Why Curiosity is Key to Growth Success
Driving breakout growth is tough. Whether you’re in a high-growth startup or working to accelerate growth transformation at an established enterprise, achieving sustainable growth requires more than just tactics—it requires the right mindset. While we often hear about the importance of a “growth mindset,” another critical factor to long-term success is often overlooked: curiosity.
Curiosity prevents you from getting stuck in the status quo. It’s the engine behind experimentation, the driver of deep insights, and the fuel for resilience when things don’t go as planned. In my career, I’ve found that curiosity has been the secret ingredient in solving tough growth challenges and unlocking new opportunities.
Let’s dig into five ways curiosity powers growth and how you can apply this mindset to your own work.
1. Curiosity Drives Experimentation
Experimentation is at the core of any successful growth program, but it’s curiosity that keeps the process alive. Without curiosity, you’d just run tests and move on. With it, you’re constantly asking questions like, “What if we tried this?”, “Why did this work?”, and “What’s next?” Curiosity pushes you to explore new possibilities and challenge assumptions, leading to better results and insights.
Example:
At Bounce, after ramping up our experimentation throughput, we quickly faced a new challenge: our idea backlog wasn’t keeping up. So instead of a general brainstorming session, we focused on retention—a potentially high-impact area for the business. I shared insights about what we had learned was already driving and preventing retention, which grounded our team in real opportunities and challenges. As a result, we came up with dozens of great experiment ideas in a single session, keeping our experimentation pipeline full and targeted. We weren’t just testing ideas; we were collaboratively solving a valuable puzzle, and that curiosity-fueled process led to more effective and targeted experimentation.
2. Curiosity Builds a Deeper Understanding of Your Growth Engine
Growth isn’t about quick wins—it’s about building a sustainable growth engine. To do that, you need to understand the complex system of variables driving your product, market, and customers. Curiosity is what gets you to ask the deeper questions, dig into the data, and uncover the real levers of growth.
Example:
When I joined Dropbox, the product was already experiencing strong growth coming out of private beta. My instinct was to jump right into experimenting, but I realized that without a deep understanding of what was already working, I could easily break the engine. So, I took the first few weeks to run surveys, analyze the data, and get a full understanding of what was driving Dropbox’s growth. That deep understanding allowed for more strategic experimentation, targeting the highest-impact areas.
3. Curiosity Fuels Resilience
The path to growth is never smooth. There will be missteps, failures, and setbacks. But with a curious mindset, these challenges become opportunities for learning. Instead of viewing a failed experiment as a dead end, curiosity encourages you to ask, “What did we learn from this?” and “How can we adjust?” This keeps you moving forward.
Example:
I once convinced my investors to let us acquire a software asset based on a hypothesis that improving the free version would lead to massive growth. We made the acquisition, invested heavily in engineering, and… instead of skyrocketing, growth plummeted. Instead of throwing in the towel, we dug deeper into the problem. It turned out customers were less price-sensitive than we’d thought, so we killed the free version, raised prices, and saw revenue grow 10X over the next couple of years. We then resold the asset, Qualaroo, to private equity at a substantial markup. What initially appeared to be a failure turned into one of our greatest successes, all because we stayed curious.
4. Curiosity Strengthens Customer Understanding
The best growth teams are customer-obsessed. Curiosity drives you to stay connected to your customers, ask the right questions, and dig deeper into their needs and behaviors. It’s not just about looking at metrics; it’s about understanding the “why” behind customer actions.
Example:
In the early days at LogMeIn, we faced a major challenge: 90% of signups from a potentially game-changing demand-gen channel were dropping out at the download stage. After running several failed experiments to address the issue, we were ready to throw in the towel on this potentially high-impact channel. Instead, we decided to ask users why they were dropping off. Turns out, they didn’t believe our software was truly free (this was the early days of freemium). Armed with this insight, we adjusted our messaging and saw a 300% improvement in download rates. I shared this insight during a recent workshop in Brazil, where I asked participants what experiment they would run given this customer feedback. Remarkably, one volunteer came up with nearly the same winning experiment. This shows how curiosity about customer behavior can lead to breakthrough experiments that dramatically improve outcomes.
5. Curiosity Fuels Collaboration
Growth isn’t something you can do on your own—it requires cross-functional collaboration. Curiosity opens you up to other perspectives, whether from marketing, product, or engineering teams, and helps you see problems from new angles. This collaborative curiosity leads to better, more integrated growth strategies.
Example:
In my interim VP growth roles, I always begin with 1-2 weeks of deep customer research to uncover key pain points and opportunities. Once I’ve gathered these insights, I bring the team together for a collaborative workshop, where we explore different perspectives and ideas. This approach ensures that our experimentation is grounded in a deep understanding of customer needs, rather than assumptions. By fostering curiosity-driven collaboration, we align around growth strategies that are not only innovative but directly address the real challenges and desires of our customers.
Conclusion
Curiosity isn’t just a nice-to-have—it’s essential for driving sustainable growth. It powers experimentation, leads to deeper insights, builds resilience, sharpens customer understanding, and fuels collaboration. Without it, you risk getting stuck, missing key opportunities, and failing to unlock long-term growth.
Whether you're a growth professional or looking to hire one, focus on fostering curiosity. Early in my career, I was more focused on numbers and experiments. But after an investor pushed me to start gathering qualitative insights, I realized the power of combining data with customer context. The more I learned about what drove customer decisions, the more effective my experiments became. This mindset shift not only shaped my approach to growth, but it also led to one of my biggest contributions to the startup ecosystem—my product/market fit survey (often called the Sean Ellis Test).
For me, curiosity is everything. It’s the engine that fuels my passion for growth. Every day, I wake up excited to dive into data, run experiments, and uncover new insights—not because I have to, but because curiosity compels me.
At GoPractice.io, a core focus is teaching you how to ask the right questions. In our simulation, you're immersed in real-world growth challenges where your success depends on identifying the critical questions that lead to actionable insights. These insights become the key to driving sustainable growth and solving complex problems.
Embrace curiosity, and you’ll not only become a better growth professional, but you’ll also drive your business to new heights.