Talk Growth, Not Innovation

A standalone P&L only works if you're running something with its own customers and cost base to begin with. Most innovation teams aren't.

Their job is to help existing business units hit growth targets those units already own, which means a separate P&L isn't the right structure, or even an option.

Nevertheless, the same logic still applies. Anchor the work to conversations every leader already understands: growth targets at risk, revenue plans built on untested assumptions, rollout timelines that depend on conditions nobody has checked. No incoming CEO needs those translated.

Frank Mattes, Growth Architect at Lean Scaleup, helps companies have exactly these conversations. His starting point is always the same: "What have you committed to?" A business unit head will typically answer with a growth target, a revenue milestone, or a timeline.

The questions that follow work from those commitments. For innovation teams, the opportunity is to bring them into a business unit's growth review, catch the assumptions the operating team hasn't tested, and earn trust with the leaders whose support the team depends on.

Pilots tend to succeed because the conditions around them are unusually good: a senior sponsor clearing obstacles, a flexible IT team, extra application support, a customer willing to tolerate rough edges. Rollout plans rarely account for that. The plan assumes the next ten customers will come on board with less support, less sponsorship, and less internal attention, and nobody writes those assumptions down. The gap between pilot conditions and rollout conditions is where growth forecasts quietly break.

Therefore, before approving a rollout, list the conditions that made the pilot work, then ask which of those conditions hold without the pilot team behind them.

Frank saw this play out at a medical diagnostics company. A hospital pilot showed strong results: better lab turnaround, happy users, a clinical sponsor who wanted to continue. The steering team moved to a rollout slide. Then the Head of Operations asked which of those conditions the company would get again. The answer was: almost none of them. Once the pilot was declared successful, everyone dispersed. Budgets were cut, management moved to other priorities, and the bridge between the pilot and the target operating model was, as Frank puts it, "pretty shaky."

Walking into a growth review and asking "which of these pilot conditions does the next site provide on its own?" is a question any leader understands and needs, because the answer directly affects whether the revenue forecast holds.

Product teams tend to validate with the end user, because users give the clearest feedback on whether the product works.

In B2B, the end user and the economic buyer are often different people with different priorities. A user cares about workflow. A buyer cares about total cost, schedule risk, and whether the purchase is easy to justify internally. When the team has only validated with users, the initiative has half a business case, and strong user feedback can actually mask the problem by creating false confidence that the product is ready for market. So before treating user feedback as market validation, map the full buying center and check whether the value proposition holds for the person who signs.

Frank experienced this at a building systems company. Technical planners loved a new planning tool and said the tool saved time. Then the regional sales lead pointed out that the planners had no budget authority. The economic buyer cared about project cost and liability, and nobody had built a business case for that audience. Surfacing the gap between user enthusiasm and buyer commitment is the kind of check that translates across any leadership change. Every commercial leader cares about whether the pipeline converts, regardless of how they feel about innovation.

Sales teams like to entertain ideas over coffee, but whether they actually sell a new product depends on the system around them: targets, incentives, KPIs.

This is what happened at an advanced materials company. Everyone agreed a new composite material deserved commercial focus. Product management had a strong value story. Then the sales dashboard showed almost no pipeline. Sales targets still rewarded volume on existing products, and the new material needed a total-cost-of-ownership argument that took more effort than the standard pitch. The system hadn't changed, so the behavior hadn't changed. To resolve this, the company dedicated one or two salespeople with different KPIs whose sole job was selling the new material, separated from the standard incentive structure.

So, before asking sales to carry a new product, check whether the targets, incentives, and tools make selling the new product a rational use of a salesperson's day. Framing the problem as "the sales system doesn't support this product yet" is language a new CEO, a new CMO, or a new head of sales all respond to. The conversation is about commercial readiness, which doesn't need reinterpreting.

Growth initiatives often have full cross-functional support and no one person deciding what to do first. Every function has a different priority, and without someone owning the trade-off decisions, the initiative stalls.

Frank watched this unfold at a specialty chemicals company. R&D, sustainability, sales, marketing, and two regional leaders all supported a recyclable packaging initiative. Then someone asked who would decide which customer applications to prioritize first. R&D wanted the best technical fit. Sales wanted the customers already asking. Sustainability wanted visible proof points. Regions wanted local relevance. Each view made sense, but with every view weighted equally, the initiative had no direction and was on the verge of stalling.

During a workshop with this team, Frank wrote one sentence on the whiteboard: "For this initiative to scale, someone owns the trade-off decisions without sending every unresolved choice back to the C-suite." Once the question was on the whiteboard, the team was able to see the gap and name an owner and reduce disagreements going forward.

These conversations land when the observation concerns something the leader already committed to. It needs to be concrete ("are we sure customers will change their behavior?" works; "we need to address uncertainty" does not), grounded in evidence rather than methodology, and framed so the leader keeps decision authority. When they fail, Frank says, it's usually because they showed up as criticism.

That's the real test for any of these four questions — not whether they're clever, but whether the leader hears them as something they can use. A question grounded in a commitment they already made ("which of these pilot conditions survive without the pilot team?") reads as due diligence. The same observation reframed as "we need to address execution risk" reads as a lecture. Same substance, opposite reception.

Four growth reviews, four questions, one condition for any of them working: they have to sound like the leader's own math, not the innovation team's methodology.