Rapid growth rarely looks dangerous at first.
It usually arrives as momentum — a surge of new features, climbing user counts, and charts that go up and to the right. But behind the progress, products often begin to change in ways that are subtle and easy to miss, and over time those changes matter a lot.
When growth becomes the primary objective, priorities shift. Decisions that once felt cautious start bending toward speed and scale — and in the process, risk quietly migrates away from the company and onto the people who use the product. This shift rarely comes from malice; more often, it emerges because growth incentives conflict with principles of security and responsibility.
When speed eclipses responsibility
In the early days, products are built to be clear, correct, and dependable. But once growth takes the driver’s seat:
- Features are added faster than evolving threat models can catch up
- Defaults become more permissive to reduce friction
- Systems collect and hold more data “just in case”
- Edge cases get postponed because they don’t affect enough users
None of this feels reckless in isolation — until you step back and realize how these incremental adjustments redefine what the team considers acceptable risk.
And that risk almost never stays within the walls of the product team.
New features expand the attack surface
As products scale, they accumulate complexity:
- Third-party integrations
- Analytics layers
- Additional permissions
- External dependencies
Each of these increases the potential surface for attacks.
What’s especially insidious is that many security failures don’t originate in core infrastructure at all — they emerge in the layers we tend to assume are safe. Modern applications quietly assume that browsers are secure foundations, even though they often become the weakest link. That dynamic is something we’ve explored in depth in why browsers are often the weakest point in user security.
And it’s not just browsers. Convenience-oriented modules like extensions can introduce hidden pathways for compromise long before anyone realizes something is wrong — a phenomenon we unpack in how browser extensions expand the attack surface.
As products grow, they aren’t just adding functionality — they are unintentionally cultivating forgotten or ignored entry points.
Convenience becomes a hidden security tradeoff
Growth teams are rewarded for reducing friction.
Security teams are trained to preserve protection.
Features like single-click access, persistent sessions, and broad default permissions all sound like improvements for usability. But they subtly shift decisions away from users and into opaque system choices.
When something inevitably goes wrong, the response is predictable:
“You allowed this.”
Even though, in reality, the user barely had a meaningful opportunity to refuse.
This is how design decisions quietly become shields from liability. It also highlights why, in many cases, simplifying the product improves its safety — a point we dig into in why minimalism improves security.
Data becomes a long-term vulnerability
Data fuels growth engines.
But it also creates exposure.
Growth-oriented products tend to:
- Collect data before it’s truly necessary
- Retain it longer than it should remain relevant
- Reuse it in new contexts without reassessing risks
Not because teams want surveillance — but because optionality feels like an advantage.
The underlying issue is simple: data that exists will eventually become a liability. It can be leaked, misused, reinterpreted, or combined in ways no one initially intended.
We look at how “free” services accumulate hidden costs in why free online services aren’t really free, and how neglecting privacy obligations compounds risk over time in the long-term consequences of ignoring digital privacy.
User numbers scale faster than trust
At a small scale, failures are personal. Users are heard, context is shared, and trust can be rebuilt.
At a large scale, systems replace judgment. Policies replace conversations. Automation replaces accountability.
When a product reaches a certain size, feeling safe can become cheaper than being safe. That’s what people mean when they contrast security theater with real protection — visible signals that reassure without meaningfully decreasing actual risk.
When harm becomes statistical background noise
Perhaps the most insidious effect of growth is how it reframes harm.
As user counts rise:
- Individual harm begins to look negligible
- Rare failures are dismissed as acceptable loss
- Risk gets justified by averages and percentiles
But security failures are never abstract to the people affected. Products don’t lose trust because of a single bug. They lose trust when users sense a pattern — that safety was traded for something else. We’ve written about this dynamic in why users abandon products they don’t trust.
Why we treat growth as a security risk
Growth is not neutral.
It shapes incentives and accelerates decisions — often at the expense of restraint.
Unchecked growth tends to reward:
- Quicker releases instead of thorough validation
- Expansion instead of internal control
- Engagement instead of user autonomy
That’s why we see decisions about growth as decisions about security.
We’d rather grow deliberately than later explain why users paid the price.
This approach isn’t anti-growth — it is risk-aware design. For us, growth isn’t the destination; it’s a side effect that must be safe by design, not just in hindsight.
This philosophy builds directly on the argument we laid out in why we don’t chase growth at any cost — the idea that relentless expansion often comes with hidden liabilities that aren’t worth the tradeoff.
See also: Why We Don’t Chase Growth at Any Cost — a reflection on prioritizing long-term quality over short-term scale.