The Growthbox playbook
Over the years of leading product & engineering teams, and in the recent years as founder of growthbox, I've collected quite a few thoughts about how we build products that users love. From time to time I bring them up in our all hands or during catch-ups with team members.
Then I thought I'd just write them down as a playbook, just like YC’s startup playbook, and make it public in my newsletter.
Philosophy
Most software development relationships are structured to fail from the start. Traditional agencies optimise for billable hours instead of product success. They spend weeks or even months writing detailed proposals, defining rigid milestones, and creating elaborate change request processes to protect the precious "scope". In my 20 years of building software, I've never seen a single project go exactly as planned in the initial scope document. Not one.
As Steve Blank famously said: “No Plan Survives First Contact With Customers.” This truth has played out in nearly every project I’ve worked on.
The modern world moves too fast—markets shift, user needs evolve, and technology advances while agencies are stuck debating change requests.
Learning & adapting is more important than deliver on scope.
Building great products isn’t about perfection upfront; it’s about launching fast, learning, and iterating.
Yet, most companies fall into the trap of trying to build everything at once, killing their product before it has a chance to succeed.
Product Discovery is applied science—it’s about experimenting, testing, and adapting until you find what works.
The key? Find the smallest version of your idea that delivers value and validates your core assumptions, then do it again and again.
Every great product starts small. We’ve seen startups pivot entirely after launching a single feature, and enterprises abandon million-dollar integrations when early experiments exposed weak demand. A few weeks of learning saves months of building the wrong thing.
That’s why we work differently.
Instead of detailed proposals and rigid processes, we Build Less, Learn Quickly, and Try Again (I call it the “BLT”). We:
Build the smallest version of an idea.
Get it in front of users fast.
Learn from their feedback.
Iterate. Rinse and repeat.
This isn’t just a process; it’s a mindset. The best founders and teams understand this. They’re willing to launch something raw and imperfect because they know speed to insight beats perfection every time.
The path to great products is through perfect learning, not perfect planning. If you’re not comfortable launching small, you’ll likely launch nothing at all.
Process
Most companies talk about being “agile”, but for many, it’s just a rebranded waterfall process with fake cycles. Daily stand-ups turn into status updates, sprints become glorified to-do lists, and retrospectives feel more like venting sessions than actual progress.
At Growthbox, we don’t waste time pretending to be agile—we’re laser-focused on what matters: delivering value fast and learning as we go.
When we start on a project, we don’t spend weeks on onboarding, alignment workshops, or unnecessary documentation. We hit the ground running. We embed ourselves in your team, get to know your challenges, and start creating value immediately. Everything we do is tied to outcomes, not outputs.
Here’s how we make it work:
No Red Tape: We skip the fluff and dive straight into solving your core problems.
Rapid Development: Our team is built to move fast without sacrificing quality. You’ll see progress in days, not months.
Transparency: We charge based on actual effort spent—no inflated hours, no hidden fees. Just results.
Continuous Feedback: Every iteration is put in front of users or stakeholders for real feedback. We adjust course as needed, ensuring you’re never stuck with something that doesn’t deliver value.
The best part? By the time most agencies are still setting up, we’ve already delivered something you can use.
Team
The Growthbox team isn’t just a collection of employees, freelancers or contractors—we’re a high-performing, battle-tested unit. For over a decade, we’ve worked together building and scaling large, complex systems. Our roots go back to Juwai.com, Asia’s largest international real estate website, where we tackled challenges of scale, complexity, and innovation daily. That experience shaped us into the team we are today: passionate technologists who love building great products.
Here’s what makes us unique:
Decade-Long Synergy: We know each other’s strengths, trust each other implicitly, and collaborate seamlessly. When you bring Growthbox into your project, you’re getting a team that’s already in sync.
Expertise at Scale: We’ve handled systems with millions of users, designed resilient architectures, and delivered under tight deadlines. Large-scale complexity isn’t just something we’re good at—it’s where we thrive.
Passion for Product: We don’t just build for the sake of it. We care deeply about creating products that users love and that make a real impact.
Plug-and-Play Value: Think of Growthbox as an extension of your team. We integrate right in, operate like internal consultants, and start delivering value from day one.
We believe great teams build great products, and we’re proud to say we’re one of those teams.
At Growthbox, we see every project as an opportunity to help someone build something meaningful. Whether it’s optimising an existing system or launching something entirely new, we bring the same energy, expertise, and enthusiasm to every challenge. We love what we do, and we’d love to use that passion to help others change the world.
Tech
We make technology choices based on what works, not what’s trendy or what our developers are excited about. We’ve standardised on a proven stack: AWS + PHP + React. Not because it’s exciting, but because it works.
Yes, we have team members who maintain bleeding-edge frameworks. Yes, we experiment with new technologies. But when it comes to building products that actually work, scale, and can be maintained long-term, boring technology usually wins.
I learned this lesson the hard way. At one point, I led a major rewrite of a traditional MVC-based application, swapping out our REST APIs for a bleeding-edge RPC framework. I believed it was faster, cooler, and the future of API design. While it worked initially, the long-term headaches it caused weren’t worth the marginal performance gains. Training new staff became a challenge, compatibility issues with libraries, and even simple integrations required custom work. Looking back, sticking with HTTP-based REST APIs would have saved us countless hours of frustration without sacrificing much.
Here’s the reality: Building the initial product is only about 20% of the journey. The other 80% is maintaining it, scaling it, and handing it off to internal teams. Our stack makes all of that easier. It’s proven at scale, has a massive ecosystem of solutions, and makes it easy for clients to find developers when they want to build their own team.
When we make technology choices, we optimise for three things:
Speed of development
Ease of maintenance
Future flexibility
Everything else is secondary. Using trendy technology might feel good, but it won’t help your product succeed.
Regarding internal productivity tools, we encourage everyone to use the best the tool they can find and we’ll pay for it. The more you spend on them, the more you save overall. We invest heavily in tools because we've learned that developer productivity compounds.
As a team who work a lot on B2B SaaS, we pay for the best SaaS as well: Notion, JIRA, Linear, Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor, PHPStorm, Superhuman, Gamma, Pitch... A tool that saves team member 30 minutes a day pays for itself in less than a week.
Everyone in the team gets an allowance for productivity tools. The worst case is we waste a little money. The best case is we find something that makes everyone more productive.
Culture
We don't think culture is about perks or office games or team building exercises. Real culture is about how decisions get made when no one is watching.
We hire the best developers who want a balanced life, and we protect that balance fiercely. Work happens during work hours - after that, time belongs to family, hobbies, and rest. This isn't being nice; it's being smart. The best work comes from well-rested minds.
Here's why most remote work fails and why we do it differently: Companies try to replicate office culture online. Instead, we build connections through meaningful interactions:
Monthly virtual gatherings where we actually enjoy each other's company
Annual in-person meetups that matter (COVID has made this harder)
Regular knowledge sharing that makes everyone better at their job
The most important thing I'll tell a team member is this: "If you feel you're not learning and growing here, you should quit." We mean it. Every project should be an opportunity to learn something new, try new approaches, and become better at what you do.
A final thought about growth that shapes how we work: The best way to grow isn't to get bigger, it's to get better. When we face challenges, our first instinct isn't to hire more people - it's to improve our processes and tools. We've tried scaling by adding more roles and layers. What we got wasn't leverage - it was complexity. Now we focus on automation and tools instead.
Final Thought
If you have a clear vision and a sound strategy but need a high-performing team to bring your product to life, Growthbox is the partner you’ve been looking for. We thrive on turning ideas into reality, delivering value quickly, and iterating effectively to ensure your product’s success.
The best products aren’t the result of large teams or cutting-edge technologies alone. They emerge from small, focused teams solving meaningful problems. Everything else is just noise.
Let’s build something great (that people actually want) together.