What Excellent Growth Teams See That Others Miss

Watch now | A conversation with Brian Hale, Chief Growth Officer at Doordash

“Seeing” excellence

Your hand can never draw better than your eye can discern.

They say that mallard ducks can see 100 million more color combinations than humans can. I think this is true also of a master versus an novice.

A 10x-builder looks at the world differently than a 1x-builder. A pro can zoom into the nuanced details of a piece of code, a design, a headline, and see many more possibilities than a n00b. But what is it that they see?

Thus begins a new experiment, where I interview some of the people who I admire the most to help me improve my eye in their respective crafts. The goal is to elevate my own bar for excellence so I can start to see what they see.

I hope these interviews help you as much as they help me.

The Art of Growth

Brian Hale’s career is the stuff of legend. Starting out in the nascent field of search engine optimization after working as a line chef, he fast became known as a wunderkund in the early days of Facebook, the person you’d call to magically make numbers go up. We now know call this practice “Growth” in the tech industry, and many a company has adopted the concept of a dedicated group of cross-functional people focused on the business of growing a business.

Today, Brian is the Chief Growth Officer at DoorDash, and he remains one of the sharpest thinkers I know on the topic of sustainable hyperscaling.

Through our conversation, what stood out to me wasn’t a list of tactics but a set of sharp contrasts.

Over and over, Brian drew a line between what okay growth teams do and what excellent growth teams do. The differences are small but structural. Once you see them, you can’t unsee them.

Below are the top seven contrasts that, together, explain why some companies unlock orders‑of‑magnitude growth while others plateau at 5–10% of their potential.

1. Okay growth teams optimize funnels. Excellent growth teams own the entire journey.

Okay growth teams talk about growth as if it ends at signup.

They focus on acquisition. They measure top-of-funnel conversion. Once a user creates an account, the work is considered done, or handed off to another product.

Excellent growth teams see this as a category error.

Brian described excellence as “Obsessing about every single step — not just ‘did we get a customer in,’ but did they complete the order, and every single thing that might possibly go wrong in between.”

This obsession changes the unit of work. It’s no longer a funnel step or a dashboard metric. It’s the lived experience of a real person trying to get value.

Growth, in this frame, isn’t about getting people in. It’s about getting people through.

2. Okay teams ship changes. Excellent teams remove blockages.

Okay growth teams ship a lot of things.

Buttons change colors. Headlines rotate. UI elements move by a few pixels. Sometimes these experiments works. Sometimes they don’t.

Excellent growth teams care far less about what they changed than why it mattered.

Brian told a DoorDash story that captures this perfectly. The company had a strong zero-delivery-fee offer for new users, and yet many customers still hesitated because they were worried about fees.

As he put it: “We were like, ‘but there’s zero — what do you mean you’re worried?’ And that’s when it became obvious we were doing a terrible job explaining it.”

The growth win wasn’t inventing a new offer, it was making the existing offer impossible to miss.

When small changes produce massive results, it’s generally always because it resolved real customer confusion or fear that had been blocking their progress.

3. Okay teams maximize experiment count. Excellent teams maximize learning rate.

There’s a popular myth that the best growth teams ship the most experiments.

Brian is blunt about this being wrong.

He’s seen teams shipping dozens of experiments a week — changing button colors, moving pixels, rotating headlines — with almost nothing to show for it.

“What’s missing,” he said, “is why the hell that thing mattered in the first place.”

A button color only matters if users are getting stuck on that step. If no one is confused, the experiment is noise. Dozens of experiments per week usually means, in his words, “You’re not doing a ton of understanding work… you’re just shipping random stuff.”

Excellent teams earn the right to test by first understanding where friction actually lives and for whom it manifests, by diving into the data to understand conversion rates and user segments. They move at a steadier, almost boring pace where there are fewer experiments but much stronger hypotheses. As a result, the experiments tend to yield much higher signal.

Excellent teams also get excited about failures, not because failure is great in and of itself but because even failures yield important teachings. “This didn’t work,” Brian explained, “which means therefore this other thing must be true.”

Real growth velocity shows up as insight density rather than experiment motion.

4. Okay teams “growth hack.” Excellent teams practice product growth.

The phrase “growth hacking” sounds exciting. It also does real damage because it implies clever tricks, randomness, and the idea that anything might work if you try enough things at the wall.

Brian rejects this framing entirely. What excellent teams do, in his words, is product growth.

Product growth means removing friction, clarifying value, and fixing anything that makes the product harder, scarier, slower, or more expensive than it needs to be.

Great growth leaders aren’t asking, “What can we test?”

They’re asking, “Where is the user stuck and why?”

The answers are rarely flashy, but that’s where the big gains come from.

5. Okay teams optimize activity. Excellent teams optimize relationships.

As companies mature, their metrics start to betray them.

Orders. Sessions. Usage. All of them go up because they’re driven by a small group of power users.

Brian calls this a trap.

No power user starts out as a power user. “They all started out as first-time users,” he reminded me, an obvious statement that many teams somehow forget.

Teams start to optimize for activity for two main reasons:

The first is that power users tend to be the most vocal about their needs. Roadmaps become cluttered with features that help the person who is already coming back three times a week eke out 10% more efficiency in their workflow.

The second is that as companies mature, everyone inside the company becomes a power user. This results in collective blindness, as new users, occasional users, and less-enthusiastic users become invisible.

The new user flows get very little love. The price-conscious users are not represented within the company. The tech-unsavvy users, who grow in number as a company scales, get overlooked.

Growth teams exist, in large part, to restore that lost perspective and represent the people who aren’t already fluent.

Excellent growth teams anchor on MAU, or other people-count metric, because it forces the question: Are we continuously earning new relationships?

Focusing on activity may feel flattering in the short term, but relationship counts spell the breadth of opportunity for sustained long-term growth.

6. Okay teams celebrate wins. Excellent teams obsessively compound them.

When an experiment works, okay teams celebrate and move on.

Excellent teams slow down. They ask why the impact was so large. Why it worked ten times better than expected. What was the invisible bottleneck they just removed.

Brian described how the best insights often emerge this way: a fix that works far better than anticipated reveals a deeper truth about what actually matters.

From there, excellence looks like obsession to apply that lesson everywhere. This is how a pretty big win becomes a massively compounding one.

Breakout growth rarely comes from many ideas; rather they come from over-indexing on a small set of deeply right ideas.

7. Okay growth hires want the job. Excellent growth hires interrogate you.

If you’re hiring your first senior growth leader, this is the clearest tell.

Brian looks for people who are trying to understand whether the company is actually ready for growth, because they know that excellence in growth is conditional. Thus, their questions serve a diagnostic purpose. They may ask things like:

• “What does retention look like over years, not weeks or months?”
  This is a test of whether growth compounds or decays. Brian is clear that most companies fool themselves by quoting short-term retention. Long-horizon retention tells you whether there’s actually a pot of gold at the end of the funnel or whether growth will just pour water into a leaky bucket.
• “Where do new users get stuck or hesitate today, and what evidence do you have?”
  This question probes whether the company has done the understand work. Brian repeatedly emphasizes that excellent growth comes from deeply understanding confusion, fear, and friction, not from brainstorming ideas in the abstract. If the answer is vague, it signals the team isn’t yet seeing what matters.
• “Will this role have engineers and designers fully dedicated, or is this expected to live inside marketing?”
  This tests structural readiness. Brian is clear that growth is a cross-functional, product-level discipline that oversees the entire journey of the user. Without engineering and design partnership, the role collapses into acquisition tactics, and excellence becomes impossible.

Great growth leaders know that growth excellence requires the right conditions. And they’re not willing to join a team that isn’t ripe for the lever or structurally set up to succeed.

What separates Okay growth from Excellent growth?

Across all seven contrasts, one thing stands out to me: Excellent growth teams relentlessly do the most important thing, even when it’s unglamorous, non‑obvious, or uncomfortable.

They don’t chase tactics.

They don’t confuse motion for progress.

They don’t build for themselves.

They obsess over the customer and hunt for where the value is leaking.

If growth feels elusive, it’s rarely because teams lack ideas; it’s because they don’t have the patience or discipline to find and commit to the real leverage.