Even at the Fastest-Growing Company in History
Growth is a human sport. Even at the fastest-growing company in history.
Earlier this week we went deep on the 7As, which break down the customer journey into logical steps for scrum teams to ignite customer-led growth. To bring these methodologies to life, we listened to Amol Avasare, Head of Growth at Anthropic, on Lenny Rachitsky's podcast, and mapped their conversation on growth strategy to the 7As.
A1 – Audiences/Customers+Insights
Amol's team uses Cowork on a scheduled basis every morning to scan 20–25 data charts and surface what matters – not everything, just the signal worth acting on. AI doesn't replace customer intelligence, it amplifies your ability to process it at scale and stay close to what's actually happening without drowning in dashboards.
A2 – Awesomeness/Positioning+Product
Anthropic's massive growth is attributed first and foremost to having the best models – not growth hacks. Amol is explicit: the growth team can't claim too much credit. Positioning is only as strong as the product truth behind it. Clear positioning + compelling product = product-market fitness. If the awesomeness is real, growth follows. If it isn't, no amount of optimization saves you.
A3 – Amplification/Awareness+Storytelling
Anthropic's ‘notebook channels’ – internal Slack feeds where leaders share provocative thinking – function as both a culture tool and a belief-scaling mechanism. As the org grows quickly, leadership uses them to model behaviors and amplify the values and principles that define the brand. Internal amplification shapes external brand identity, especially during rapid growth.
A4 – Acquisition/Leads+Sales
Rather than optimizing acquisition at the margin, Anthropic's growth team skews toward larger bets – roughly a 70/30 split toward big swings over micro-optimizations. If your product value is growing exponentially (AI-first), optimizing the existing funnel is less valuable than finding the next acquisition unlock. Small wins are good and compound, but they don't multiply.
A5 – Activation/Onboarding+Engagement
Amol's most counterintuitive finding: adding friction to onboarding increased conversion. Asking users who they are, what they care about, and then routing them to the right product or feature outperformed the ‘cut all the steps’ approach. The goal isn't speed to product – it's speed to the right product for the right person. Friction that helps users self-identify is good friction.
A6 – Adoption/Upselling+Retention
The CASH initiative (Claude Accelerates Sustainable Hypergrowth) uses Claude itself to automate growth experimentation – identifying opportunities, building tests, analyzing results. It's currently performing at a ‘junior PM’ level, but improving rapidly. Adoption and retention optimization can increasingly be systematized and delegated to AI, freeing the human team for the larger, more ambiguous bets that require judgment.
A7 – Advocacy/Virality+Referrals
When Anthropic shipped the ‘import memory from ChatGPT’ feature, it was timed precisely to a cultural moment – people excited about switching – and it solved a real cold-start friction for new users. Advocacy and word-of-mouth acceleration often come from meeting customers at the moment of intent, not from campaigns. Remove the barrier at the exact instant someone is already motivated to move, and they become evangelists.
The throughline
Across all 7As in this interview, the human side of strategy – judgment, context, cross-functional trust – is what AI can't yet replace. Everything else is getting automated faster than people expect.
To learn more about the 7As and how they guide the journey for igniting customer-led growth, read Find the Friction. Remove the Friction.
– Dariusz Paczuski, Founder & Managing Partner, CLG Partners