Growth Team

“We're roughly maybe 40 people now”

“Probably the things that are maybe different is that we, I think that we index a lot more towards larger swings as opposed to smaller optimizations. Like if I think about a traditional growth team, I would have probably done maybe 60, 70% of my time on small t…”

“And I think that the reason why growth team is, is, is the advice I would go with rather than to build an analytics team is because if you build an analytics team or a data science team, it's possible that no one's going to listen to them. Right. It's like, oh…”

“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 …”

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

“You do not need growth teams until you actually can start running experiments on your user base, which means that you have volume of users that you can learn from and optimize and innovate on. And that first wave of growth has to be a founder led.”

“So I think any growth team that does not have an advisor is a growth team that is underperforming”

“It's my rule of thumb. If we cannot collect the sample size in the month, we shouldn't test it. Period.”

“However, just removing steps or yanking or simplifying things to an oblivion where you lose an identity of what you even do or what you're capable of doing is a completely failed growth tactic. So simplifying may be an initiative of a different problem that yo…”

“Chamath Palihapitiya... This was Chamath's big thing before Growth. And actually, the epic failure here of Beacon leads directly to growth, as we shall see in a sec.”

“They go from like just barely getting to a hundred million users in August of 2008 to almost a hundred and fifty million by the end of the year. So 50% growth in the last four months of the year. And then 2009 is just like lights out. They grow 250% in 2009 to…”

“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 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.…”

“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.”

“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…”

“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.”

“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 …”

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

“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…”

“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…”

“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…”

“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…”

“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?”

“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.”

“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…”

“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.”

“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 …”

“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…”

“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.”

“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…”

“Revenue is for better or worse, more important for the company, but also much further down the, you know, line whether or not the growth team can impact that.”

“The way I think about the growth team's journey is, like, step one is, like, build a system that can move fast, And then like work on improving the quality and then work on, you know, optimization of costs after. So similarly, you pick which phase you're on be…”

“Our team at Dropbox moved a ton. Actually, we started marketing. We actually then report into the revenue org with sales, and then we finally moved into product because we realized so much of our revenue was that product growth motion happening in the product …”

“When I think about growth, I don't think about a specific, it's not growth equals SEO and Instagram. For me, growth equals whatever it takes to move the needle. So I get this question all the time. How do you build a growth team? What does a growth team do? An…”

“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…”

“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 …”

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

“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.”

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

“Any growth team that's beholden to short timeline wins and improvement is always going to be dangerous. That's a, that's an environment that's conducive to vanity metric usage and fabric, you know, massaging the data to fit.”

“I think it's good, especially for newer teams, but even teams in general commit, commit to something that you can kind of do over the course of a year and, you know, low, medium, high, right.”

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

“You can't start a startup with a growth team mindset, because that is just scalable things all the time. And really what you need to go back to is doing things that don't scale and unscale your way of thinking about customers. But it's really useful to have th…”

“Generally my advice is to experiment when you need to, and to primarily see it as a risk mitigation tactic when you're making dramatic changes and to let the product development process do more work.”

“It's important that growth teams are agile. And this means that north stars, key metrics, focus metrics will change. And if you're working on the same metric forever, there's probably some inefficiency in actually chasing the biggest impact for the business.”

“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 …”

“Teams in growth need to work differently in some ways from R and D teams working on core product, assuming otherwise, and just giving growth responsibility to an existing team without working with them. To implement appropriate ways of working, I think it's a …”

“And if I had to pick one meeting that is the most important in the growth team, it would be this.”

“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.”

“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…”

“A lot of these startups I see in PLG, almost all of them actually, put their growth teams in marketing, and I think that's an opportunity because all of the best-in-class ones put their growth team in product.”

“And what happens if you put your growth team in marketing is you won't have any engineers. I've never had met an engineer whose career goal was to work in marketing. Like, no offense, right? It's just, like, not what they want to do. And so, if you have your g…”

“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…”

“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…”

“A growth team can go terribly wrong when they just try to like onboard a bunch of brand new tools that don't integrate well. And it takes six months to integrate fully. And then they get nothing done for six months. Like everything in growth is an opportunity …”

“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…”

“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.”