rating

From

15

per month

Books

Good Strategy Bad Strategy

Richard Rumelt

Rating

Rating

Rating

Rating

Rating

Good Strategy Bad Strategy

A sharp test for strategy quality. Diagnose, choose guiding policies and design actions that compound over quarters.

Disciplined Entrepreneurship

Bill Aulet

Rating

Rating

Rating

Rating

Rating

Disciplined Entrepreneurship

Step by step approach to define customers, test value and design a go to market path that leads to repeatable revenue.

Lean Analytics

Alistair Croll

Rating

Rating

Rating

Rating

Rating

Lean Analytics

Pick the One Metric that Matters for your stage. Build lean dashboards and use data to decide the next best move.

Measure What Matters

John Doerr

Rating

Rating

Rating

Rating

Rating

Measure What Matters

A clear guide to OKRs for growth teams. Write good objectives, choose key results and run cadences that stick.

The One Thing

Gary Keller

Rating

Rating

Rating

Rating

Rating

The One Thing

A method for ruthless focus. Ask the focusing question, block time and protect momentum on the work that matters most.

The 80/20 Principle

Richard Koch

Rating

Rating

Rating

Rating

Rating

The 80/20 Principle

Use Pareto thinking to pick channels, ideas and customers. Cut the long tail and double down on what works.

Wiki

Key Performance Indicator (KPI)

Select metrics that reveal whether you're achieving strategic goals to track progress and identify problems before they become expensive to fix.

Buyer persona

Document your ideal customer's role, goals, and challenges to tailor messaging and prioritise features that solve real problems they actually pay for.

Competitive advantage

Identify what you do better or differently that competitors can't easily copy to defend margins and win customers consistently over time.

Go-to-market strategy

Plan how you'll reach customers and generate revenue by choosing channels, pricing, and sales models that match your product and market reality.

Positioning statement

Define how you're different from alternatives in a way that matters to customers to guide all messaging and ensure consistent market perception.

Value proposition

Articulate the specific outcome customers get from your solution to communicate why they should choose you over doing nothing or using alternatives.

Total Addressable Market (TAM)

Estimate the maximum revenue opportunity if you captured 100% market share to size your opportunity and prioritise which markets to enter first.

Growth marketing

Apply disciplined experimentation across the entire customer lifecycle, optimising every stage through rapid testing and data-driven iteration.

Product-market fit

Achieve the state where your product solves a genuine, urgent problem for a defined market that's willing to pay and actively pulling your solution in.

Inbound Marketing

Attract prospects through valuable content that solves real problems, building trust and generating qualified leads who approach you.

Referral marketing

Turn satisfied customers into active promoters who systematically bring qualified prospects into your pipeline at near-zero acquisition cost.

Related topic

Growth leadership

How do you make all four engines work together instead of in isolation?

Growth operating system

Other playbooks

Win bigger deals

Win bigger deals

Increase the average value of your initial contracts through better packaging, value framing, anchoring, and negotiation.

Convert more pipeline

Convert more pipeline

The full journey from first meeting to signed contract. How to improve conversion at every stage of your sales pipeline so more opportunities become revenue.

Sales sequences

Sales sequences

Build and automate sales follow-up sequences that keep deals moving through your pipeline without manual chasing.

Go-to-market strategy

Go-to-market strategy

Define your ideal customer profile, craft positioning that differentiates, and choose the channels that reach buyers when they are ready to act.

Lead qualification

Lead qualification

Build a scoring and qualification framework that separates genuine buying intent from casual interest, so sales invests time where it counts.

Project delivery

Project delivery

The operational wrapper for every consulting engagement. Covers kickoff, communication rhythms, progress reviews, and handover so nothing falls through the cracks.

Keep reading