The Growth Playbook:
Kindle Tactics → Fire Strategies

Casey Winters

CPO, Eventbrite · Ex-Pinterest, GrubHub
Advisor: Airbnb, Canva, Tinder, Reddit & more

GROWTH LEGEND

Core Framework

Kindle → Fire:
The Growth Strategy Stack

"The goal of your Kindle strategies, these non-scalable hacks, they only exist to unlock the fire strategies, to unlock the things that could take you to millions of users."

Non-scalable hacks are not the destination, they're the ignition
Early growth at GrubHub: no PM titles, just "grow how many people order food"
Pinterest: rebuilt entire growth model to reignite stalled growth, 40M → 150M MAU
Every fire strategy was once someone's scrappy kindle tactic

The Upward Communication Problem

Executives Speak a Different Language, Learn to Bridge the Gap

Most PMs present starting at chapter 6, the exec hasn't earned that chapter yet
Start from the last point that's completely obvious, then proceed to less obvious
Don't re-explain company strategy for 20 min either, find the middle
Role-play the meeting beforehand: impersonate each exec's likely questions

Casey's pre-meeting rule "I try to run through it with the team, pretending to be the other members of the audience. What the CFO's going to ask is X, answer that question before it gets asked."

The Ocean's Twelve problem

Execs speak in code, strategy, context, levers. ICs speak in details. Neither side realizes they're in different languages until the meeting goes sideways.

The pre-meeting fix

Get key stakeholders aligned before the big meeting. Eliminate surprises. De-risk the reveal. The goal is a good decision, not a dramatic aha moment.

Escalation is leadership

Handling it silently is NOT the mark of a good leader. Escalating so the CPO can change circumstances IS. People mistake stoicism for leadership.

Protecting What You've Built

Product Market Fit Decays, Protect the Gains You Already Have

User expectations rise every day, your product's relative quality falls if you stand still
The competitive landscape improves constantly; yesterday's great UX is tomorrow's "meh"
Pinterest was hit by a Facebook algorithm change that wiped out their growth channel overnight
Technical debt compounds: the longer you wait, the harder it is to catch up to market expectations

The non-sexy investment problem Performance, stability, developer velocity, and UX quality are chronically underfunded because they're hard to measure. What gets measured gets managed, everything else gets ignored.

Tactic 1: Build custom metrics to surface invisible value (e.g., latency vs. conversion)
Tactic 2: Run small tests that prove worthwhile-ness before asking for big investment
Tactic 3: Align eng manager + design lead first, a small coalition beats solo advocacy
Tactic 4: Frame it as protecting existing gains, not just adding new ones, loss aversion is powerful

The counterintuitive ask Show executives what it looks like when the gain goes away. "Here's our conversion rate today… here's what it looks like if we lose it." Loss framing unlocks budget that growth framing can't.

Playbook

Casey's Growth Career Principles

Start by measuring every channel; only then can you optimize it
Growth is a mindset, not a job title, Casey grew GrubHub Series A to IPO before "PM" existed
The best growth loops embed product sharing into the core experience, not bolted on top
Segment your users by sophistication, build a simple default path and an advanced on-ramp, not one size fits all
Coach by role-play before the meeting, not debrief after it, de-risk, don't dramatize

On ops as a product signal "Having marketing ops means you suck at marketing." Ops roles are a symptom of unscalable product decisions, the right fix is to build better software, not more operators.

"You can't really do a lot of this work alone. If you're a PM, you want to be approaching this with your engineering manager and your design leader also bought in."

Contrarian

Casey's Counterintuitive Takes on Growth & Product

✗ Escalating problems is a sign of weakness as a leader INSTEAD → ✓ Handling it silently means your CPO can't change the circumstances. Escalating IS the leadership move, it unlocks resources and provides fair context for evaluating results.

✗ Big meetings should have a dramatic reveal moment INSTEAD → ✓ De-risk the meeting entirely. Pre-meets with key stakeholders, role-play the exec questions in advance. The goal is a good decision, not applause at the reveal.

✗ At scale, you should focus entirely on adding new growth INSTEAD → ✓ At scale, protecting what you've built becomes equally important. User expectations rise daily. A high conversion rate or strong engagement CAN go away, and recovering it takes far longer than preserving it.

✗ Ops teams are a sign of organizational maturity INSTEAD → ✓ "Having marketing ops means you suck at marketing." Ops headcount is a signal that your product hasn't automated what it should. The goal is software that makes ops roles unnecessary, not more operators to paper over product gaps.

Kindle → Fire:The Growth Strategy Stack

Executives Speak a Different Language, Learn to Bridge the Gap

Product Market Fit Decays, Protect the Gains You Already Have

Casey's Growth Career Principles

Casey's Counterintuitive Takes on Growth & Product

Kindle → Fire:
The Growth Strategy Stack