May 2026

You’re pulling your growth team together for a strategy conversation. Who’s in that room? The Head of Product rarely makes the first cut. Did you expect them to be there? That’s the most expensive default assumption in a growth strategy conversation.

Before almost every growth strategy engagement, someone asks: “Who should we invite to these meetings?” The list they build is telling. Which functions get named first as growth drivers? And which ones get treated as something else? There’s a group that almost never makes the first cut. They’re also sitting on the only unfiltered evidence about whether your growth strategy is working.

PR got deprioritized. Direct mail got cut. Events got shelved. Every channel decision your team has ever made had a reason behind it. Most of those reasons have never been revisited. Some of them have quietly expired — and a few of the tactics that were abandoned are now more valuable than the channels that replaced them.

One in three B2B buyers recently purchased from a vendor they’d never heard of before…introduced by AI during the research phase. That vendor didn’t get there by accident. There’s a specific strategic decision behind it, and most growth teams are skipping it entirely.