How to achieve hypergrowth in your business and career | Carilu Dietrich (Atlassian)

Achieving hypergrowth isn't about a single magic bullet or a massive advertising spend. It's a disciplined, multifaceted strategy built on an exceptional product, authentic word-of-mouth, and an organizational ability to scale at lightning speed. Drawing from her experience leading marketing at Atlassian through its IPO and advising titans like Miro, Segment, and 1Password, Carilu Dietrich unpacks the frameworks that separate fleeting success from enduring market leadership. This is a masterclass in building a resilient career, picking winning companies, and aligning your entire organization to ride the wave of exponential growth.

Key Takeaways

• Hypergrowth is Earned, Not Bought: Sustainable, rapid growth is fueled by an amazing product that generates organic, viral word-of-mouth. You cannot pay your way to hypergrowth with expensive ad campaigns alone.
• Career Acceleration Requires Momentum: The trajectory of your career is directly tied to the momentum of the company you work for. Choosing a high-growth company provides more opportunities for advancement and learning than a stagnant one.
• Think Like the CEO: To reach the C-suite, you must understand and communicate how your function directly contributes to revenue. Develop a strong grasp of business finance and the interconnectedness of all departments.
• Strategy is a Team Sport: Major growth initiatives, like moving upmarket or launching new products, fail when they are siloed within one department. True success requires a cross-functional, company-wide strategic commitment.
• Product-Led Growth (PLG) and Sales Coexistence: Atlassian's model of investing heavily in R&D over sales created a self-selling product. For most companies, the key is to use sales strategically, engaging only with customers who show strong buying intent through product usage.

The Three Pillars of Hypergrowth

What do companies like Miro, Segment, and Atlassian have in common? They didn't just grow; they experienced hypergrowth, a stage of rapid expansion that compresses years of development into months. According to Dietrich, this rare trajectory isn't accidental. It stands on three foundational pillars that work in concert to create unstoppable momentum.

1. An Amazing Product People Love

The absolute, non-negotiable starting point is a product that users are genuinely excited about. Dietrich points to ChatGPT as the ultimate recent example of a product whose utility and novelty created an unprecedented user adoption curve. The product experience must be so compelling that it becomes its own best marketing tool. This was the secret at Atlassian, where a relentless focus on engineering and product excellence created tools that developers and teams actively sought out.

The biggest thing is an amazing product that people love to use.

If the core experience is mediocre, no amount of advertising can fix it. As Dietrich learned with Atlassian's HipChat, even a clever ad campaign couldn't overcome product uptime and feature issues when competing against a superior product like Slack. The advertising only amplifies what's already there.

2. Organic, Inbound, and Viral Word-of-Mouth

The second pillar is growth that happens naturally, driven by users themselves. You can't sustain hypergrowth rates through paid channels alone; the economics simply don't work. The growth engine must be built into the product and the user experience.

• Natural Collaboration Points: Products like Miro and Confluence thrive because they are inherently collaborative. When one person uses a Miro board for a meeting, they invite others, who then become users. This user-driven sales motion is far more efficient than a traditional sales team.
• Community and Thought Leadership: Empowering internal experts to engage with the community builds trust and authority. Atlassian's founders were active in developer forums for years, and companies like Weights & Biases empower their technical staff to write, speak, and share knowledge, creating an ecosystem of learning around their product.
• Customer Evangelism: Your happiest customers are your best salespeople. Dietrich highlights Atlassian's User Group community, where the company simply provided pizza and beer, and customers would meet to share best practices, growing their own careers and networks while evangelizing the products.

3. Riding the Lightning: Scaling People and Systems

Hypergrowth is a wild ride. The organizational challenges that most companies face over a decade can materialize in a single year. Being able to adapt is the third critical pillar.

Hypergrowth companies go through the stages of growth that would take other companies five years or ten years.

This means the leadership team must constantly evolve. Dietrich advises hiring "2X and 3X leaders"—people who have already seen the next stage of growth and know what excellence looks like at that scale. While homegrown talent is valuable, it's difficult for individuals to keep pace with the company's breakneck speed without mentorship or prior experience. Leaders must hire ahead of the curve, build systems that can scale, and cultivate an organization that thrives on rapid change.

Navigating Your Career Path to the C-Suite

Reaching an executive role isn't just about being good at your job; it's about a deliberate and strategic approach to your career. Dietrich emphasizes that while the path requires sacrifice, certain habits and mindsets can dramatically accelerate your journey.

The Personal Habits of High Achievers

The executive track often demands more than a typical 9-to-5 commitment. Dietrich notes that top leaders often make significant trade-offs, dedicating extra time to learning, reading, and taking on more responsibility. Early in her career, she consistently worked later than her peers, calculating that the extra hours would compound into years of additional experience over time. She also volunteered for "moonlight" roles in other departments, such as running a product beta, which gave her a holistic understanding of the business that proved invaluable later on.

When leadership voids appear, stepping up to take on interim responsibilities is a powerful way to demonstrate both appetite and capability to senior executives. There are no shortcuts to deep expertise and experience.

Five Steps to Cultivate an Executive Mindset

Beyond hard work, aspiring leaders need to train their minds to operate at a strategic level. Dietrich outlines five key areas of focus:

1. Tie Your Work to Revenue: Always think and speak in the language of the CEO and the board. Understand the company's financial model and be able to articulate precisely how your team's efforts contribute to the bottom line.
2. Understand the Whole System: To lead at the C-suite level, you must grasp how the entire business functions as an interconnected system. Dietrich encourages "tours of duty" in different departments to gain cross-functional empathy and insight.
3. Build Strong Relationships: Your ability to collaborate and influence peers across the organization is critical. Strong relationships are built on a foundation of consistently doing good work and helping others succeed.
4. Choose Your Company Wisely: Your career's momentum is heavily dependent on your company's momentum. A fast-growing company creates more opportunities, bigger teams, and higher-level experiences that accelerate your growth.
5. Leverage Your Network: Great companies attract great people. The network you build at a successful company will create opportunities for the rest of your career, as former colleagues move on to lead other exciting ventures.

How to Pick a Winning Company

The single most impactful career advice is to join a company that is poised for success. A rising tide lifts all boats, and one great company on your resume can transform your entire professional trajectory. But how do you identify the next Atlassian or Snowflake before everyone else does? Dietrich shares her personal 10-point checklist for evaluating a company's potential.

Carilu Dietrich's "Post-it Note" Checklist

• Rule of 40: Is the sum of the company's growth rate and profit margin above 40%? This is a key indicator of a healthy, efficient business.
• Quality of Investors: Are they backed by top-tier VCs? Elite investors perform extensive due diligence and their backing is a strong signal of quality.
• Net Promoter Score (NPS): Do customers genuinely love the product? A high NPS indicates strong customer satisfaction and organic growth potential.
• Net Dollar Retention (NDR): How much is revenue from existing customers growing? An NDR well over 100% (like Snowflake's famed 160%+) means the business can grow substantially without even adding new customers.
• Growth Rate: What was their revenue growth in the last year? Look for strong, sustained momentum.
• Burn Rate: Are they financially sustainable, or are they at risk of running out of money?
• Market Leadership: Are they considered #1 in their category by analysts like Gartner or Forrester?
• Glassdoor Rating: Is it a good place to work? Unhappy employees and a toxic culture are red flags for long-term survival.

For those early in their career, Dietrich suggests targeting established, high-momentum winners like OpenAI, Salesforce, or AWS. The brand recognition and network from these companies can be a powerful career catalyst.

Driving Growth: Strategy, Sales, and Bundling

Once a company finds product-market fit, the challenge becomes scaling its growth motions. This involves making smart bets on channels, deciding when to introduce a sales team, and structuring product offerings for different market segments.

When to Hire Your First Salesperson

Atlassian famously defied convention by plowing the money that would have funded a sales organization directly into R&D, creating a product that sold itself. While a pure product-led growth (PLG) model is rare, the lesson is universal: sales is an expensive growth channel. Dietrich advises founders to wait as long as possible and use sales surgically. The modern approach is a hybrid model where sales teams only engage with accounts that have already shown strong product adoption and buying intent. Forcing a sales-led motion onto a product that isn't resonating is a costly mistake that drains resources without adding predictable revenue.

Making Big Changes to Your Growth Strategy

Pivoting a growth strategy—such as moving from SMB to Enterprise—is one of the hardest things a company can do. Dietrich argues that these initiatives fail when they are treated as a departmental goal instead of a company-wide strategy. If marketing is tasked with generating enterprise leads but the product roadmap, customer support, and sales compensation plans don't align, the effort is doomed. True transformation requires the CEO or a united C-suite to champion the change, securing buy-in and resources from every function in the organization.

The Power and Peril of Bundling

Bundling multiple products can be a powerful strategy for increasing deal size and expanding a company's addressable market. However, it comes with a crucial caveat. For PLG companies, bundling can be a "land" strategy killer. Atlassian found that forcing a customer to evaluate a multi-product bundle slowed down the self-service motion. The most effective model was to land with a single, high-velocity product that solves a specific pain point (like Jira for issue tracking) and then expand the relationship with other products over time. In a tough economic climate, however, bundling becomes more powerful, as all-in-one solutions from giants like Microsoft can seem more appealing to cost-conscious CFOs than best-of-breed point solutions.

Conclusion

The journey to hypergrowth is not a mystery—it's a formula. It begins with an unwavering obsession with the customer and the product, creating something so valuable that people can't help but share it. It's sustained by building an organization that can scale at an unnatural pace, led by people who have seen what's next. For individuals, a successful career is built on the same principles: find a company with incredible momentum, learn the entire system, tie your work to revenue, and never stop pushing the boundaries of your own capabilities. By focusing on these fundamentals, both companies and careers can achieve a trajectory that defies expectations.