By Román Hughes, former VP of Marketing at Rappi and former Director of Growth at Mercado Libre.
What does success look like?
Not because it is a brilliant phrase. In fact, it is a pretty simple question.
And that is exactly why I like it. Because many growth problems do not start in execution. They start earlier. They start when a team cannot clearly say what it is actually trying to achieve.
During the talk, very different kinds of cases came up. Some were thinking about how to listen more effectively to their customers. Others were trying to understand how to drive organic loops. Others wanted to find a better way to prioritize ideas and experiments. Different contexts. Different businesses. But underneath it all, something quite similar was happening in every case.
There was a lack of order.
And when there is no order, ideas start coming in from everywhere. What a customer said. What the founder asked for. What we saw someone else doing. What simply seems logical to try.
And that is where a team can start moving a lot, but not necessarily making progress.
One of the things I value most from the last book we read, Hacking Growth, is precisely that warning about uncontrolled action. That feeling that the organization is doing things all the time, but if you look at it week by week, there is no truly clear direction. There are sudden turns. Shifts in focus. Initiatives that appear for no real reason. And in growth, that is incredibly exhausting.
That is why I think it is so important to come back to that question.
What does success look like in what we are about to do?
Not as a workshop phrase. As a very concrete way to organize your thinking before taking action.
Yes, listen to the user. But with clear expectation management.
