Sometimes, growth is boring…

For most growth teams, the default instinct is to look for something totally new.

A new channel. A new tactic. Even a new feature.

That instinct is healthy. Step changes often do come from new ideas. Exploration matters.

But over time, one of the biggest blockers to growth is not a lack of ideas: it is the quiet deprioritisation of improving things that are already working.

What you might term “the boring work”.

Shiny and new

In my own experience working on growth, it is often much more exciting to try and crack something brand new than to iterate on and improve something that is already working. The challenge of something new feels ambitious. It feels like progress.

By contrast, refining an existing paid ads account for the fourth or fifth time does not feel particularly glamorous. Improving conversion rates slightly, tightening targeting and iterating on creative all to reduce CPA by a small percentage doesn’t necessarily feel like a breakthrough, yet the reality is it takes creativity and trying new things within that channel.

If something is working a little, a very real question is whether you can make it work a lot.

Imagine a channel running at a $100 CPA with a $300 LTV. It works…but only just. A 10 percent improvement in conversion rate drops CPA to $90. A further improvement in creative performance drops it to $85. Now the unit economics look meaningfully different. You can afford to spend more. Increased spend brings more data. More data improves optimisation. Over time, what began as a channel that “kind of works” becomes a reliable growth engine.

When setting goals, I have found it useful to ask: “If we could not try anything brand new for the next six months, where would we iterate and improve?”

A famous framing

Jeff Bezos is well known for framing Amazon’s strategy around the things that will not change. Customers will never want slower delivery. They will never want less choice. They will never want higher prices.

That framing is strategic. But the same logic applies at a tactical level in growth: if something is working, can you make it work better?

Amazon did not build its competitive advantage through one breakthrough in logistics. It improved delivery times steadily over decades. It built warehouse infrastructure. It refined routing. It expanded selection systematically through Marketplace and Fulfilment by Amazon.

Taken together, these improvements reinforced the same core value proposition: faster delivery, greater selection, better convenience.

In growth work, the equivalent might be investing in a channel that consistently performs or a referral loop that consistently drives new leads and iterate on it, experimenting with ways to make it work better-and-better.

From spike to reinforcement

Many growth initiatives start as spikes. It can be tempting to take the win, report it, and move on.

But treating that win as the beginning of something, not the end, is important. When a channel works, do you build the internal capability to scale it properly? When an ad set performs, do you invest in systematic creative testing? When a landing page converts well, do you turn optimisation into an ongoing discipline rather than a one-off project?

This is where reinforcement becomes intentional.

Compounding growth does not happen automatically. It means allocating time and talent to squeeze the extra efficiency out of what already works.

Over time, those small improvements accumulate. Not because of a single breakthrough, but because of a series of iterative breakthroughs built on top of one another.

Momentum

New initiatives can create very visible motion: there’s generally more to announce and a lot more low-hanging fruit to tackle and make early progress.

In contrast, incremental improvements are quieter and less dramatic and, well, they’re harder! It’s often harder to eke out the next 10% than the first 80%. As a result, they are easy to deprioritise.

I’m not saying growth is about choosing between new bets and incremental improvements! It’s not: you need both. Exploration creates the opportunity for step change and reinforcement turns those opportunities into durable advantages.

A useful question for any growth team is this: what are we systematically improving, not just testing? And, just as importantly, where are we forgetting to improve something that is working, simply because it no longer feels new?

The work that feels repetitive or unglamorous is often the work that compounds. It raises the floor and therefore increases the return on every future decision.