Watch the episode on YouTube · 17:58

If somebody asked where your company should invest its next growth dollar, could you give them a defensible answer?

Could you explain why it belongs there, what you expect to get back, and what would make you spend it somewhere else? Or would you start describing the campaigns you're already running?

I keep having versions of this conversation with growth leaders, people on their teams, and founders trying to hire. You can have years of experience, know the channels, and manage a team, and still be missing capabilities the business needs from you right now.

Your experience needs a working explanation.

I don't think past experience has become worthless. I do think we need to explain which parts still apply, which assumptions have changed, and how we'd find out. Being confident because you've done this before can become a problem if it stops you from looking closely at what's different.

Matt Swulinski's interview with Harry Stebbings got me thinking about this. His work has included growth at Superhuman, Wispr Flow, and Viktor. What stood out to me was the range of the conversation: acquisition economics, measurement, creative, customer experience, and hiring. A growth decision can involve all of those things.

There are three capabilities I'd want to see in the person responsible for making it.

A growth leader manages a portfolio of investments. You have limited money and team capacity, different opportunities to create value, and different levels of confidence about what will happen.

Knowing the CAC in your best-performing channel is part of the job. So is knowing what the business can afford and what happens to customers after they arrive.

Imagine a founder asks whether you can substantially increase acquisition spend next month. Before answering, I'd want to know what we're trying to grow. Accounts? Paying customers? Revenue? Contribution? What payback period can we support? What do we know about retention? How much of our acquisition already comes through inexpensive distribution?

Those answers change the decision. A business with a lot of inexpensive acquisition elsewhere might have room to pay for additional customers through paid media. Insisting that every channel meet the same standalone target could starve that business of growth.

I'll happily make an investment that loses money on the initial acquisition if the expected lifetime value supports it. But I need a reason to believe that expectation. I need historical retention, realistic service costs, and enough cash to carry the payback period.

Being well-funded doesn't mean we should spend like drunken sailors either. There's still a ceiling.

And averages can hide the choice we're making. Customers we acquired cheaply earlier don't tell us what the next group will cost. I want to understand the cost and value of the additional volume we're considering, and I want us to be clear about the numbers we're using. Revenue, gross profit, and contribution after marketing costs tell us different things.

The scope also has to extend beyond the ad account. In McKinsey's interview with Genentech CMO Zoë Lazarre, she describes barriers patients can encounter even after diagnosis and a prescription. The operating question travels: where does the customer get stuck, and what does that do to the value of acquiring them?

If onboarding is losing people or sales follow-up is weak, you need to understand that. You may not manage those teams. You still need to bring the right people into the decision.

Could you trace one customer group from acquisition spend through conversion, retention, and expected contribution, and tell me where your confidence breaks down?

Reporting the channel metrics more beautifully won't fill that gap.

If I ask how you use AI and you tell me you use it to write briefs or brainstorm headlines, I still don't know whether you've improved the way your team operates.

Walk me through a workflow. What starts it? Where does the information come from? Who makes the important decisions? What does a good output look like? What happens when the output is wrong, and how does the next attempt get better?

You don't have to write every integration yourself. You do need enough understanding to specify the work, recognize a failure, and judge whether the result is useful.

Take a hypothetical campaign review. An agent pulls the numbers and recommends moving budget between ad sets. Is it comparing the same time periods? Have conversions had time to arrive? Is it recommending cheaper leads or customers who actually create more value? Who can approve the change, and how will we know whether it helped?

If the agent produces a confident answer and nobody can explain how to check it, you've added another thing for the team to worry about.

The same applies to producing marketing materials with AI. Maybe faster production lets us test more messages against a known conversion problem. Maybe it frees up time to understand why qualified prospects don't buy. Then we need to see whether that actually happened.

Producing twice as many assets isn't automatically progress. If the team still can't decide which ideas deserve testing or learn from the results, we may have made the wrong part of the process faster.

If you're hiring, ask for one workflow the candidate has materially improved. What got faster or more reliable? What did the team do with the capacity that opened up? What failed, and what changed afterward?

Let them show the awkward parts. A polished diagram by itself doesn't establish that they can build, diagnose, and improve the work.

The old playbook gives you a place to start investigating. You still need to know whether the conditions that made it work exist here today.

Maybe the new business has a different sales cycle. Maybe the channel is more competitive. Maybe buyers are doing more research before they talk to you. A good growth leader can say what they believe, what they're uncertain about, what they'd test next, and what would make them stop.

That doesn't mean changing the budget every time yesterday looks bad. You need to account for conversion delays, the evidence available, and the time an investment needs to bake. Or, as the kids say, let it cook.

It also doesn't mean crushing brand spend. I think growth leaders who can explain the business impact of longer-term investment are in a better position to get it funded. What behavior do we expect to change? How could that create value? Over what horizon? What would increase or reduce our confidence?

We don't protect that work by leaving its purpose vague. A credible investment case gives the business a reason to fund it.

If you're hiring, give a candidate a bounded hypothetical with imperfect information. Ask what they'd want to know before allocating the budget. Then change one important assumption. Can they adapt without pretending their first answer was perfect? Can they distinguish a missing fact from a decision we can reasonably make now?

The organization has a responsibility here too. If you want someone to own the outcome, give them access to the information, the relevant partners, and room to challenge the method. You can't demand commercial ownership while treating the person as an order taker.

Take a meaningful growth decision you're facing and work through it on a page. Explain the goal, the economics that constrain it, the opportunity you recommend, and the evidence behind it. Write down what you don't know, how you'll learn it, and what would make you change your recommendation.

Then trace the work required to act. Where are the dependencies? Where could AI help? Who checks the result?

Pay attention to where you get stuck. That's a much more useful development plan than vaguely deciding you need to get better at AI. If you're hiring, use the same exercise to structure the conversation.

I still think more marketers should negotiate performance upside tied to an agreed contribution target. But the contribution comes first. We need the capability, the responsibility, and the authority to make the decisions that create it.

My fear is that too many marketers will wait too long to grab hold of this shift. We need to understand our unit economics, work with finance and sales, and get out of our ivory towers of lead gen and lead-volume quotas. Businesses need to give the people who can do that the scope to act.

What's the biggest gap you're seeing between the growth leadership your business needs and the candidates you're meeting? And if you're doing the job, what part is forcing you to learn the most right now?

I'd love to hear concrete examples. Those are the conversations worth having in future episodes.