Stop Asking for 20% More. Think in Multiples.

Every year, in almost every company I know, the planning conversation starts the same way. Someone puts last year’s number on the screen, and the room negotiates a percentage on top of it. Fifteen percent feels safe. Twenty-five feels ambitious. Forty feels like someone is going to get hurt.

I have sat through many of these conversations, and I have led some of them. Over time I came to believe that the percentage itself is the problem — not because the number is too small, but because of what it does to the way people think.

This is the idea I shared with our team at a recent all-hands, and I want to write it down properly because I keep coming back to it.

What a percentage target actually asks for

When you ask a team for 20% more, you are implicitly saying: keep doing what you are doing, just a little harder. Add a few more salespeople. Run a few more campaigns. Squeeze a few more tickets through support. Ship a few more features.

That is not a bad instruction. Incremental improvement is how most good companies stay good. But it carries a hidden assumption: that the current system — the product, the channel, the pricing, the way work is organised — is the right system, and the only variable is effort.

The trouble is that effort scales linearly at best. Twenty percent more output usually needs something close to twenty percent more input. People feel it. The target becomes a grind, and the grind becomes the culture.

What a multiple asks for instead

Now change the question. Instead of “how do we grow 20%?”, ask “what would we have to change to be 3x this size?”

Something interesting happens in the room. Nobody believes you can get to 3x by working three times harder. It is obviously impossible. So people stop thinking about effort and start thinking about the system. Which channel would have to change? Which customer would we have to serve that we do not serve today? What would we have to stop doing? What would have to become self-serve? What would we have to automate?

The multiple is not really a target. It is a forcing function that makes the existing system visible, so you can question it.

You may never hit 3x. That is fine. The ideas that come out of a 3x conversation tend to produce far more than 20% even when they are only partly executed — because they change the slope, not just the height.

Three stories I use to explain this

I like to explain this with three companies, because together they cover the upside and the danger.

Slack: reinvention over refinement

Slack did not start as Slack. The team was building a game, and while building it they made an internal tool to talk to each other. The game did not work. The internal tool turned out to be the business.

The lesson I take from this is not “pivot when things fail.” It is that the most valuable thing a team owns is sometimes sitting next to the thing they are trying to grow. A percentage mindset would have said “make the game 20% better.” A multiples mindset asks, “what here could be ten times bigger than what we are working on?” — and sometimes the honest answer is a different product.

Jio: rethinking the infrastructure, not the price

When Jio entered Indian telecom, the existing players were competing on percentages — slightly cheaper plans, slightly better coverage, slightly bigger data packs. Jio did not play that game. It rebuilt the underlying infrastructure around data first, and that allowed it to change the economics of the whole market at once.

You can argue about the strategy, but the shape of the move is clear: they did not ask “how do we take 5% more share?” They asked “what would the market look like if data were nearly free?” and then built the system that made that answer possible.

Nokia: the warning

Nokia is the story I tell so nobody leaves the room thinking incremental work is enough. Nokia was extremely good at improving phones. Every year the phones were a bit better — better battery, better build, better distribution. They were winning on percentages right up until the moment the definition of a phone changed.

Incremental thinking is not wrong. It is just blind. It optimises the current game very well, and it cannot see when the game is being replaced.

How this changes day-to-day work

Big stories are easy to agree with. The harder part is turning this into how a team actually plans. A few things I have found useful:

Ask for the 3x plan first, then the 1.2x plan. If you start with the safe plan, the ambitious plan becomes a stretch version of it. If you start with the ambitious one, the safe plan often borrows its best ideas. The order matters.

Separate the “system” question from the “effort” question. When a team presents a plan, I try to ask: which part of this growth comes from doing more of the same, and which part comes from doing something differently? If the second bucket is empty, the plan is a percentage plan in disguise.

Look for the thing that does not scale with headcount. Self-serve onboarding, better documentation, an API that lets developers integrate without a sales call, automation inside support. These are boring, and they are exactly the kind of work that changes the slope. In a communications platform business like ours, developer experience is one of these levers — every hour you save a developer at integration time is growth you did not have to sell.

Kill something. A real multiples conversation almost always reveals work that should stop. If a plan only adds and never removes, it is probably not a new system — just a heavier version of the old one.

Make the team small enough to feel the constraint. You cannot get 3x by adding three times the people, so pretend you cannot add any. What would this team do differently if headcount stayed flat? That question produces better ideas than most brainstorms.

What I am not saying

I am not saying percentage growth is bad, or that every team should chase moonshots. Most of a company’s work should be steady improvement. Customers want reliability, not reinvention every quarter.

I am also not saying you should announce 3x targets and hold people accountable to them. That just produces fear and creative accounting. The multiple is a thinking tool, not a performance metric.

What I am saying is that if the only question you ever ask is “how much more?”, you will get very good at the current game and you will not notice when the game changes. Asking “how many times more?” once in a while is a cheap way to check.

The question I leave with teams

At the end of that all-hands, I left everyone with one question, and I will leave it here too:

If your part of the business had to be three times bigger next year without three times the people, what is the first thing you would change?

Most people have an answer within a minute. That answer is usually more interesting than anything in the annual plan. The job of leadership, I have come to think, is to make sure that answer gets heard — and then to give people the room to try it.