How to run growth meetings
10 Lessons from running 874 growth weeklies in 10 years
Today I want to share lessons on how to run the perfect growth meeting.
Growth meetings are the beating heart of the growth process. It’s the way we run our weekly meetings at Ballpoint, and how I used to run them in-house before then.
My back of fag packet estimations tell me I’ve run 874 of these to date (875 by the time this email goes out).
Here’s the schedules I’ve run and who attended
Weekly as head of growth at Thriva – whole company until we were above 14 people
Weekly as founder at Wine List until our growth lead took over – whole company of 6
Weekly as fractional VP growth at Hims UK – the entire UK team
Weekly as fractional VP growth at Fy! – all non-tech team heads and full marketing team
Weekly as fractional growth lead at Ferly – myself and the founder
Weekly at Ballpoint with clients, averaging five per week since founding
No single action is responsible for any growth, but I can say confidently that without the growth meeting every one of those companies would have grown less than they did.
Today, I want to share how to run them well and why they work.
The one meeting you need each week
We’re all busy. Do we really need another meeting? Do we really need a meeting that requires lots of prep for and lots of engagement?
Don’t get me wrong, while I spend a lot of time in meetings, I really hate superfluous ones. I am 100% a bias for action person. I default to just doing the work. Throughout all of my 20s, I hated meetings. I am not a natural meeting goer. I’m a huge believer that a well run system does not need lots of meetings to produce work or maintain it.
Proper delegation and accountability can make businesses go far. Meeting culture is why too many businesses have ten person marketing teams when they could be run with one. Why there are 12 month planning committees for actions that could be completed in 45 days.
I say this to point out that I would never advocate for a meeting that is unnecessary.
Meetings are necessary evils, and should be tamed and controlled to make them work for your business.
5 people joining a one hour meeting likely accounts to 10 hours of cost when you factor in productivity losses from context switching. That’s a huge amount of company cost and it’s important you only do it where necessary.
The Growth meeting is the single most important meeting your company can run this week.
So what is it?
The 7 roles of the Growth meeting are:
The heartbeat for your Growth Process
Align everyone behind the important stuff
Learn what works and what doesn’t
Create comfort with uncertainty
Educate our guts
Refine our ability to forecast
Accelerate pace within the business
What is the Growth Process?
This is covered in a lot more depth in What is Growth? but for a tl;dr, the Growth Process is:
Understand the engine of how your business grows: it’s most likely ads, content, or sales
Identify your core bottleneck as a definitive metric
Create experiments that consist of an insight, a hypothesis, and test to try to improve that metric
Prioritise experiments balancing the potential impact and required workload
Learn from those experiments to inform future experiments
On paper I bet most of you are reading that thinking “we do that” or “we’re always running tests” but in my experience, unless you’re running this through the growth process you won’t be doing it well.
Where does growth engine go wrong? People try to do stuff that won’t actually help you grow – investing loads of time in events if you’re a DTC, or testing our organic social if you’re enterprise saas.
Where does core bottleneck go wrong? Trying to do too much i.e. “this might help retention of the month 5 customers” or “this probably will do something and we have to do it”
Where do experiments go wrong? People don’t do them and so just do stuff. They are “testing” but not in a proper way.
Where does prioritisation go wrong? Time spent on stuff that won’t move the needle but because it’s easy to understand or quick to do.
Where does learning go wrong? Human bias for needing to be right and win – we should be trying to disprove ourselves.
Your Growth Process should be the beating heart of your business.
Growth Process = Focus x Pace
How to run the growth meeting
At Ballpoint, we run these in a very structured way:
Core Metrics Review – recap on how the last 7 days went compared to week before, if there’s trends we need to highlight, and seeing how we are against forecast (5-10 mins)
Experiment Review – recap on experiments that have finished that week, insights gained, how we’ll adapt future experiments, prioritising what experiments we’re launching next (35-55 mins)
This is the structure I used in-house, as a consultant, as a coach, and now how we run these with clients as an agency.
Growth meetings are not:
Status reports
Deep dives into metrics
Brainstorms
If you’re doing these in-house, this is the responsibility of your head of growth to own and run this meeting. If you don’t have one and you’re a startup, it should be the founder, if you’re big, then the marketing lead.
The majority of work takes place before the meeting: the growth lead should spend time documenting and writing up the experiments, they are a scientific thing. They should pre-empt questions and importantly they should be aiming to disprove theories and ideas.
80% of experiments fail
Growth is insanely hard.
If it wasn’t, then the world would be full of billionaires. The reason that most businesses float on by with single percent points of growth each year is because they don’t focus on and address the Growth-sized elephant in the room.
Most experiments will fail. At big growth-focused companies this is around 80%.
At Ballpoint, because for the most part, we’re a bit more focused on paid acquisition – and therefore are more confined with where we experiment – our failure rate is lower. (I don’t necessarily see this as a good thing).
If you’re one of our clients, early days you might expect a 80% failure rate, which levels out at around 50% once we fully understand your customer and what works.
10 lessons on how to run better growth meetings
A few years ago I was coaching at the SYSTM growth accelerator. At the time I put together a list of 10 lessons for running better growth meetings.
Here is my refined list updated for 2025.
Growth meetings reflect company culture – if you are a culture that champions and leans into failures as ways to learn, your growth meetings will reflect that. If your culture doesn't allow for it, neither will growth meetings.
Commit to a volume of weekly experiments. Quantity is important. If it takes 100 attempts to break through your growth ceiling, would you rather try once per week or three times?
Perfectionism kills growth and kills startups – your growth meeting can control that. Leading on from the committed volume – do not let perfectionism get in the way. Your experiment doesn’t need to be perfect, it needs to be live. No customer cares about this stuff as much as you do, most have never heard of you before. Kill perfectionism, not your startup.
Aim to disprove hypotheses rather than prove them. Humans are biased towards looking good, proving themselves right, and glory. That’s a huge blocker to success. We need to proactively open our arms around failures. Every week I see people making excuses for why something ‘worked’ when it didn’t. It’s a fail, that’s amazing. Learn and don’t do it again.
Make bets – get skin in the game. Having a team of people see what won or lost is one thing. If you get people to bet in advance, and then follow up after, you’ll get way more buy-in. You’ll also get people testing their own assumptions far more frequently.
Kill the long backlog. Backlogs shouldn’t be long. If they are you’re not actively learning enough. The experiment you launch today should have been almost impossible to come up with 3 months ago. Long backlogs = low learning rate.
Don't be afraid to bring more people into them. At Thriva, ours were all-hands until 12-15 people. As well as being the drumbeat to your growth process, they are also a way for people who don't typically look at numbers to understand them. They gain direct exposure to the impact their job is having. And creative ideas come from differing places.
Documentation is critical to getting this right. I personally find this incredibly boring, but the value repays tenfold. Why? Embedding future learning is one part, but also becoming accountable before the experiment starts is the other. What are you really expecting to happen and what does success really mean?
All the work goes into the pre-meeting. Great growth meetings work when the lead has done all the prep before. That’ll mean working with different team members to question data and interrogate it and come up with hypotheses.
Data can be a cause of debate and discussion for the wrong reasons. Nothing derails experiment reviews faster than uncertainty around data. Your growth lead has to be analytical so they can properly judge data ahead of time – the founder will question it if you don’t.
I write a weekly newsletter on growth based on my lessons as an in-house growth lead, a startup founder, and now an agency head. I’ve grown 8 businesses from 0 to 1 million in revenue, have helped scaled those doing tens and hundreds of millions of revenue, and currently we oversee millions in monthly ad spend. Let me know what you’d like to learn about.
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