A Chief Growth Officer’s Playbook for Building High-Performance Development Teams

Chris Tarrant from VASA Fitness shares his tips on creating ambitious development teams and how to cultivate a culture optimized for performance

At RetailSpaces Fall 2026, Pulley co-founder and COO Andreas Rotenberg sat down with Chris Tarrant, Chief Growth Officer at VASA Fitness, to talk about building teams that enable growth.

Chris has done this at a number of high-performing organizations. At Starbucks, he was part of a team opening as many as 440 stores a year. At VASA, Chris’s team is already on track to open four times the number of clubs this year as it did last year.

Getting there required more than asking the team to work harder—it meant creating a culture where people could take ownership, building systems that removed friction from the work, and continually looking for ways to improve.

Here are five practical ideas that stood out.

1. Create a high-permission environment

Chris believes teams do their best work when people feel safe enough to be creative, curious, and willing to take calculated risks.

That starts with:

• Create a safe environment where people can experiment, take risks, and learn from mistakes.
• Treat feedback as fuel, not a governor by using coaching to help people improve in the moment.
• Drive ownership and accountability so people feel empowered to act and take responsibility for outcomes. The goal is to create what Chris calls a “what’s possible” mindset—one where people spend less time worrying about what might go wrong and more time thinking about what the team could accomplish.

“Creating a high-permission environment tends to get the most horsepower,” he says.

2. Give people trust and ownership from the start

A high-permission environment only works if people actually have the authority to act.

Chris’s view is simple:

“No one on your team should have to earn the right to contribute. They should have it the moment that they become a member of the team.”

When people know they’re trusted to make decisions, teams can move faster. And as trust increases, so does the pace and autonomy of the team.

For Chris, trust is an operating mechanism that gives people the confidence to act, make decisions, and keep work moving.

3. Hire people who are always striving to improve

Chris looks to hire people with a growth mindset. One unexpected interview question he uses to assess this is:

“What’s the one thing that you’re working on right now from a professional perspective to make yourself better tomorrow?”

For Chris, a strong answer signals self-awareness and a genuine desire to improve, which translates into showing up as a highly proactive participant on a team.

He applies the same principle to himself. His daily mantra is: “How can I leave things better than I found them today?”

That mindset extends beyond individual performance. It creates a team that is constantly looking for ways to improve how the work gets done.

4. Hold people accountable without making them afraid to take risks

When something doesn’t go according to plan, Chris believes leaders should first examine what went wrong:

• Were the goals realistic?
• Was the process engineered correctly?
• Were the right metrics and gates in place?
• Where did things start to break down? Just as importantly, leaders need to own their part in the miss. That creates room for the team to learn without losing the confidence to set ambitious goals again.

The balance matters: teams need accountability, but if every miss leads to tighter control, people eventually become less willing to take the risks that produce meaningful improvement.

5. Before asking a team to work harder, diagnose the system

At VASA, Chris inherited a development process that wasn’t keeping pace with the company’s growth ambitions. Rather than simply asking the team to move faster, he described re-engineering the process from the beginning.

The team looked at:

• Build times
• Vendor loops
• Design cycle times
• How work moved through the process The result was a meaningful reduction in construction time—from roughly 26–27 weeks to 21 weeks, or about 20%.

When a team isn’t moving fast enough, the answer isn’t always to push the people harder. Sometimes the bigger opportunity is to understand the system they’re operating within and fix what is slowing them down.

Build a team that gets better every cycle

Scaling a development organization isn’t just about hiring more people or setting more ambitious targets. It’s about creating the conditions for people to do better work—and improving the system around them so that better work compounds.

That’s how performance culture can become an operating advantage.