You need someone who can explain the subtleties of growth from idea to action. A growth hacking agency and a growth champion could be a VP of growth, VP of marketing, or even CEO of a small start-up. Regardless of the title, you need someone who leads the team and has more product experience than someone who works as a designer or engineer.  

When the talent pool for good growth engineers is small, top growth teams often hire people without growth experience, and that is fine as long as effective training is provided.  

In addition, good growth designers balance user experience metrics with profits to deliver a good product. The type of designer you want for growth is specific to how you want them to implement many small design projects and enjoy working on several large ones, given the project length of most growth teams. There is no perfect composition of growth teams, and different companies need different types of teams to implement their unique strategies.  

One of the main pain points of this model is the silo approach, with each team pushing for its own specific growth. Let’s take a closer look at how to structure growth teams for startups and businesses. Startups and companies have different objectives, so it makes sense for their growth teams to be structured to serve those objectives and not affect productivity.  

When growth hacking agencies and teams work on growth in the first few days, they find product / market fit (PMF). The cross-functional nature of such teams builds a growth mentality throughout the organization. As organizations evolve and structure different teams responsible for KPIs, a culture of growth is more important than ever to drive scale.  

The KPIs they work on – Lead Signups, Daily Active Users (DAU), Conversion Rates, and LTV – focus on growth improvements, but only work individually and in parallel. The growth team looks at the whole funnel to see how overall growth can be improved and how each part of the funnel can be influenced.  

The teams at growth hacking agencies are not just marketers, designers, product managers, engineers and data analysts. They also ensure that the core product experience that users use is the most efficient way forward. Their growth team needs to understand the people they need to speak to and what they do best.  

However, growth teams often focus on improving existing features rather than adding additional ones. The latter is often the reason why growth teams focus more on improving an existing feature than on adding an additional one.  

Building a team that can sustain growth and grow your business is a tricky business. Some start-ups approach hiring a growth team as if they were hiring a regular departmental team, such as sales.  

There is a lot of talk about growth hacking and quick tricks, but it is difficult to build a growth team that is focused on long-term success. It doesn’t matter in what industry you are in, how much you love quick solutions or what experience you have taught me – you need to use common sense to build your growth team. The structure you build for your business depends on who you are, your life cycle and your size.  

Evaluate every stage of the business and decide how many growth-oriented teams you need. Adjust your team to success with the right goals, effective growth indicators, and support from leaders and key stakeholders.  

One way to view growth from a company’s point of view is to place it at the center of the universe, but depending on what part of your business you are in, you may find that growth teams overlap with them. If you have a growth team reporting to a functional manager such as Marketing or Product, the easiest way to achieve a unique growth goal is to have clear and unambiguous responsibilities. This not only increases the potential for downsizing on the road, but also involves departments involved in marketing and related activities.  

The growth process only occurs when you have a solid product on the market. Once you have found a market that suits your product, you can enlist the help of a growth team to use data analysis, qualitative research and experimentation to understand what discourages people from buying and using your product, and how your business can reduce friction.  

By communicating new solutions to your growth marketers, you ensure that your growth team has the necessary number of users to test hypotheses and to make data-driven decisions. Customer satisfaction creates a company that invests in maintaining customer needs.  

Marketing at the top of the funnel involves examining the impact of individual advertising channels on performance metrics such as lead traffic, e-mails, opt-ins and sales. In the past, marketing teams focused on the top of the funnel by measuring impressions, thought shares and leads.  

Modern industry leaders such as Uber and Facebook have adopted hybrid practices, with marketers, engineers, analysts, and product designers working hand in hand to add value to the organization. Other companies such as Uber, Airbnb and Slack have started separate growth teams and merged them into product teams.  

Advocates of this approach often point out that it is critical that product and growth teams are in the same organization. Growth teams can experiment and make subtle changes to the product to spur growth, and that becomes even more important on a scale.  

In other cases, they may have a dedicated team or multiple dedicated growth teams in growth hacking agencies. Discuss whether multiple roles should be covered by a single employee, or if a few people should do the same job. If the company’s marketing team is responsible for user acquisition and the associated budget, it should be the standard department within the growth team.  

The idea came from several sources: interviews and discussions with people who lead growth teams in places like Slack, Dropbox, HubSpot, Pinterest and others as well as my own personal experiences at Uber. Teams should focus on making a difference in the first few days. The difference in the skills of individual practitioners within an org can be between functions such as product and marketing.  

In the Y Combinators Continuity Team, I get a lot of questions from founders about formalizing growth. Everybody is eager to understand how to recruit a dedicated Growth Product Manager ( PM ) and how to structure a growth team to grow over time.  

Growth is the most misunderstood and unknown function in most companies. Beyond the basic distinctions between growth, product, and marketing, there is a lot of confusion about what a growth team looks like.