Simo Heiskanen is the Chief Growth Officer and a co-founder of Expanly. As a seasoned growth leader, he has spent over a decade building and leading high-performing teams in international e-commerce scale-ups, including at companies like Swappie, Finnish Design Shop, and Babyshop Group. Through this experience, Simo has gained a deep, hands-on understanding of digital commerce strategies, internationalization, and data-driven marketing.

Growth in e-commerce is more than a metric; it's a discipline. It requires a deep understanding of the battlefield, from the front lines of campaign management to the strategic decisions made in the boardroom. To understand the strategic DNA of Expanly, we sat down with our co-founder and CGO, Simo Heiskanen, to discuss what it takes to build real, sustainable growth in the modern era.

You've been on the front lines of e-commerce for over a decade. Can you share a specific 'war story' from that time?

The high season, especially November and December, has always been critical for e-commerce businesses I've worked with. Months of meticulous preparation lead up to a few intense weeks. Over ten years, I've seen major successes, pushing technical limits and exceeding sales expectations.

But there have also been devastating setbacks when performance entirely missed targets. Reflecting on this, a common thread is that despite extensive planning, too much at the crucial moment still relies on simply driving maximum traffic and hoping things fall into place, rather than true control.

The word "growth" can mean anything from "more revenue" to "more profit". What does sustainable, intelligent growth actually look like to you, and why do so many companies get it wrong?

To me, growth means constantly testing and improving how things are done. It's a driven, process-focused approach, far removed from chasing quick wins or growth hacks. Instead of immediately optimizing revenue and focusing on tactical, short-term fixes, it's vital for teams and the entire organization to have the experience and confidence to invest enough resources in building sustainable, long-term growth.

Imagine you have a CMO who lives by their Google Ads dashboard and a CFO who lives by the P&L statement. If you could get them to agree on one single metric or dashboard to define success for the entire business, what would it be, and why is that 'single source of truth' so elusive for most companies?

I would definitely choose a customer-centric metric like Customer Retention. Positive customer retention is the foundation for sustainable and profitable business growth. This can often be challenging to achieve because it measures success so comprehensively across the entire company, from product strategy and customer acquisition to all internal processes. To truly excel here, a company needs to operate with genuine customer-centricity, guiding diverse teams simultaneously toward shared goals and avoiding siloed or short-sighted target setting.

Our platform is about intelligent automation. In a world increasingly run by AI, where does the human strategist fit in? What's the one thing a great human marketer can do that an algorithm never will?

A human strategist, regardless of their specific role, is strongest when they remain customer-obsessed and can translate all those qualitative and quantitative customer, market, and competitor insights into clear goals and actions. These actions can then be supercharged by embracing new tools and innovative ways of working.

What's a piece of conventional marketing wisdom or a popular "growth hack" that you think is fundamentally flawed or even dangerous for e-commerce businesses today?

Optimizing marketing and customer acquisition, or using "growth hacks," can easily and understandably focus on metrics that are simple to measure, test, and show immediate progress. Examples include click-through rate, conversion rate, ROAS, or view-through rate. The danger here is that the focus shifts to these easily measured results, but not enough to the most important fundamental elements that are more significant for the business.

You wrote our guide called “The 5-step guide to Google PMax for e-commerce”. Let's imagine a sixth, more philosophical step to the guide. What would that unwritten rule be?

Especially with Google PMax, measurement is often based on overall ROAS or POAS, which makes transactions for different types of products equally valuable. However, from a business perspective, this isn't the case. The sixth step would be to bring a true strategic layer to the management of PMax (or any product-driven channel). This means identifying which product categories you want to dominate in terms of market share, and setting clear goals for how much. The chosen categories, their ad spend, and efficiency would then be tracked and managed separately.

Looking beyond Expanly, what's the next great challenge in e-commerce that needs to be illuminated? What's the next big unknown that leaders should be thinking about?

Up until now, Google search has dominated search behavior. This has made it possible for e-commerce businesses to be discoverable to the majority of their target audience through strong Google SEO and paid advertising. With the rise of artificial intelligence and social media platforms, search behavior will continue to change and become more fragmented. This means that customer acquisition tasks, priorities, and metrics will also shift. For example, high-quality and comprehensive product data and genuine unique and valuable content like customer reviews will play an even more crucial role in the future.

What's a non-marketing tool or app on your phone that you think is brilliantly designed for growth or efficiency in your personal life?

That's a tough one, since I don’t think I have any fancy apps. In fact, right after my summer holiday, I removed all the apps I don't actively use. I like my phone's desktop clean, with just essential apps there. If I have to pick something, I'll choose S-kaupat (grocery delivery app). I think it's fantastic that you don't have to wander around the grocery store anymore; you can get all your week's groceries delivered straight to your home, all done in about 15 minutes on the app.

When you're not architecting growth strategies, what topic or rabbit hole are you most likely to fall into?

I enjoy reading and following articles, discoveries, and books related to space and astronomy. I find it calming to realize that, in the end, we are just one grain of sand in this vast universe that we don't even fully understand yet. It puts things into perspective if ever I feel rushed.