As one of my mentors, the venture capital investor Shawn Carolan, put it, “Startups don’t starve; they drown.” There are always a zillion new ideas about how to make the product better floating around, but the hard truth is that most of those ideas make a difference only at the margins. They are mere optimizations. Startups have to focus on the big experiments that lead to validated learning. The engines of growth framework helps them stay focused on the metrics that matter.
