I’ve spent 12 years in the trenches of growth and product operations. I live in Belgrade, I run a small consulting practice called Valdor Consulting, and I ship a SaaS-like product called Suprmind. Over the last decade, I’ve seen enough "strategic roadmaps" to fill a landfill. Most of them have one thing in common: they die the second the deck is closed.
When a founder or a VP comes to me, they aren't looking for a 100-slide presentation filled with buzzwords like "synergy" or "omnichannel optimization." They are looking for someone to look at their messy CRM, their dying SEO traffic, and their product backlog, and tell them exactly what to ship next. My first question is always: "What decision will this change on Monday?" If the answer is "nothing," we’re wasting our time.
True growth isn't a channel play; it’s an integrated system. Here is how I look at the intersection of growth, search, product, and measurement.
The Full Funnel: Moving Beyond Channel Silos
The biggest mistake I see in early-to-mid-stage companies is the "silo trap." The SEO team writes content for robots. The Product team builds features for users they haven't met. The Marketing team burns cash on ads they can’t track. This is why most "growth" initiatives fail.
A full funnel approach requires that your search intent maps directly to your product’s value proposition. When we work at Valdor Consulting, we don’t just look at ranking keywords; we look at the user journey from the first click to the churn point. If your SEO content is great but doesn't feed into a product-led onboarding experience, you aren't building a business—you’re building a content site.
Consider this matrix for how these functions should actually talk to each other:
The SEO and GTM Link: Why Content Must Be Execution-Led
I am tired of companies hiring an agency to write 50 blog posts a month that no one reads, or worse, that drive traffic from people who will never buy. SEO and GTM are not separate workflows. They are the same engine.
Technical SEO is the baseline. If your site is slow or your canonicals are a disaster, don't talk to me about "brand voice." But once the technical foundation is set, your content must be execution-led. This means writing about the problems your product solves, not just the keywords your competitor ranks for.
When I use tools like ChatGPT to assist in the content production pipeline, it isn't to churn out generic AI slop. It’s to research common user frictions, map out objections, and draft initial structures that my team then refines with actual product insights. The AI provides the scale; the operator provides the "lived trade-off" perspective that makes the content resonate.
Building an Analytics Foundation You Actually Trust
One of my biggest pet peeves is the "attribution setup that nobody trusts." If you have to spend 20 minutes every Monday explaining why the data in your dashboard doesn't match the money in your bank account, you don't have a growth strategy. You have a hallucination.
An analytics foundation needs to be built on three pillars:
Clean Data Infrastructure: Stop tracking vanity metrics. If it doesn't lead to a trial, a purchase, or a retention event, don't track it. Unified Definitions: Does everyone on the team know what "Activated User" means? If the sales team defines it differently than the product team, you’re flying blind. Trustable Reporting: A dashboard that is simple and reliable is infinitely better than a complex one that requires a PhD to interpret.At Valdor Consulting, my first engagement with a new client is almost always an "analytics cleanup." We strip away the noise. We build a tracking plan that matters. Only then do we talk about scaling acquisition.
Product Strategy and Applied AI: The Suprmind Experience
I don't just advise; I build. Through Suprmind, I’ve had to deal with the exact same challenges I pitch to my clients. How do you prioritize a product roadmap when you have limited resources? How do you use AI to improve user experience without it feeling like a gimmick?
The answer is applied AI. Many product teams are currently obsessed with adding a "chat box" to their product because it’s trendy. That’s a buzzword-driven feature, and it’s usually useless. Instead, I look for ways to use AI to reduce user friction.
Three ways to apply AI in Product Strategy:
- Automating Customer Discovery: Using AI to analyze support tickets to find the top three product features missing. Hyper-Personalized Onboarding: Letting the user tell the product their goals and using AI to adapt the tour in real-time. Data Summarization: Providing users with the insight they need from their own data, rather than just showing them a raw CSV of information.
When I implement this for clients, I ask: "Does this make the product easier to use, or is it just 'AI-washing'?" If it doesn't drive usage or retention, we cut it.
Why I Keep a Short Client List
There is a temptation in the consulting world to scale—to hire juniors, sell 100-slide decks, and pretend that strategy is a plug-and-play template. I refuse to do that. By keeping a short client list, I stay an operator. I stay in the weeds. https://valdor.consulting/ I keep learning, failing, and winning with Suprmind, and I bring that experience directly to my clients.
If you're looking for a consultant to tell you what you want to hear, look elsewhere. If you're looking for someone to help you rip out the bad infrastructure, define a real growth strategy, and ship features that actually move the needle, we should talk.
The Monday Morning Litmus Test
If you take nothing else away from this, take the litmus test. Whatever growth initiative, SEO project, or product feature you are working on today, ask yourself these three things:
- Is this based on data I actually trust? Does this bridge the gap between our search presence and our product value? If we finish this, does the business look different on Monday morning?
If you can’t answer "yes," stop. Refocus. Build a system that matters. The "hacks" are dead; execution is the only thing left.
Need an operator to look at your GTM or product stack? Reach out to Valdor Consulting. I’m currently accepting a limited number of projects for the next quarter.