New growth metrics for a volatile world
June 2025
What does uncertainty mean for your growth strategy?
A promising time to grow, if you are willing to reframe your view of uncertainty and adjust your strategic approach. If a more uncertain world means adjusting our approach to growth, we must adapt our approach to growth tracking as well. As I find myself saying often recently: if you are trying to do new things in changing markets, we need new tools and metrics to do so.
Metrics and measurement matter, but as we shift what and how we are executing, we should occasionally relook at our approaches.
Building a company that can thrive through uncertainty is a team sport, not an individual one. All leaders have a role to play as organizations navigate the growth loop from stabilizing after a market shock to resetting for the new reality to thriving once more. A senior team is jointly responsible for metrics that matter, and new ones need to enter the discussion, occasionally at the retirement of others.
Below are a selected set of proposed metrics that provide additional insights into your journey to breakthrough growth.
Chief Financial Officer (CFO)
CFOs should be growth partners, not just a stabilization protecters.
Measures to master:
Cost to learn: Organizations become risk-adverse over time as failures often lead to financial or reputational losses. The CFO can help shift the mindset from risk aversion to learning by helping to track and measure learning. To build a culture of learning and experimentation, teams must be great at learning quickly and cheaply. It starts by being able to identify each assumption that needs to be tested. CFO’s should help teams track the ‘cost’ to learn: How can we significantly reduce the cost (including time) it takes to test individual assumptions? Can we move from $10,000 to test an assumption to $1,000 since we’re getting better at identifying core variables and designing faster tests? Mastering this metric will dramatically increase learning velocity and moves the CFO to growth partner with the teams.
Reduction of uncertainty: When presenting opportunities for investment, the first question CFO’s ask is ‘what is the Return on Investment (ROI)?’ This is a sensible question for investments with known variables and timelines, but not so useful when doing new things in uncertain environments. CFOs should focus instead on identifying the key uncertainties in the market funnel of assumptions. They should work with the team to tease out every assumption in the model (e.g. We can price with a 20% premium over competitors, or 25% of our existing customers will also buy our new solution line). Once identified, rank them from most (pretty much a guess) to least (very confident in) uncertain. Then work with the leaders to test the most uncertain assumptions as quickly and cheaply as possible to reduce the overall uncertainty. The CFO sees the most assumptions of anyone in the business – they should leverage that knowledge by sharing learnings of how testing is being conducted across the organization. Being able to assess the uncertainty of assumptions and then reduce this uncertainty will further the organization much more than ranking initiatives by ROI.
Chief People Officer (CPO)/ Head of Human Resources:
A CPO should be a true business partner not just the ‘people person.’
Measures to master:
Days to value creation: Organizations rarely measure all the right metrics on talent attraction. Too many companies focus on cost to hire, which disincentivizes working with partners when needed, or time to hire, which fast-tracks searching or interviewing. Both lead to poor, rushed decisions and increased turnover, which has a significant cost. Instead, my favorite metric is ‘days to value creation,’ as this measures the lifecycle of recruitment. That is, how many days does it take to post a position, search and recruit, interview, decide, contract, onboard the new employee, and then have that employee create value in their new role. Every critical aspect is involved in measuring this – from writing a good job description to an effective onboarding procedure. Being able to measure days to value creation means you understand what it takes to create value in every critical role of the organization, which is key to moving to Thrive.
Length of learning loops: Learning is the critical metric to measure, but often organizations default to ‘activity’ metrics like training courses conducted or participant evaluations. Instead, measure learning loops. Discussed in chapter 10 of the SRT Book, learning loops are specific, iterative cycles of forming hypotheses, testing, learning, understanding, analyzing, and applying and embedding various forms of knowledge. Start with two of the organization’s most critical must-win battles and identify the critical learning loops within them (i.e., the areas where you most need to accelerate learning). This could be new key account signing or building partner relationships in new markets. Map them out and design ways to accelerate and shorten them. Then do the same for the other top priorities until you have a ‘loop dashboard.’
Chief Operating Officer (COO):
CFOs should be strategic partners not just execution partners.
Measures to master:
Outcome achievement: A great COO measures outcome achievement, not activity completion, and builds a team that knows how to measure results instead of effort. To execute strategy we do things like make plans, build training programs, and negotiate new warehouse space. These are great but they are not strategy. These activities deliver progress and outputs: plans are completed, timelines are built, and there is new warehouse space. To create value, we need outcomes. Outcomes are tangible results for the organization: revenue, profit, cost saved, customer churn reduced, and so on. Helping the team track this metric furthers the partnership with the CFO in allocating spend.
Amplified – not just saved - time: Many initiatives involve furthering automation, reducing costs, and achieving efficiency. Most companies struggle to show the results, however, and when they do these are tracked in terms of hours saved. The real power metric is ‘amplified’ time. Consider a new digital platform, a touchless ordering portal, or an AI-empowered search of previous request for proposals. For these, measure not just saved time, but how much the team member working with that system became more effective (for example, 30% more productive every hour). This is a multiplier. Saved time is helpful but not valuable unless time is reallocated to more value-creating activities, or productivity is increased dramatically. Being able to show, track, and continue to amplify time will further accelerate execution.
What gets measured gets improved. It’s a popular adage, often attributed to Peter Drucker, and it’s a good reminder to reset your performance tracking and resource-rewarding systems along with all the other changes you are making in the transition to thrive through uncertainty. By building your strategy around uncertainty—not simply adjusting for it—and embracing new metrics that matter, you can track progress towards your new performance pathway.
The above is adapted from Chapter 11 of Survive Reset Thrive: Leading breakthrough growth strategy through volatile times.
