Growth and momentum are the keys to great execution. Growth (as long as it is not “sell dollar bills for 90 cents” growth) solves all problems, and lack of growth is not solvable by anything but growth. If you’re growing, it feels like you’re winning, and people are happy. If you’re growing, there are new roles and responsibilities all the time, and people feel like their careers are advancing. If you’re not growing, it feels like you’re losing, and people are unhappy and leave. If you’re not growing, people just fight over responsibilities and blame.

Founders and employees that are burnt out nearly always work at startups without momentum. It’s hard to overstate how demoralizing it is.
The prime directive of great execution is “Never lose momentum”. But how do you do it?
The most important way is to make it your top priority. The company does what the CEO measures. It’s valuable to have a single metric that the company optimizes, and it’s worth time to figure out the right growth metric. If you care about growth, and you set the execution bar, the rest of the company will focus on it.

Here are a couple of examples.
The founders of Airbnb drew a forward-looking graph of the growth they wanted to hit. They posted this everywhere—on their fridge, above their desks, on their bathroom mirror. If they hit the number that week, great. If not, it was all they talked about.

Mark Zuckerberg once said that one of the most important innovations at Facebook was their establishment of a growth group when growth slowed. This group was (and perhaps still is) one of the most prestigious groups in the company—everyone knew how important it was.

Keep a list of what’s blocking growth. Talk as a company about how you could grow faster. If you know what the limiters are, you’ll naturally think about how to address them.

For anything you consider doing, ask yourself “Is this the best way to optimize growth?” For example, going to a conference is not usually the best way to optimize growth, unless you expect to sell a lot there.

Extreme internal transparency around metrics (and financials) is a good thing to do. For some reason, founders are always really scared of this. But it’s great for keeping the whole company focused on growth. There seems to be a direct correlation between how focused on metrics employees at a company are and how well they’re doing. If you hide the metrics, it’s hard for people to focus on them.

Speaking of metrics, don’t fool yourself with vanity metrics. The common mistake here is to focus on signups and ignore retention. But retention is as important to …