growth team

“I think that once, you know, you have strong retention and you probably have 10 or 15 engineers on your team, it may be time to actually focus on growth.”

“You can't focus entirely on the results. What you really want to focus on is the learning. Are we continuing to learn how our users operate, how this business operates, and what our scalable growth strategies are? As long as that learning loop is quick, that's…”

“While that can be really good at going fast, a lot of times by going fast, you're not going far because you're not as default biased to keeping the rest of the organization in loop with what a growth team is doing.”

“CEO or the leadership team do not understand the value that growth team is meant to provide and what their Success looks like and what their goals are. It's going to get rejected by the system. There has to be buy-in top-down if you're creating growth team. Ot…”

“So if you see somebody that has ownership desires, that they want stability, they want ability to finish something from very start to the very end, probably not going to be great on your growth team. Your growth team has to be flexible.”

“I think hiring pre-product market fit, big, big mistake. Hiring right after product market fit without actually figuring out how to create some of the traction is a big mistake as well.”

“Any new growth team has to initially rely on intuition or just overall feeling within the company of what needs to be worked on because you don't have data at the beginning.”

“I'll tell you number one mistake, not having data team ready for growth team. So hiring growth team even before you have data analysts or data literacy in your company before you were data informed or hiring growth and not attaching any data analysts into thei…”

“Expecting wins right away. You hire your growth person, your growth team, and then the three months you expect the forecast lift. It's the worst thing that you can do to a growth team in terms of really messing up their onboarding, in terms of them creating th…”

“So really being an enabler, to the company, as opposed to whole source of all of the ideation and the win is the key here in order to create successful relationships with the rest of the teams.”

“I think of growth like One may think about finance at a startup. And what I mean is finance as a startup is responsible for measuring the flow of capital in and out of the business and hopefully contributing ideas to optimizing the flow of that capital, earnin…”

“The stay off my lawn thing is a distinct characteristic of a growth team that has huge impact within a network effects business.”

“I think the most important distinction that a startup has to make as it relates to this question, and really any growth-related question, is are we a network effects business, or are we not a network effects business? And the reason why I think that is critica…”

“Yeah, I usually actually tell people to start junior. The reason why is a couple things. One is, you know, when you hire people who are more senior, they tend to be really, really good at, like, understanding systems, building for scale, like, helping to enabl…”

“And so, you know, sometimes it takes six to nine months to really start making progress if you don't have the right foundation.”

“I do think one of the most important things is to at least think about, well, who can be on their team on day one? I think that's probably one of the most important things. It's like, think about who are the initial people that can be on that growth team with …”

“In the very, very early days, the first thing you need to know about having a growth team, I feel really strongly about this, you should not have a growth team set up the way Facebook does or conceptualize it that way until you have product market fit.”

“None of the people inside that group have any experience doing this. That is like a recipe for complete and utter failure. So I would say most of the time when I see these teams fail, there isn't really anyone who has done, has deep expertise in this sort of t…”

“I think a lot of times teams are trying to think of solving their problem to try and increase growth, but their problem is a power user problem, not a marginal user problem, and they're focused on the wrong people.”

“Ideally, growth owns the product areas, and it's not just kind of a layer on top of core products. So usually growth would have ownership over the core onboarding flow and the monetization flow and maybe the logged out pages, or those might be owned by marketi…”

“Forgiveness, 40% of the time, and then permission 60%. So mostly you should be on board with the team, but occasionally, yeah, you want to be a little bit that loose cannon who delivers amazing results.”

“There's really is like a sweet spot here. To junior. And you just have a bunch of order takers that can't prioritize their way out of a wet paper bag and figure out what they should be doing or to or they've maybe only seen it done one way before. And so they …”

“That's a common, I think failure state where you build something that moves the needle. But the quality is terrible. It looks awful. It's bad for the other team's goals. It's bad for consumers. That's a failure state for growth.”

“I think ideally you want the growth team to own all of the services. That matter the most to growth. That's the ideal state. Senior leader, multi disciplined. They know how to do engineering. They know how to do growth. They know how to do product, and they ha…”

“In a marketing and sales led business where you have a demo trial, you really have the growth teams you find in those businesses sit on marketing and they just run performance marketing. So in the heyday, they were called performance marketing, but growth soun…”

“If you're in a marketing or sales-led business, you do have growth teams, but they predominantly look after performance marketing channels like search paid, paid advertising, affiliate. Like they don't touch the product because it's a marketing sales-led busin…”

“The number one mistake is just not going through that process and just being like, oh, this person was the head of growth at X, Y, and Z. Yeah. They will know what to do. Let's just hire them. No, it's very different. Every single situation, every single compa…”

“Growth really should be renamed to something like value connection. And mean, and while value connection isn't exactly a very sexy term, I do think it defines what growth teams do way better than the term growth does.”

“Not having data team ready for growth team. So hiring growth teaming before you have data analysts or data literacy in your company before you're data informed or hiring growth and not attaching any data analysts into their for you. Because if you do that, wha…”

“And then there's number two, expecting wins right away. You hire your growth person, your growth team, and then the three months you expect the forecast lift where you put assumptions that they didn't drive forecast lifts. It's the worst thing that you can do …”

“We stopped growing in 22,007, and that's why we created the growth team.”

“Generally speaking, I actually don't think most companies need a growth team. Like, growth, again, should be infused throughout the business.”

“I think it's hiring because they need growth, rather than hiring because they have growth.”

“So like we actually, all of those functions within the growth team eventually actually merged back into the core business to where by the time I left, we actually didn't have a centralized growth team anymore.”

“The moment that you're looking for is that the product has a core product market fit, and at least one channel is working for bringing in some new users. It doesn't have to be huge, but it has to be consistent and reliable and stable. If it's not there, to me,…”

“And so when you think about that, if you have a huge team, it is more complex to get anything done because you're having to coordinate across a bunch of people. And so the thing that I look for is, is there, you know, One to four people that can get something …”

“If you're an early stage company, if you're an early stage product, you're looking for something that clearly impacts top line growth. You're not looking for one percent wins. Sometimes not getting a clear signal is a signal in itself. And I think that, you kn…”

“I would say rule of thumb is for growth teams, maybe a 20% batting average. So you'll see metric wins or hit that goal 20% of the time.”

“I think so, especially in early to mid-stage businesses, because the reality is that there is one engineering team that is delivering all changes to the product. And it's important that the quality bar is as high for growth as it is anywhere else in the org. S…”

“In some cases, if you're making a change that's focused on a pretty narrow set of customers, you may never actually get to that significance. It might take months, right? Or even a year. So in general, I worry less about how long to run an experiment and think…”

“We at ramp still, for example, run the growth team, whether it's product or non-product teams as well on a two week sprint cadence.”

“In the early days of growth, you've got kind of a small ragtag team that's throwing a bunch of spaghetti at the wall and seeing what works, right? This works for a bit but it often tends to devolve into undiagnosable chaos. If things aren't working, you have n…”

“Finding product market fit, in my opinion, is the founder's primary job. It is not something that you outsource to a growth team.”

“Either too senior or too junior for the given problem that they have. Too senior being like, you know, if you've got a three person growth team, like don't hire a VP level person because you actually need somebody that can really coach people and get into the …”

“And if you look at a team like Reamp, these days, with like, 10, 15 people on the growth team, they ship about 200 experiments per quarter.”

“The biggest mistake that I see happen in growth teams is they undertake an experiment without assessing the cost, the effort or the audience size. And often I ask, can we reach statistical significance here? Is the audience big enough for us to be able to lear…”

“My budget? It's my head count, and it's the time allocation of my head count. My constraint, generally, is how many experiments can my small team ship, right?”

“I'd love for that to be true. I have learned that I'm wrong. And that is rarely the case. The local effects of the world are the exception, truly, right? It generally rolls into, like, either product or marketing, more rarely to revenue but I would love for th…”

“Ideally you instill it around the org. I have never seen a place where that is a success yet.”

“The biggest mistake that I see is that they start very, very late if the PMF is very strong. I've seen a lot of companies that have a very strong product market fit. And because of that, in the beginning, they just start getting a lot of revenue because big co…”

“One thing, for example, that we've done To make growth people be competitive is build dashboards similar to what you do with account executives, where instead of having a quota, you actually have growth person and how much pipeline they created. And you get th…”

“I think the answer at an earliest stage of your growth, I think they should be a standalone team. I think it's for two reasons. One is I think it's the, is for the best practices, meaning that they can learn from each other and then they can go solve problems …”

“Growth teams have numbers, but they should not be micro optimizing those numbers. They should be really much changing the product in meaningful ways to get to that next. Like step function level of what we can, what can drive growth.”

“And on the other hand, because it's a weekly cadence, it pushes the pace. You're like, we have our meeting on Monday. I need to have my experiments done by then. And, you know, the cadence of experimentation and learning is critical.”

“I think there needs to be a part of it that's in person. A lot of it is really solitary, a lot of it is almost like coding, like spending time with data, Talking to customers, making sense of interviews, refining and designing creative, setting up experiments.…”

“When you have a larger company, it needs to stand outside. It needs to be cross-functional and diverse, because growth people have a fundamentally different orientation, different approach to life than other groups, but they need to have really good relationsh…”

“I think the way I like it I like it to work is that the product team builds the end, build the variety engine, and growth operates it. So you build something that is that you can parameter, you know, with parameters, and then you let growth play with it, you k…”

“I honestly, that's one of the reasons why I love ramp is the growth team reports to one of the co-founders.”

“I think my personal opinion is I think growth should be independent. I think like the growth team's mandate should be to figure out how to grow the business. And that should be more than just marketing. It should be more than just product. It should mean that …”