Growth has slowed. Nobody agrees why.

A pattern from the operating years · Juan Vegarra

Sales says marketing. Marketing says product. Product says pricing. The board says leadership, quietly, to each other. Every function has a theory, every theory conveniently locates the problem in someone else's department, and meanwhile the number is still the number. Here is what two decades of operating has taught me about this moment: the disagreement is not an obstacle to the diagnosis. The disagreement is the diagnostic.

What is usually actually wrong

When smart executives cannot agree on why growth slowed, it is almost always because the company outgrew its own commercial model and nobody was assigned to notice. The motion that got you here, founder-led deals, one heroic channel, a single buyer profile, quietly exhausted its natural market, and the company kept running the play harder instead of asking whether the play still fit. Every department's theory is a description of the same underlying shift viewed from a different window.

The second most common answer is less comfortable: growth did not slow, the market repriced what you sell, and the company is still charging for a category that no longer commands the premium. That one nobody volunteers, because admitting it demands strategy work, not execution work.

What to do about it

Make every function write its theory down in one paragraph, then put the theories side by side; where they contradict each other is where the real answer is hiding. Pull cohort revenue by acquisition period before anyone argues another minute, because the cohorts almost always settle it. And when the answer turns out to be that the company outgrew its own commercial model, say so out loud in one sentence everyone signs. Alignment is worth more points of growth than any initiative on the list.

Juan Vegarra is the author of An Outsider’s Playbook (2026). The views here are his own. More from the Notebook · Advisory · Continue the conversation