Digital Growth Notes

Ask five people what growth means and you will probably get five answers, and at least two of them will include the word "ecosystem." Growth is one of the most discussed goals in business and one of the most muddled. That muddle is the problem Digital Growth Notes set out to tackle, with a free library of more than 20 articles written in ordinary words.

Why plain words matter

Jargon is never harmless. When a term hides its meaning, the people who most need to act on it are the least likely to ask about it: the owner of a small firm, or the team lead who inherited a platform nobody fully understands. A good explainer does something simpler. It lets you read once, follow the reasoning, and decide for yourself what fits your situation.

That is the spirit behind the library. Articles cover marketing, leadership, retail, banking and emerging technology, and each one tries to show its working rather than hand over a slogan.

Five levers, not one magic formula

If you are new to the subject, a good place to start is a 2019 piece on five factors driving growth towards hyper-growth. It treats growth as a set of levers to examine one at a time, not a single switch to flip.

The first lever is demographic change. In the survey the article draws on, private company leaders saw demographic shifts as a bigger disruptor than digital or geo-economic forces. The second is leadership development. Growing firms plan to hire, keep and train more people, and the article argues that clarity of purpose matters more than charisma when leaders steer a growth agenda.

The third lever is digital acceleration, and here the article's message is that many mid-sized firms have spent years talking about digitisation and are only now acting on it. It includes a client example in which a user-friendly digital front-end went live in ten weeks, where a platform extension would have taken nine months. The fourth lever is customer engagement, which the article connects to brands that treat customer data as a way to serve people better. The fifth is cloud adoption, summed up as ringfence, refactor and rewrite.

None of these levers works alone, and the article is honest that there is no magic formula. What it offers is a checklist of questions worth asking before a growth plan is written.

Reading numbers with their limits attached

Some readers want harder evidence than a list of levers, and for them there is our Google App Engine benchmark. It tests five setups at 4, 40 and 400 requests per second, with each run lasting roughly ten to twelve minutes. Up to 40 requests per second, the setups behaved much alike. At 400, Go created the fewest instances, while the Node.js and Nest setup created the most.

What makes this piece useful is the caution around it. PHP and Python were left out. The results apply to one instance type and one kind of small database query. The author also points out that choosing a technology stack involves far more than speed and cost, including team skills, maintenance and how the product will change over time. The test was run in 2019, so treat it as a method you can reuse rather than a current leaderboard.

That is a habit worth carrying into any growth decision: ask what a result measures, what it leaves out, and when it was measured.

Where to begin

If you are planning a growth year, read the five-factor piece first. If your team is choosing a stack, read the benchmark and its footnotes together. Either way, the full library is at growthops.com.au, and each article is written to help you understand your options before you decide.