The growthbox playbook

Over the years of leading product and engineering teams, and in recent years as founder of growthbox, I've collected thoughts about building products users love. From time to time I bring them up in all hands or during catch-ups with team members.

Philosophy

Most software development relationships are structured to fail from the start. Traditional agencies optimise for billable hours instead of product success. They spend weeks or months writing detailed proposals, defining rigid milestones, and creating elaborate change request processes to protect "scope". In 20 years of building software, I've never seen a single project go exactly as planned in the initial scope document. Not one.

As Steve Blank famously said: "No Plan Survives First Contact With Customers." This truth has played out in nearly every project.

The modern world moves too fast - markets shift, user needs evolve, and technology advances while agencies debate change requests.

Learning and adapting is more important than delivering on scope.

Building great products isn't about perfection upfront - it's about launching fast, learning, and iterating. Yet most companies fall into the trap of trying to build everything at once, killing their product before it has a chance to succeed.

Product Discovery is applied science - it's about experimenting, testing, and adapting until you find what works.

The key? Find the smallest version of your idea that delivers value and validates core assumptions, then do it again and again.

Every great product starts small. Startups have pivoted entirely after launching a single feature, and enterprises have abandoned million-dollar integrations when early experiments exposed weak demand. A few weeks of learning saves months of building the wrong thing.

That's why we work differently.

Instead of detailed proposals and rigid processes, we implement "Build Less, Learn Quickly, and Try Again" (the "BLT"). We:

1. Build the smallest version of an idea.
2. Get it in front of users fast.
3. Learn from their feedback.
4. Iterate. Rinse and repeat.

This isn't just a process - it's a mindset. The best founders and teams understand this. They're willing to launch something raw and imperfect because speed to insight beats perfection every time.

The path to great products is through perfect learning, not perfect planning. If you're not comfortable launching small, you'll likely launch nothing at all.

Process

Most companies talk about being "agile", but for many, it's just a rebranded waterfall process with fake cycles. Daily stand-ups turn into status updates, sprints become glorified to-do lists, and retrospectives feel more like venting sessions than actual progress.

At growthbox, we don't waste time pretending to be agile - we're laser-focused on what matters: delivering value fast and learning as we go.

When we start a partnership, we don't spend weeks on onboarding, alignment workshops, or unnecessary documentation. We hit the ground running. We embed ourselves in your business, get to know your challenges, and start creating value immediately. Everything we do is tied to outcomes, not outputs.

Here's how we make it work:

1. No Red Tape: We skip the fluff and dive straight into solving your core problems.
2. Rapid Execution: Our team is built to move fast without sacrificing quality. You'll see progress in days, not months.
3. Transparency: We're aligned on outcomes, not hours. Just results.
4. Continuous Feedback: Every iteration is put in front of real users or stakeholders. We adjust course as needed, ensuring you're never stuck with something that doesn't deliver value.

The best part? By the time most agencies are still setting up, we've already delivered something you can use.

Team

Our team isn't just a collection of employees, freelancers or contractors - it's a high-performing, battle-tested unit. For over a decade, we've worked together building and scaling large, complex systems. Our roots go back to Juwai.com, Asia's largest international real estate website, where we tackled challenges of scale, complexity, and innovation daily. That experience shaped us into the team we are today: passionate technologists who love building great products.

Here's what makes us unique:

• Decade-Long Synergy: We know each other's strengths, trust each other implicitly, and collaborate seamlessly. When you bring growthbox into your business, you're getting a team that's already in sync.
• Expertise at Scale: We've handled systems with millions of users, designed resilient architectures, and delivered under tight deadlines. Large-scale complexity isn't just something we're good at - it's where we thrive.
• Passion for Product: We don't just build for the sake of it. We care deeply about creating products that users love and that make a real impact.
• Your Technology Team: Think of growthbox as your embedded technology operating partner. We integrate right in, operate like your own team, and start delivering value from day one.

We believe great teams build great products, and we're proud to say we're one of those teams.

Technology

We make technology choices based on what works for each business - not what's trendy or what our developers are excited about. Every business is different, and the right stack depends on the problem, the team, and the long-term vision.

Building the initial product is only about 20% of the journey. The other 80% is maintaining it, scaling it, and making sure your team can own it long-term. When we make technology choices, we optimise for speed of development, ease of maintenance, and future flexibility. Everything else is secondary.

AI done right

There's a lot of excitement right now about AI-powered tools that can spin up an app in minutes. And they're impressive - for demos. But there's a gap between a quick AI build and something that actually runs a business.

We use AI extensively. It's embedded in how we work - from accelerating development to automating workflows to building AI-powered features for our partners. But we don't start with AI. We start with the problem.

The difference is depth. Most quick-build approaches skip the hard part: understanding the business logic, the data underneath, the edge cases that real users hit, the integrations with existing systems, the compliance requirements, the team that needs to trust and adopt it.

We go end-to-end. We spend time deeply understanding the problem space - the people, the processes, the decisions being made today. Then we design a solution that might involve AI, might involve restructuring data, might involve training the team, or might involve all of the above. The AI layer is powerful, but only when it sits on top of a foundation that's properly understood and properly built.

The result is something that actually works in the real world - not a impressive demo that falls apart when it meets messy data, undefined processes, or users who don't behave the way the prototype assumed they would.

The businesses that will win with AI aren't the ones that built the fastest prototype. They're the ones that understood what to build and why - and then used AI to build it better.

Final thought

The best products aren't the result of large teams or cutting-edge technologies alone. They emerge from small, focused teams solving meaningful problems. Everything else is just noise.

If you have a strong business with real domain expertise but haven't cracked the technology side yet - that's exactly where we come in. We embed as your technology operating partner, bring a full team, and turn technology into your unfair advantage.