That’s the first half of a joke (“joke”) I used to tell with new copywriting clients. They would hire me to create a deliverable to improve a single metric owned by a single department.
But a few weeks later each and every client found themselves confronting difficult truths about their company-wide strategy, even before they saw their first messaging brief.
As a bright-eyed copywriter, I assumed most companies hiring growth experts already had a handle on their vision, their mission, their core users. They knew all these things about who they were selling to, they just needed someone who could translate that knowledge into a landing page, an email sequence, a sales letter. Right?
Right?
Wrong. Time and again I asked leaders of truly innovative products and services to tell me what problem they solved and for whom – only for us to both end up in muddy waters.
When I asked:
“Who are your customers and what problem are you solving for them?”
I would hear 5 different answers from 5 different people in 5 different departments.
When I probed:
“What is your mission? What is your vision? What product category are we in?”
I would hear one person sharing 100 different ideas or 100 people groaning that the one person who could commit to a singular vision refused to just pick one.
When I insisted:
“What metrics do you want to grow? How do you measure them? How do you know those are the right numbers to track?”
I would hear “Everything” or “We don’t know” or “Activations” only to find that no activation metric had been determined, recorded, or measured. Anywhere.
One minute my champion is hiring someone to increase new user activation with targeted onboarding emails.
The next minute they’re wondering how they’re going to turn their organization upside down.
“How do I convince the head of marketing that they are writing for the wrong audience, building the wrong pipeline?”
“How do I convince an army of product leaders and engineers that they are not building what the market wants?”
“How do I get the CEO to take the company in a new direction based on what we’ve learned on this project?”
“How can I pull a vision, a strategy, a commitment out of the CEO – and get them to stick with it for longer than a quarter?”
“Maybe my vision for this company, this initiative has evolved.”
“Wait, maybe we actually aren’t solving the problems our customers have.”
“Am I making a huge mistake?”
I hated the position we found ourselves in – me, the copywriter wanting to make an impact and my client, a leader trying to grow a business without a solid foundation to build upon, suddenly seeing their organization through new glasses, slowly realizing that the reason they sought out a copywriter wasn’t because they needed help writing the words, but because they didn’t know what to say.
The underlying strategy of what they were selling and who they were selling to simply was not working for most of the teams I worked with.
But as long as I sat in a chair called “copywriter” or “growth strategist” I would always fight an uphill battle for the change management work that leaders needed if they were ever going to reach their growth goals.
“What is to be done?” I wondered.
At first I thought that I was looking at departmental misalignment, or maybe even my own inexperience was to blame.
“Product and marketing ought to be building for the same audience, but they aren’t. If I could set up a single source of truth and rebuild some of the lost trust between them, maybe things could get on track.”
“Sales and engineering are motivated by entirely different incentive structures, maybe if I could figure out how to get both aligned with a single vision we could help them see they can both reach their goals better if they work together.”
Guided by curiosity and hope, I learned UX design, built customer research repositories, and trained others how to do the same. I led product teams, apprenticed as an engineer, and paired with sales leaders to build our product roadmaps. I read books on linguistics and systems thinking. I used the skills I learned in PR and honed in marketing copywriting to define communication and buy-in strategies.
I worked as a fractional IC and as a fractional executive.
I reinvented myself every 18 months.
And still, the problems I saw remained fixed.
No matter where I sat.
No matter what skills I learned.
The same truth held firm
No one hires a builder to tear everything down.
But no builder can promise a skyscraper without knowing the foundation is solid.
No matter the title, the role, the job description, if an organization is already established, the expectation put upon most team members is to grow it.
My original hypothesis – the one about how I just needed to fix the departmental alignment and then everyone would be able to do actual growth work – was wrong. Dead wrong.
The more I tried to force it, the more I realized there was more truth in the old “joke” I used to tell as a copywriter – especially in the second half, the part I hadn’t been saying out loud.
“Hire a copywriter and you’ll be doing change management within 3 months,” is what I used to say.
“Because most of the growth stage problems people hire copywriters to solve are a result of mistakes made years ago, at the innovation stage,” is what I finally started muttering.
Hire a marketer to market a muddy vision and you’ll get muddy marketing.
Hire a product person to build without telling them what they’re building and you’ll get a disjointed product.
Hire a researcher, a UXer, an engineer, a sales leader – hire anyone without clearly communicating your vision and without giving them the qualitative data to understand who they are building for and you will get a stagnant, disjoined, mess of a movement.
And yet, dedicated change management is an endeavor rarely included in scope of the copywriting, ux, research, or prototyping projects sold to and sought by so-called high growth companies.
So what then?
A new hypothesis started to form.
Teams that build something from the ground up have structural advantages that can’t be recouped later on without a dedicated change management process.
One day I had the opportunity to test this hypothesis.
A small team of colleagues launched a new product from 0-1. We defined and mobilized the vision, researched our users at the level of detail I’d always hoped for, shipped a prototype and measured metrics from day 1.
The sailing was not always smooth. And yet.
A product staffed with experts malfunctions as often as anything else, but it is much easier to fix.
A team that understands and agrees on what success means in both qualitative and quantitative terms ships projects that fail to meet their expectations. But they waste less time on work that helps no one (or worse, actively hinders their progress).
An idea launched with a single vision, backed by research that the entire team understands faces growth challenges. The team disagrees. Decisions about what to do next are not always obvious or easy to make.
But a team with a solid innovation foundation and commercialization strategy always knows exactly what they are growing and for whom, an obvious yet so often overlooked step many growth leaders run smack into.
After a decade of watching growth strategies fail to account for vision and commercialization missteps, now I help leaders of bold new initiatives build the foundations of real growth
If your whole team starts with a clear understanding of your singular vision, if your whole team starts with a deep, data-informed, and singular understanding of the progress they are trying to help customers make, and if your whole team knows how to build against that vision from the start, then you are in a position to have real growth later on.
I help leaders understand what customers want and need so you can decide what parts of your vision to chip away at first. Then I train your team so everyone has the same understanding of who you’re solving a problem for and why. So you don’t end up wasting years stagnating while you ship things no one wants.
I help you refine and communicate your vision so your team looks at your user research and knows exactly what parts are relevant to building your vision and what parts are neat but unimportant. So you don’t end up with disjointed projects that no one can understand how to contribute to.
And then – and only then – we create the experiences of use and purchase that help your innovation take hold.