Growth Teams Force Measurement Rigor

When scaling a product from initial traction to hypergrowth, Peter Deng prioritizes building systems that enable sustainable acceleration, even if it means temporarily slowing down. He believes in planning chess moves in advance rather than just reacting to immediate needs.

One of his first moves after joining companies like Instagram, Uber, Airtable, and ChatGPT was to build a growth team. This wasn't just about driving growth metrics, but about fundamentally changing how the organization understands its product. Growth teams ask rigorous questions that expose measurement gaps and force deeper analysis.

"When you hire the right growth leader, they start asking all the right questions," Peter explains. "That's when you realize you don't have certain things logged. After you log them and look at the data, you ask 'why is that happening?' which forces deeper analysis about correlations and hypotheses."

This approach creates a virtuous cycle: growth leaders are naturally wired for experimentation, which begets the right questions, which leads to more rigorous systems. The result is transforming something that seems to be working into a measurable, optimizable system.

Peter recommends building a growth team rather than an analytics team because growth leaders are tied to outcomes. While analysts might generate insights that nobody acts on, growth leaders are incentivized to partner with data science to make the entire product and business more rigorous, fundamentally changing the DNA of the team.

For product leaders, this means recognizing that measurement infrastructure is a prerequisite for sustainable growth. Before optimizing features or launching new initiatives, ensure you have the instrumentation to understand what's actually happening. The questions that emerge from this process will often reveal your most important opportunities.