The question isn’t profit vs growth
A product strategy framework that drives focus
Hi there,
Early in my career, I used to ask founders the same question all the time:
What matters more: profit or growth?
I wanted to understand what really drove them. Did they care more about how fast the company was growing — or how profitable it was along the way?
At the time, it felt like a sharp, strategic question. I was even a little smug about asking something that seemed so tough and insightful.
Now, I think it was a stupid question.
Not because profit and growth don’t matter. They do.
But because the question forces a false choice between two things that are both essential.
Worse, it obscures the real issue. Teams aren’t actually fighting about profit versus growth. They’re disagreeing about what they’re optimising for right now.
Profit and growth are outcomes. Growth requires profit to be sustainable long term. Profit without growth is just slow stagnation.
The real question isn’t which one matters more.
It’s: what does this company need at this stage, and what are we willing to trade off, temporarily, to get there?
That’s why I’ve found a lot more clarity in a framework from Gibson Biddle: the GEM model.
How the GEM model changes the conversation
The GEM model asks teams to force-rank three factors:
Growth is about reach and momentum: how many new people enter your product experience.
Engagement is about value: how consistently users experience the core benefit that keeps them coming back and delighting customers.
Monetisation is about sustainability: how and when that value turns into revenue.
It also forces leaders to get clear on the order of priorities: is it Engagement → Growth → Monetisation, or Monetisation → Engagement → Growth?
That ranking becomes a lens for every product decision:
What do we optimise?
What do we accept as imperfect?
What do we explicitly deprioritise?
And that’s where strategy actually becomes real.
My update to the original GEM framing
Gibson originally argued that for early-stage startups, monetisation should almost always come third:
Consistent with the focus on delight, young startups alternate prioritizing engagement (building a delightful, highly engaging product) and growth (the raison d’etre for startups). Monetization is almost always the third priority. In a few years, you’ll find ways to build a business around your product and then can debate the prioritization of all three G.E.M. factors.
Source: Gibson Biddle Newsletter Dec 2021: “Do your product strategy frameworks work for startups?”
That made sense in 2021, when capital was cheaper and runways were longer.
Today, I’d tweak that slightly:
Monetisation must be designed earlier, even if it’s not prioritised.
That doesn’t mean squeezing revenue too soon or obsessing over pricing. It means making sure growth and engagement aren’t built on assumptions that will later break the business.
Engagement still matters most in the early days, but ignoring monetisation entirely is no longer realistic for most teams.
How does this tie back to product strategy?
This is where the framework really earns its place.
A strong product strategy isn’t just a vision or a roadmap. It’s a clear signal of which tensions you’re willing to live with right now.
When teams can’t force-rank GEM:
Roadmaps grow endlessly
Experiments lack direction
Everyone optimises their own metric
And “strategy” becomes something people debate instead of use
When teams can force-rank GEM you see the opposite:
Optimisation becomes easier, not broader
Decisions get faster
Growth and product stop pulling in different directions
That’s also why I keep coming back to this idea:
Product strategy defines the promise you make.
Growth strategy is the system that keeps that promise.
If you can’t agree on what you’re optimising for, that system will never work.
Recommendation
In every edition of Growth Waves, I also share a related resource to check out related to the week's topic.
If this topic resonated, I highly recommend checking out Gibson Biddle’s writing on product strategy and trade‑offs. I love how clearly he explains strategy and the practical frameworks he gives for driving real decisions.
Start with a summary of his different frameworks:
And then dive deeper into the GEM framework if you found it helpful:
If there’s one thing to take away, it’s this:
Strategy isn’t choosing between profit and growth.
It’s choosing which tensions you’re willing to live with… right now.
Until next time,
Daphne