Your First Growth Strategy: A 5-Step Guide for Product Teams

Jan 28, 2026

Written by Nico De Paul (CEO and Co-Founder)

How to Build Your First Growth Strategy (Without Getting Lost in the Chaos)

Building a growth strategy for the first time can feel like trying to solve a puzzle without the picture on the box. Where do you start? What should you prioritize? And how do you get a team aligned when everyone has a different idea of what “growth” actually means?

This guide breaks down the few foundations that consistently help teams move from confusion to clarity.

At Minders, we’ve had the chance to support dozens of digital teams across LATAM as they build their first growth strategy. While the details always vary, the starting points rarely do. In practice, the path becomes clearer once teams focus on a small set of fundamentals.

1. Clarify the Growth Goal

Not all growth is the same. For that reason, the first step is getting clear on what kind of growth you’re aiming for.

Are you trying to bring in new users? Activate existing ones? Improve retention? Expand usage or increase revenue?

This may sound obvious. However, it’s also where many teams lose momentum. Without a shared definition of success, efforts fragment, metrics compete for attention, and teams end up pulling in different directions. Clear goals create focus and make trade-offs easier.

2. Diagnose the User Journey

Once the goal is clear, the next step is understanding how users actually experience your product.

Start by mapping the journey from first touch to first value, and then from first value to repeated use. As you do this, look for patterns. Where do users slow down? Where do they drop off? What behaviors signal that they’ve found real value?

Often, teams uncover friction points that seem minor but have an outsized impact. An unclear first step, a confusing onboarding flow, or missing guidance can quietly block progress. Addressing these early, therefore, tends to unlock more growth than launching new campaigns.

3. Define the Metrics That Matter

Without the right measurement, growth efforts drift. So after you understand the user journey, it’s essential to define the metrics that will keep teams focused and learning.

We recommend building a simple metric stack:

A clear North Star Metric that reflects user value
Two to three key input metrics that drive that North Star and can be influenced week to week

As a result, teams move from tracking outcomes to managing levers. Instead of asking why numbers changed, they start understanding how to change them.

4. Build an Experimentation Engine

Teams that learn quickly tend to grow steadily. Fortunately, this doesn’t require a heavy or bureaucratic process.

What matters more is creating a consistent rhythm where teams can:

Generate hypotheses
Design simple, fast experiments
Review what worked and what didn’t
Adjust and try again

Over time, this builds a habit of learning. With more repetitions, confidence increases, and teams become clearer on what actually drives impact.

5. Break the Silos

Growth is a team sport, which means coordination matters.

The strongest growth work happens when product, marketing, data, and engineering operate from the same goals and assumptions. Importantly, this collaboration can’t live only at the leadership level. It has to show up in everyday decisions, rituals, and conversations.

This takes intention. Still, the payoff is meaningful. When different perspectives come together around a shared problem, solutions tend to be faster, deeper, and more durable.

Growth Strategy Checklist

Use this checklist to stress-test your strategy and spark productive team conversations:

Have we agreed on our single most important growth goal for the next 3–6 months?
Have we mapped the user journey and agreed on the biggest drop-off to tackle first?
Do we have a clear “aha moment” defined, and are we tracking time to value?
Are we aligned on our North Star Metric and a small set of weekly input metrics?
Do we have a regular cadence for running experiments and reviewing learnings?
Are product, marketing, data, and engineering solving the same growth problems together?
Have we created shared rituals or spaces to support cross-functional collaboration?

If you’re checking most of these boxes, you’re already ahead of the curve.

Bringing It All Together

Your first growth strategy does more than move numbers. It shapes how your team thinks, learns, and works together. In many ways, it sets the tone for your culture.

So the real questions become: will you prioritize short-term tactics or long-term systems? Will teams operate independently or build shared momentum? And will decisions come from reaction or intention?

We don’t pretend to have it all figured out. That said, we’ve seen these five steps bring clarity and momentum to teams across stages and industries. If you’re building your first growth strategy, we hope this gives you a strong place to start.

And if you’re early in the process and want a second set of eyes, we’re always happy to compare notes.