You Can See the Potential, But the Owner Sets the Speed

Recently I’m working in a role that is a mix of growth engineer and product builder for a real-estate auction portal. Basically, I’m responsible for whatever happens from a product and tech point of view. It’s not the first time that I work as a growth engineer.

Being a founder, I believe I’m pre-biased. At the beginning of my work, I really love to see each company growing, and I see potential everywhere. Sometimes even more than the business owner. And that is the challenge: keeping your role, or forcing a bit the decision.

Just to give credibility with numbers: contacts tripled in about a month, from around 1,250 to around 3,600 a week. When we looked, of 4,664 requests that came in since 1 September, only 905 had received a reply; a recovery run reached 3,321 people. In one week, from 5 to 9 October, there were 326 consultations held.

As always, this is me sharing lessons. Useful for me, useful for whoever will read, hopefully even for my kids.

You can’t force their growth

You can dramatically change things, you can have brilliant ideas, you can see the potential very clearly. But the speed of the growth is related to the mindset and the speed of the business owner. You can provide data, you can do your best, but the company will grow at that speed.

If you are a growth engineer, you are a player, not the business owner. This is hard when you care, because you naturally want to push more. But pushing is not the same as owning.

Don’t take it personally

This is a common mistake that I made when I tried to do my best. When you are a passionate guy, you tend to treat the company of someone else as your company. It doesn’t work. Not for you, and not for the business owner. I learned a version of this as a PM too, when being too involved became the problem.

When the company is yours, you can force, you can inject money, you can find something different. When the company is not yours, it’s another story. The first thing is to be sure you are aligned with the mind of the owner. Working with a manager is different, because even for the manager it is not their own company. Working directly with leadership, or with owners, is a different game.

Sometimes techniques don’t work, period

Sometimes we are convinced that we can grow by applying some technique. And they don’t work, period. Even if the same technique worked in another business, even with the same type of data, sometimes it just doesn’t work there.

Sometimes they work even better than what you believed, and that’s cool. But you can’t fall in love with the technique. The only thing you can do is try the next lever.

Be clear on the levers

Be clear with the lever, with what you can do, and which KPI it should impact theoretically on paper. What is the challenge? What are the hypotheses? Order them.

This comes from my product management background, but it matters even more when you work with a business owner. The reality is that you will not make the final decision. They will decide if they want option A or option B, and maybe in a different order than what you suggested. Visible hypotheses, KPIs, and priorities help you work better and not take it personally.

Have a clear contract

Have a clear contract, written down. I’m not thinking about twenty pages. In fact, the opposite: typically my contracts are one page. But it should be clear what they pay you for, what you are responsible for, and what the bonuses are.

Most of the time, bonuses are not fully up to you. Maybe you can change one KPI, but then someone else can outperform or underperform, and the final goal is not reached, especially if the goal is related to revenue. A bonus is a plus, but you need to be okay with the base amount. This is important for anyone approaching gig work, because at the end of the day what counts is what is written.

Real experimentation is amazing

Doing experimentation on a real business is amazing. You have real data, a real use case, real constraints. You can read books, you can chat with LLMs, you can do whatever you want, but until you stress-test something real, it’s just theory.

Don’t trust what I say, trust the data. It is the same principle as facts vs. projections: what happened first, opinions after. That is why you need access to their data, period. At least the data that counts for your work. LLMs can help extract data, build dashboards, and understand what is happening, but only if you can actually see the data.

Clarify ownership

Sometimes you are responsible for things that were not done by you, maybe by a previous contractor. That’s fine, and you can always help. But you need to clarify ownership. Helping is one thing, being responsible is another.

Your code, your problem; their code, their problem. It sounds brutal, but it’s not about being rude. It’s about making clear what is yours to fix and what is not, because otherwise everything becomes your problem by default.

Be flexible with ideas

You need to be able to change mindset. The business is their business, not yours, so you need to adapt. You don’t need to be jealous of your idea. You don’t need to judge what they are thinking.

You can suggest something, but at the end of the day it is up to them to decide. Maybe they will change it, or they will add context you didn’t have. The job is not to defend your idea forever, but to find the lever that works for that business.

Document everything

For me, transparent work means documenting everything in artifacts. Be transparent with what you are doing, what you are trying to achieve, and the time you need. They should not need to ask what you are working on. It should already be written somewhere, the same lesson I learned about never leaving a meeting without documentation.

When I create the plan, I keep that document constantly evolving during the time. Every time we discuss, there is something there: things we did, things we discarded, things we achieved, things we decided to abort. Super high level, once again, but visible.

Keep communication simple

This one is more for me. Keep communication simple. Short sentences, shorter sentences. Details count, and I am a detail guy, but they need to understand what you write.

Especially when you are responsible for a big business, details are needed. But if they don’t read or don’t understand, you can’t just say, “I wrote it to you and you never read it.” It should be simple enough to be easily understandable.

Maybe the real lesson is that working on someone else’s business is a great mirror. You learn about growth, data, contracts, communication, and also about your ego. If you are experiencing this or have other suggestions, just let me know.