Growth Isn’t a Department — It’s a System

I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve been called in to help a business “fix growth.” Usually, what I find isn’t a problem with the individual teams. It’s the spaces between them that are broken.

Growth doesn’t live in marketing. It doesn’t live in sales. It lives in the system that connects them—with product, with ops, with leadership. When those connections are shallow or absent, you get friction. And friction kills momentum.

"If you're solving channel performance without looking at handovers, feedback loops, and incentive alignment, you're just polishing one cog while the machine grinds."

The Real Anatomy of Growth

A functioning growth system includes three critical dynamics:

A clear and shared understanding of the customer journey
Tight feedback loops between every team that touches that journey
Leadership alignment on what ‘good growth’ looks like

In a true growth system, marketing doesn’t just hand off leads. They co-create sales materials. Sales doesn’t just close deals—they feed back insights to marketing and product. Product doesn’t build in isolation—they attend sales calls, read support tickets, and understand how the message lands.

"The best teams I’ve worked with don’t wait for silos to create problems—they build bridges before the cracks appear."

Why Most Companies Get This Wrong

It’s not because they’re lazy or misaligned in spirit. It’s because organizational design and growth targets often evolve on different timelines. You build out a marketing team before sales is ready to absorb the volume. Or you push product updates before support has the tools to handle the fall-out.

These mismatches compound. And eventually, someone says, “Growth isn’t working.”

But growth is working. It’s just out of sync.

How to Start Thinking in Systems

The first step is to shift how you talk about growth internally. Stop attributing wins or losses to a single function. Start mapping how those functions interact.

What parts of the customer journey are owned vs. co-owned?
Where do decisions in one department impact another?
How are success metrics reinforcing—or working against—each other?

When I enter a company, I don’t ask “Who owns growth?” I ask, “How does growth move through this company, and where does it slow down?”

That’s where the answers live.

What You Can Do Today

Map your current lead-to-revenue journey as a leadership team
Identify three points where teams hand off ownership
For each handoff, ask: is this frictionless, and do we all agree on what success looks like?
Pick one of those handoffs and fix it—not with a meeting, but with a process and a shared metric

“Sustainable growth doesn’t come from fixing isolated parts. It comes from designing for flow.”

I write about operational leadership, growth design, and how to build systems that scale. Follow along here or on LinkedIn or X @rlivain_builds.