A “Growth Engine” is a system within an organization that has been engineered to achieve one or more specific objectives. It operates according to the principles of Growth Engineering.

A Growth Engine is not one thing. It’s not a fancy app or a new piece of tech.

A Growth Engine is a system—an integrated configuration of tangible and intangible “ingredients” each of which play its part in achieving a strategic business objective.

And while there is usually nothing new in what a Growth Engine comprises, it’s the unique combination and scientific application of the following ingredients which makes a Growth Engine unique, and more importantly, effective.

What goes into a Growth Engine?

Here are some examples of ingredients that may go into a Growth Engine:

Operations

• A software development company replaces traditional training with an enabling workflow to quickly get new hires up to speed with best-practice Agile development.

• A new process that marketers follow to formulate a strategy and execution plan for the subsequent year’s projects.

• A manufacturing facility implements a new operation to transition focus from post-production inspections to “built-in” quality.

Procedures

• A healthcare facility aims to save time and improve communication quality by standardizing the preparation, conduct, and reporting of meetings and implementing a related meeting quality evaluation system.

• A consulting firm implements a new procedure to facilitate use by the senior consultants of the recently installed CRM system.

• A sales team creates a standardized procedure for researching potential customers before the first sales meeting.

Skills

• Problem-solving best practices are built into a problem-resolution workflow for middle managers.

• Critical thinking mechanisms are incorporated into a planning procedure.

• Bias mitigation safety checks are incorporated into strategy formulation sessions.

• A just-in-time support system was developed to replace traditional training to help new hires be able to sufficiently use an application the first day on the job.

Systems

• An evidence-based, near-real-time performance evaluation is implemented for an operational division to provide staff with accurate, fair, and promote feedback and evaluations.

• A system to ensure the Marketing Department functions strategically rather than tactically by building a system with procedures for planning and preparing all campaigns strategically according to best practices and in cooperation with the Sales Department and requesting business units.

• At a SaaS company, the decisions and next steps made during meetings were getting lost in an array of ad-hoc files and folders. A system for storing all meeting reports in a centralized location in a structured manner in a searchable format is established.

Integrations, Interfaces, and Connections

• A marketing department’s campaign strategy formulation Growth Engine workflow is integrated with the sales department's research database and field reports database to provide marketing with instant access to that data.

• The product design department at a manufacturer creates an interface with the sales department’s customer feedback database to give them instant access to this information.

• The HQ sales office of a SaaS company constructs integrations with the customer feedback databases of non-English-speaking foreign offices and processesd this information through an AI translation engine before automatically adding it to the global English-language customer feedback database.

How is a Growth Engine implemented?

A business can build multiple Growth Engines in different areas of the organization, and they can be built simultaneously or one at a time.

Ultimately, an initial Growth Engine can be continuously expanded one component at a time until it encompasses the entire organization. Or, several Growth Engines in different locations can be gradually expanded until they merge into one larger Growth Engine.

The ultimate goal of Growth Engineering is for the entire organization to function as a single Growth Engine, running at a consistently high level of performance.