Revenue, product and growth are one system
The most expensive mistake in scaling a business is treating its three core functions as separate departments with separate scoreboards.
Walk into most growing companies and you’ll find three teams, three roadmaps and three sets of metrics: product, growth, and revenue. Each is competent. Each is optimising hard. And the business is quietly leaking value in the gaps between them.
Why the gaps cost so much
Product ships something users love but that’s impossible to monetise. Growth fills the funnel with users the product can’t keep. Revenue closes deals the product can’t deliver on. Everyone hits their target. The company underperforms.
The numbers look fine in isolation, which is exactly why nobody fixes it.
Run it as one machine
The teams can stay separate. The thinking can’t. A few things that help:
- One shared model of value. Everyone should be able to draw how a user becomes worth something, and where that breaks.
- Decisions at the seam get a named owner. The handoffs between functions are where value dies. Someone has to own the join.
- Sequence, don’t silo. The order you build revenue, product and growth in matters as much as how well you build each.
The operator’s edge
This is why I work across all four levers instead of specialising in one. Not because I’m better at any single function than the specialists, but because the most valuable problems live precisely where the specialists’ maps end.
Disagree? Want to go deeper? I'd genuinely like to hear it.
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