<aside> 🤫 September 2023: These are some really rough thoughts. I wanted to get them out while my brain was still abuzz.

</aside>

Every so often, you stumble across something and you say, “that just makes sense.”

I was recently acquainted with the title of “People Growth”

When companies make a hire, they are often looking at that person to address needs that they currently have. But the hope is that that person can continue to grow and adapt to the challenges of the business. And, where they can’t, additional hires will be made. The cycle repeats over and over again.

What concerns me most is closing the gap between hiring someone for a job versus hiring for a career. To borrow a SaaS term or two, let’s frame things from the concept of LTV (Lifetime Value).

Amplitude has a nice, succinct, definition:

LTV is the cumulative total of all revenue a customer contributes to your business over their entire lifetime of using your SaaS product or service. The higher the LTV, the higher the value of that customer to your business. (Source)

For employees, it’s a no brainer that we want to keep them at the company as long as possible. It costs a lot to recruit, train, and replace people. So as much as that can be minimized, the better.

However, SaaS companies don’t just look at a customer as a static asset. The intention is to grow the account, so that the overall LTV is maximized.

Seeing SaaS companies in action, it takes work to increase the LTV of a customer. Sure, metered use / seat-based licensing may track with the customers growth, but they may stick with the initial package as to when they joined (a ‘basic’ license versus an ‘enterprise’ license; only the core platform instead of some additional, complementary, modules).

So much People infrastructure is geared towards reactive growth. (Ex. this person demonstrated X performance over the past year, let’s give them a promotion).