Early in my career, I was part of a consumer tech app in Michigan that was growing fast, but like a lot of early-stage companies, we were building the plane in the air.
There was no obvious product leader.
I was responsible for driving revenue, and in those early days that meant a heavy focus on acquisition and scaling the user base. So many of the earliest conversations around monetization, pricing, onboarding, growth, and user behavior happened between the CEO and me. A lot of the best signals came from the team I was managing. We were close to the funnel, close to the friction, and close to the moments where the product either delivered real value or quietly lost the user.
At the time, the broader tech world was in a very specific moment. Facebook had opened up mobile app install ads in 2012, which became a major unlock for app distribution, and by 2016 the app economy was still expanding fast, with worldwide downloads up 15 percent year over year, time spent in apps up 25 percent, and developer revenue up 40 percent. That was the environment a lot of us were learning in: mobile-first, acquisition-heavy, and increasingly obsessed with scale.
From Michigan, that world felt both exciting and far away.
Silicon Valley already had a vocabulary for product, retention, onboarding, loops, and network effects. We were still learning the language. You would hear names like Chamath Palihapitiya in the broader conversation around Facebook-era growth and Social Capital, and you could feel that there was a deeper operating discipline underneath all the noise. Even Chamath pushed back on the term "growth hacking," calling out the "snake-oil salesmen" and arguing that the real work was product and marketing rooted in psychology and behavior.
But Casey Winters was the one who really pulled me in.
He was the gateway drug into that whole scene for me.
What hooked me was not just that he was sharp. It was that his work helped me sort signal from noise at exactly the right time. There was already plenty of "growth" content floating around, and a lot of it was nonsense. Tactics dressed up as strategy. Tricks to get a little more activation, a few more clicks, a little more short-term lift, often without much concern for whether it was actually in the user's best interest. Wired was writing about the backlash to "growth hacking" more than a decade ago for a reason.
Casey's thinking felt different. He had started as an early employee at Grubhub, later led the growth product team at Pinterest, and became Chief Product Officer at Eventbrite in 2019. On his own site, he describes joining Pinterest when it was shifting from a social network to a personalized recommendations system, turning SEO into a scalable acquisition strategy, increasing conversion to signup and mobile significantly, and rebuilding email and notification systems for scale. That was the kind of operator perspective I was hungry for: not just "run experiments," but understand the growth model, identify the bottleneck, and build systems that are better for the business because they are genuinely better for the user.
From there I found a few others who shaped how I think.
Brian Balfour gave me a broader systems view. He had been VP of Growth at HubSpot before founding Reforge, and later wrote that he created the original hypothesis document for Reforge in 2016. His work helped me move beyond channel thinking and into something more durable: fits, loops, retention, and the way product and distribution compound together over time.
Adam Fishman gave new life to onboarding for me. Reforge describes him as having served as Head of Growth at Lyft, VP Product and Growth at Patreon, Chief Product and Growth Officer at Imperfect Foods, and later interim SVP of New Products at Mozilla. His work helped sharpen something I was already seeing in the field: onboarding is not administrative. It is strategic. It is one of the clearest windows into whether a company actually understands how to move a user toward value.
Years later, I put direct reports through Reforge because I wanted them exposed to the same level of thinking. Not because I wanted them to sound smarter in meetings, but because I wanted them to develop better judgment. By then, I understood that what I had originally gone looking for was not just growth content from Silicon Valley. It was a way to think more clearly. Reforge itself started in 2016, which tracks with how that body of work began to crystallize into something more structured and teachable.
That is the obvious story.
The more important one is underneath it.
At first, I thought I was learning product and growth.
What I was really learning was how to think like an operator.
That is the fracture for me.
We tend to treat product thinking as something that belongs to product leaders. Revenue belongs to the commercial team. Marketing owns acquisition. Finance owns pricing discipline. Everyone has a lane.
That sounds neat. It also breaks in real companies.
In actual businesses, especially growth-stage businesses, the highest-leverage decisions usually sit between functions.
Pricing is not just a finance decision.
Onboarding is not just a product decision.
Retention is not just a lifecycle decision.
Monetization is not just a sales decision.
The best operators learn to work in the seams.
That is what those early product thinkers gave me. Not just frameworks for SaaS. Not just language for growth. They gave me a better way to diagnose businesses.
Where is the real bottleneck?
What behavior actually signals value?
Are we helping the user reach value faster, or are we just getting better at forcing activity into the funnel?
Is this an acquisition problem, a product problem, a pricing problem, or an onboarding problem pretending to be one of the others?
Those are product questions.
They are also executive questions.
And for the PE and VC audience, I think that distinction matters.
A revenue leader who only understands channels can create movement.
A revenue leader who understands product thinking can build an engine.
That person sees onboarding risk before it becomes retention pain. They understand that pricing is not just extraction, but packaging. They know that bad growth tactics often flatter a dashboard while weakening the product underneath. They can tell the difference between borrowed growth and durable growth.
That is a different level of operator.
Looking back, Casey Winters was the entry point. Brian Balfour, Adam Fishman, Reforge, and many others deepened the thinking. But the biggest gift they gave me was not tactical.
They gave me a filter.
A filter for what is durable versus noisy.
A filter for what helps the business by helping the user versus what simply manipulates behavior for a quarter.
A filter for what real executive judgment looks like when growth, product, and commercial performance are all tied together.
And for me, that all started in Michigan, trying to solve product-shaped problems before we even had the title for the person who was supposed to own them.