Growth Through the Ages and Stages
Why would somebody use this? It was a simple, powerful question I struggled to answer. Jennifer Bailey sat on the side of the table, looking at me with curiosity.
Nearly thirty years. Seven tech waves. One question that never changed.
If you used the Netscape browser, you might remember the bookmarks that came preloaded in it. I ran that program.
In my first program review, Jennifer Bailey – now the head of Apple Pay – asked me a question I fumbled: ‘Why would somebody use this product’? I was new to the role. I winged it. I talked around it. I didn’t have a clean answer.
That question has been the most reliable tool I’ve used ever since. Not a platform, not a channel, not a dashboard. A question. It’s now A1 in the 7As customer-journey diagnostic at the center of the CLG Method™️:
Who’s the audience? Who’s the customer? What pains and pleases them? How do we solve their problems? What role do we play in their everyday life?
The 7As map the full arc of a customer relationship – seven stages, each an ‘A’: Audiences, Awesomeness, Amplification, Acquisition, Activation, Adoption, and Advocacy. They run from knowing who your customer is all the way to turning them into someone who brings you the next one.
A1, Audiences, comes first for a reason: it’s the one the other six depend on. Misread who the customer is and what moves them and every stage after it – however well executed – is aimed at the wrong person and problems. Get A1 right and the rest of the journey has customer truth to build on. That’s why I always start there.
Every growth problem I’ve faced in almost thirty years has yielded to some version of that first question. The technology around it has been unrecognizable from one decade to the next. The question hasn’t moved an inch. The tools changed beyond recognition.
Look at what ‘state of the art’ meant across the waves I worked in.
At Netscape, one of the most valuable things on the early web was DMOZ – a directory of the internet edited by hand, by people, one link at a time. We helped make it the largest human-edited directory in the world. The cutting edge of web discovery was human judgment at scale.
At Microsoft, I ran Tellme’s consumer business and helped turn 1-800 directory assistance – 411 – into voice search, launching it with Bing on the first BlackBerrys and Windows phones. The tool was your voice and a phone number. Growth came from solving a human problem: I need an answer and my hands are full.
At Telenav, we built Scout and grew it from zero to 3.9 million users, powered in part by OpenStreetMap – the ‘Wikipedia of maps’, another map of the world drawn by people. The tool was GPS. The growth was in the moment a person needed to get somewhere and figure out where to go to begin with – convenience from the couch to the car to the coffee shop as we liked to say.
At Yahoo, we set out to answer the exact question Jennifer had asked me years earlier – this time with 40 in-home, in-person interviews to understand why people used Yahoo Mail. The insight caught us off guard: people weren’t really writing emails anymore. They were receiving them – and drowning in them – buried in messages from companies. However, we learned those messages were gold: deals, coupons, offers, and more, all impossible to stay on top of. That single reframing pivoted the entire product and positioning strategy (Yahoo amplifies what matters most to you), helped put Yahoo Mail back into growth, and in turn helped reverse reach, retention, and revenue declines across a $7.5B business that served close to 900 million people. No dashboard surfaced that. Meaningful conversations with forty people did.
At Malwarebytes, growth was a subscription relationship with people who wanted to feel safe more so than having to buy cybersecurity – and we nearly tripled the valuation in under two years. At EnterpriseDB, it was leaning into the human-powered, open-sourced Postgres and repositioning a database company into a Postgres Data & AI platform, expanding how the market saw its own possibility, from an $80B to a $250B opportunity. At Globalization Partners, we launched Gia, an AI-powered HR agent built on 15 years of deeply human expertise.
At FranklinCovey we framed the work as strengthening the human side of strategy in the AI era, and we experimented with AI across the go-to-market – what I think of as The Human/Agentic Continuum. The lesson repeated itself. Agents can research, draft, test, and personalize faster than any team. They still can’t decide why somebody should use your product. That’s a human judgment about other humans.
Different tool every time. Same question every time. Same answer every time: find the human, understand the human, serve the human. This is what I mean by Augmented Intelligence – people plus AI, not people replaced by AI.
The one that still works
After nearly thirty years of new technology waves and platform stacks, I keep coming back to that review room at Netscape and the answer I didn’t have.
The dashboards will keep changing. The models will keep getting better. The marketing channels will multiply. The place you find growth won’t move: it’s between people – in the trust, the clarity, and the value that no funnel produces on its own.
So before the next tool, the next platform, the next agent – the same question Jennifer asked me:
Why would somebody use your product?
Connect with me or follow CLG Partners.
– Dariusz Paczuski, Founder & Managing Partner, CLG Partners