Unlock Business Growth with the ‘What Three Things?’ Method

UpTrajectory Review

Entrepreneur profiles Jyothi Swaroop, Chief Growth Officer at ChargePoint, and distills his leadership philosophy into a single question he puts to his teams: what three things will move the needle? The piece frames this as a growth framework for businesses chasing dramatic scale. Swaroop arrived at the electric-vehicle charging company after senior roles at major tech firms, and he now owns expansion strategy there. The method sounds almost too simple, but it reflects a discipline many operators lack: forcing real prioritization when every inbox, dashboard, and employee insists everything is urgent.

For a small-business owner juggling payroll, inventory, marketing, and hiring, the three-things filter offers a way out of the tyranny of the urgent. Most operators track a dozen initiatives at once, then wonder why none gain traction. Swaroop's question demands a choice. It asks the leader to name the few actions that actually drive revenue, retention, or market position this quarter. That discipline matters more for a resource-constrained shop than for a venture-backed growth team, because spreading effort across ten priorities usually means executing none of them well.

The article's 10X promise deserves a raised eyebrow. Business media loves frameworks that compress messy strategy into a memorable slogan, and this one fits the pattern. The method works only if the leader already understands the business deeply enough to know which three things matter. It does not tell a retailer whether to focus on inventory turns, customer acquisition cost, or staff retention. That judgment still requires domain knowledge and honest data. The three-things question is a container for decisions, not the decisions themselves, and the piece would be stronger if it said so plainly.

What the article likely underplays is the organizational friction this approach creates. Telling a team to focus on three priorities means explicitly deprioritizing seven others, and someone owns each of those seven. Someone's quarterly goals depend on them. The method fails without candid conversations about what stops getting attention, and without leaders willing to absorb the political cost of saying no. A small-business owner feels this acutely because the team is small enough that every shelved project has a face and a name attached, and the owner eats lunch with those faces.

Operators should test the method in their next planning cycle, but with one modification: write down the three things, then write down what you will stop doing to make room. If you cannot name what you will abandon, you have not actually chosen three priorities. Watch ChargePoint's growth trajectory over the coming year to see whether Swaroop's approach survives contact with a competitive market, and ask whether your own three things would hold up under a skeptical lender or a thin cash month.

The broader lesson is that growth frameworks succeed or fail on execution, not elegance. Swaroop's question works because it forces a conversation most teams avoid. Small-business owners who adopt it should pair it with a weekly review that asks whether the three chosen things are still the right three, because markets shift and yesterday's priority becomes tomorrow's distraction. The method is a starting point, not a destination, and the operators who benefit most will treat it as a habit rather than a one-time exercise.

Takeaway: Name your three priorities for the quarter, then write down what you will stop doing to make room for them.