Growth Is a Process, Not a Platform

For more than a decade, New Zealand businesses have been urged to “go digital.” The result? A landscape dotted with new platforms, cloud migrations, and shiny apps. Yet, the hard truth is that many organisations are still waiting for the business growth these investments were supposed to unlock.

The problem isn’t the technology itself. It’s the belief that buying a platform, or even a suite of platforms, is the same as building a growth engine. It’s not. Growth is a process, not a product. And the missing middle in most digital strategies is the work of optimising how sales, delivery, finance, and customer success actually come together to create value.

Platform-First Thinking: The Comfortable Trap

It’s easy to see why platform-first thinking is seductive. There’s a certain comfort in signing off on a major tech purchase, announcing a transformation program, and ticking the “digital” box. But platforms are just tools. They don’t create growth on their own. In fact, they often highlight the gaps in your underlying processes, data, and culture.

Ask yourself: Has your latest system rollout made it easier for your sales and delivery teams to collaborate? Has it given finance real-time visibility into margin and cash flow? Are your customer success teams empowered to solve problems, or are they still navigating silos? If the answer is no, then you haven’t solved for growth, you’ve just added another layer of complexity.

Growth Lives in the Gaps

Real, sustainable growth comes from relentlessly optimising the handoffs and feedback loops between teams. It’s about making sure the insights from customer success inform product development, that sales forecasts are grounded in delivery reality, and that finance has the data to support smart, timely decisions.

This is the “missing middle” in most digital strategies: the connective tissue of process, accountability, and shared metrics that turns technology into business value.

Consider the basics:

• Sales: Are your teams equipped with insights from delivery and customer feedback, or are they selling in a vacuum?
• Delivery: Do your processes flex to meet customer needs, or are they constrained by system limitations?
• Finance: Does your data flow seamlessly from quote to cash, or are you still reconciling numbers at month-end?
• Customer Success: Are you proactive in identifying churn risks and upsell opportunities, or reactive to complaints?

Growth happens when these functions work as one, supported by technology, but not dictated by it.

Where Growth Is Built, Not Bought

Look at Xero. Their success didn’t come from simply building a cloud accounting platform. It came from obsessively refining how product, sales, support, and partner channels work together to deliver value to small businesses. The platform is an enabler, not the engine.

Fonterra’s supply chain transformation is another case in point. Digital twins and predictive analytics are powerful, but the real breakthrough was in connecting farm data, logistics, and customer demand to improve efficiency and resilience. Growth was unlocked not by the technology itself, but by the way people and processes were re-aligned to use it.

Metrics That Matter

If you want to know whether your digital strategy is driving growth, stop measuring system uptime and start measuring business outcomes:

• Sales cycle time
• Margin per customer segment
• Customer retention and NPS
• Cash conversion cycle
• Time from customer feedback to product improvement

If your numbers aren’t moving, it’s not a platform problem; it’s a process problem.

Build, Don’t Buy, Your Growth Engine

The most effective leaders in Aotearoa don’t confuse activity for progress. They know that transformation is not a side project; it’s the operating model. They challenge their teams to look beyond the next tech purchase and focus on the hard, often unglamorous work of process improvement, cross-functional alignment, and capability building.

They ask tough questions:

• Are we clear on the outcomes we’re driving?
• Are our teams empowered to act on insights, or are they still working in silos?
• Are we measuring value, not just activity?

And they act:

• Cut or delay tech initiatives that aren’t tied to business outcomes.
• Invest in process design, change leadership, and upskilling.
• Insist on shared accountability for growth metrics, not just system adoption.

Growth Is Earned, Not Installed

New Zealand’s business future won’t be defined by who has the latest platform, but by who has the discipline to build a growth engine, one process, one team, one outcome at a time. Platforms help, but they are never the answer on their own.

Growth is a process. It’s time to lead like it.