Growth Driver

A growth driver is a factor that genuinely moves a product's or business's growth forward; a variable that, if you move it, meaningfully changes the growth outcome.

Identifying a growth driver means separating cause from company: among the dozens of metrics that rise and fall with growth, only a few actually drive it and the rest merely accompany it. This distinction is the most important task of growth analysis, because budget and effort should go to the drivers, not the companions. The analytical tool for this is the metric tree: you break the growth outcome into its multiplicative parts (growth = traffic × conversion rate × retention rate, say) to see which part's movement has the largest effect. The perennial trap is the causation trap: a metric correlated with growth is not necessarily a driver, and the only sure way to separate them is a controlled experiment, not observation. A growth driver must not be confused with a growth measure; the measure gauges the outcome, the driver produces it.