Growing — or Leaking?

The story: The chart looked great. Monthly active users climbing steadily — 2,000 to nearly 5,000 in four months. Let’s keep this growth going. Couldn’t agree more! One month later, he was thrilled: our growth is amazing — we’ve tripled our new users! She wasn’t celebrating. Totally disagree. Have you seen our churn rate? He was watching the front door. She was watching the back. They’d agreed on growth without ever agreeing on what growth means when people are leaving as fast as they’re arriving.

What it means for organisations: "Growth" is the metric everyone rallies behind — until you discover that two departments are measuring completely different things. Acquisition and retention are both growth. But optimising for one while ignoring the other doesn’t produce a bigger business — it produces a more expensive one. When leadership says "keep growing" without defining whether they mean expand the top of the funnel or deepen what’s already there, teams don’t disagree on the goal. They disagree on the math — and neither finds out until the number that matters doesn’t move.