Archive
Growth engineering, written for Ariadne Growth Systems.
A nine-stage series on how demand, conversion, capture, routing, follow-up, sales, measurement, automation, and compounding behave as one system. It belongs to the company rather than to this site, so it lives here rather than in the main writing feed.
Why this is a separate archive
This site is an AI research and engineering portfolio. These 20 articles are growth-engineering writing for Ariadne Growth Systems, a separate company. Every article keeps its original /blog/… URL so nothing that already links to it breaks; they are simply no longer part of the main feed, the RSS feed, or the navigation. For AI and research writing, see Field notes.
Faithfulness · Causal Inference
Auditing the Systems That Audit You
Why I named the company after a paper on causal faithfulness — and what measuring 'reasoning theater' in LLM agents taught me about trusting business automation.
Growth Engineering · Diagnostics
What a Growth System Audit Actually Looks For
A diagnostic is a search for one binding constraint, not a list of everything wrong. Here is the instrument, the arithmetic, and the deliverable.
Vendor Lock-in · Economics
Leave the Keys: The Economics of Not Being Locked In
Switching costs are worth roughly a customer's entire future profit stream to the vendor holding them. The industrial-organisation literature says so precisely.
Measurement · Incentives
Measure Honestly: Goodhart's Law Inside Your Own Dashboard
Why the agency model produces optimised parts and an unimproved whole — traced to a formal result in contract theory, not to bad intentions.
Customer Lifetime Value · Retention
Stage 09 · Compounding: The Loop That Pays for Itself
Retention elasticity is 3–7 while acquisition elasticity is 0.02–0.3. Also: the most mis-cited statistic in business, traced to its actual source.
Automation · Human Factors
Keep Humans in Control: The Ironies of Automating a Sales Process
Bainbridge's forty-year-old result on why automating the easy parts makes the human job harder — and what that implies for automated follow-up.
Automation · Operations
Stage 08 · Automation: Amdahl's Law for Your Operations
The ceiling on every automation project, why Gustafson's rebuttal matters more than the law itself, and the 95% glue-code problem.
Advertising · Measurement
The Unfavorable Economics of Knowing If Your Ads Work
Twenty-five large randomised advertising experiments, $2.8M of spend, and confidence intervals over 100 points wide. Why ad measurement is hard for reasons no dashboard can fix.
Experimentation · Statistics
The Experiment You Cannot Run
What A/B testing actually costs in sample size, why most small businesses can never afford it, and the four things to do instead.
Attribution · Measurement
Stage 07 · Measurement: Last-Click Is a Story You Tell Yourself
Markov removal effects, Shapley attribution, and the peer-reviewed evidence that last-touch does not merely mis-measure — it changes behaviour for the worse.
Sales Systems · Process Variation
Stage 06 · Sales: Variance Is the Tax You Never Budgeted For
Kingman's V term, Shewhart's two kinds of variation, and why standardising a sales process buys more speed than hiring does.
Follow-up · Sales Systems
Stage 05 · Follow-Up: Persistence Is a Probability, Not a Personality
A geometric model of contact attempts, the point where extra dials turn negative, and why 'we followed up' is not a measurable claim.
Queueing Theory · Routing
Stage 04 · Routing: Your Lead Queue Obeys Erlang, Not Optimism
Little's Law, Erlang C, square-root staffing and the abandonment model — the queueing results that decide whether an inquiry ever reaches a person.
Lead Capture · Reliability
Stage 03 · Capture: Every Inquiry Needs a Next Step
Multi-channel intake is a reliability problem in disguise. Series yield, silent failure modes, and why the leak you can't see is the expensive one.
Web Performance · Conversion
Core Web Vitals Are a Revenue Variable
The published business-impact numbers for web performance, sorted by how much you should trust them — and the one that was a genuine controlled experiment.
Conversion · Experimentation
Stage 02 · Conversion: The Page Is a Decision, Not a Design
Response-time limits from human-factors research, what actually gets tested, and why 'most ideas fail' is the most useful conversion statistic there is.
SEO · AI Visibility
Stage 01 · Demand: Being Findable When the Searcher Is a Machine
How retrieval actually selects sources, what the first peer-reviewed study of generative engine optimization found, and why AI search cites so few domains.
Lead Response · Growth Engineering
The Five-Minute Window
Everyone quotes the speed-to-lead statistic. Almost nobody quotes it correctly. Here is where each number actually comes from, and what survives scrutiny.
Growth Engineering · Theory of Constraints
Nine Stages, One Constraint
Growth systems fail at one place at a time. Kingman's equation explains why that place is almost never where it feels like it is.
Growth Engineering · Systems Thinking
Growth Is a System, Not an Effort
Why revenue stalls the moment the founder stops pushing — and what fifty years of feedback-loop research says to build instead.