The "Guesswork" Growth Plan: Why So Many Software House Strategies Are Doomed to Fail

Welcome to the SHGrowth Podcast.

Have you ever seen a beautifully crafted growth plan, maybe from a top consultant or your own C-level team, that just... fizzles out? It looks great on a whiteboard, but it fails to gain traction in the real world. This is a common and dangerous trap for many software houses.

In this episode, we're tackling a critical mistake many leaders make: building ambitious strategies based on guesswork, gut feeling, or what the competition is doing, rather than on a solid foundation of validated learning.

This isn't about having a "bad" plan; it's about the danger of committing to a plan before you've done the hard work of experimentation and discovery.

In this 14-minute deep dive, you'll learn:

• The Flaw in "Top-Down" Strategy: Why simply adopting a framework like "Playing to Win" (f.e. using such great framework for Sales Strategy) without tangible, market-validated learnings is a recipe for disaster.

• The Power of Iteration: We'll look at the "Testing Business Ideas" framework as a practical tool for moving from risky assumptions to confirmed hypotheses through a continuous cycle of design and experimentation.

• The Most Important Question to Ask: Before you commit to any growth plan, what is the single most important question you need to ask your leadership team about the "learnings" behind it?

• The Alignment Problem: Why even the most brilliant market opportunity is worthless if it doesn't align with your founding team's core capabilities and passions. We'll explore why trying to "bolt on" a new expertise, like design, often fails if it's not part of your company's DNA.

• A Simple Path Forward: Don't build a huge plan if you don't have learnings. Instead, build a simple plan to get learnings. Iterate, learn, and let a real, proven growth engine emerge from that process.

This episode is for any founder or leader who feels the pressure to have a grand strategy but suspects it might be built on shaky ground. It’s a call to embrace a more disciplined, honest, and ultimately more effective approach to growth.