People assume industries are different worlds, and from the outside they are. Healthcare has nothing in common with packaging. Packaging has nothing in common with a Web3 startup. Different products, different buyers, different rules. Then you get inside the growth problem and it’s the same problem every time. Almost boringly so.
I’ve now built or fixed growth systems across healthcare, packaging, consumer, and Web3. Wildly different companies. Identical failure mode. Channels that don’t talk to each other. No system holding it together. Growth that works only when a specific person is paying attention and quietly stalls when they aren’t. Change the product and the story doesn’t change at all.
The Product Changes, the Plumbing Doesn’t
Growth doesn’t break inside a function. It breaks in the seams between them. The handoff from marketing to sales. The gap between a signup and the first real touch. The place where data crosses from one system to another and loses something on the way. Those seams exist in every company, because every company is the same parts bolted together, whatever it happens to sell.
The domain sits on top. The plumbing sits underneath. And the plumbing is where things actually leak. A lead going cold in the six hours after it arrives looks exactly the same whether you’re selling therapy or cardboard. The industry decides what flows through the pipes. It doesn’t change how the pipes fail.
”Our Industry Is Special” Is the Expensive Belief
Every owner believes their industry is the exception. The dynamics are different here. Outsiders don’t get it. Sometimes that’s true about the product. It’s almost never true about the constraint.
That belief is expensive, because it sends you looking for the wrong help. You hire the person who knows the industry cold, assuming the knowledge is the hard part. But the domain knowledge was never the bottleneck. The bottleneck was a broken seam that someone who’d seen it in three other industries would have spotted in a week. Instead you get someone fluent in the vocabulary who’s just as blind to the plumbing as everyone already in the building.
What Actually Transfers
What carries across industries isn’t the domain. It’s the ability to see the system, find where it leaks, and build the fix. Domain knowledge you can pick up in a few weeks of paying attention. Systems-sight you can’t. It gets built from watching the same pattern fail in enough different places that you stop being fooled by the surface.
That’s also why fresh eyes tend to beat insiders on this particular problem. People who’ve been inside an industry for a decade have learned to route around the broken seam so smoothly they no longer see it. Someone who’s fixed the identical thing elsewhere walks in and spots it immediately, precisely because they aren’t used to it.
The product is different every time. The buyer is different. The vocabulary is different. The problem is the same every time. That’s not a knock on any of these businesses, it’s the whole reason the work travels. It’s also why I stopped worrying a long time ago about whether I’d worked in someone’s industry before. I’ve worked on their problem. It just had a different logo on it. Related: the constraint is never where you think.
