What Is A Growth Team?

About ten years ago, the first growth team was made by Facebook. It was a time when Facebook had nearly fifty million active monthly users and flat growth. This move not only turned Facebook into the giant that it has become today but also highlighted the significance of having a proper growth team.

And, right now, Google, Pinterest, Airbnb, and Uber have one thing in common: successful growth teams.

As such, a growth team has kind of become the favorite buzzword of the tech industry. But it would be wrong to consider this as just another passing trend. The usefulness shown by the growth teams makes their importance in a company pretty evident.

On that note, let’s get to know a bit more about what growth teams are all about.

What Exactly Is a Growth Team?

Before explaining what a growth team is, it’s important to get the facts straight about what it is not. It isn’t an umbrella term that describes any team having the responsibility of customer acquisition and reducing churn rates.

Though growth might be the shared task and a goal for a number of teams, it is one of their many priorities. Thus, it makes sense for the businesses to get together a proper team whose sole focus is growth. And that’s where a growth team comes into the picture.

In the words of Bruno, Growth leader at Webflow, “Growth team is a multidisciplinary team with individuals across marketing, product, engineering, design, and data. This team is responsible for acquiring the right users and making sure these users are experiencing core product value as often as possible.”

There is no denying the role of several teams, and all employees are helping the business attain a particular success level. Growth teams are here to figure the when and how of taking matters to the next stage. They focus on plans for increasing revenue and customer acquisition and retention in a strategic and sustainable way.

In most cases, growth teams get tasked with taking a product that’s already working and expanding its value and customer base through data-informed and rapid experimentation.

The Reason behind the Need for Growth Teams

Having a growth team can be beneficial for every company. You will have a better understanding of how true the previous statement is once you consider the primary goals and functions of growth teams.

Outlining and achieving the growth primacies:

Growth teams help to drive user acquisition and bring down churn rates. They execute the vision of the senior management and optimize varied aspects of the business to ensure the holistic growth of revenue.

Maintaining the practice of precise data management:

Proper data management is the key to continued experimentation and analysis. This is the reason why the growth teams generally select and integrate testing tools and analytics in the overall technological framework of the company.

Asking the right questions and finding the answers:

Growth teams get deep into the customer insights to figure out the reason why users tend to drop off at different stages of the sales funnel. They probe customer lapses and engagement reduction. In this way, the priorities of the product team are set by the answers found by the growth team.

All in all, growth teams can offer the much-needed impetus to growth that a company needs in order to taste success.

The Place of Growth Teams in a Company

Where exactly does a growth team fit in the entire organizational chart of the company? Well, there are no set rules or ways to demarcate that. As such, three common scenarios are noted regarding the position of the growth teams.

In the product team:

A majority of the companies have their growth teams inside a bigger product team. Many of the leading brands start off with a separate growth team. But these teams eventually end up becoming a part of the main product teams in the companies.

As a separate entity:

The second most common scenario is where growth teams stay as a separate organization within the company. Though Facebook uses this method, it’s not something that works for all companies.

In the marketing team:

The rest of the companies have the growth teams as a part of the bigger marketing teams. Because user acquisition is typically the responsibility of the marketing teams, growth teams often come under this particular reporting chain. In this case, the growth leader has to report to the chief marketing officer of the company.

If you consider the growth team as a separate entity, it comprises many roles handled by different individuals. The first and foremost role gets played by the growth product managers, and their team comprises growth designers, growth marketers, growth data scientists, and growth engineers.

Does Your Company Need A Growth Team Now?

Having a growth team surely sounds like a great idea, and every company can benefit from it. But the right time to get a dedicated growth team is after your company shows the ability to retain customers and has a track record of keeping the acquired customers.

Furthermore, if you want to change how your company approaches growth, getting a dedicated team to make that happen would be a good idea. In the conventional approach to growth, the company looks for reasons after the growth stops. But a growth team takes a more continuous approach to the process.

The growth team starts by formulating hypotheses for testing out and starts the test. The results of the test get analyzed, and the company takes the right measure. Then, another hypothesis gets formulated and tested, instead of waiting for the previous spurt of growth to slow down.

Signing off

There is no doubt about the fact that the new and improved approach undertaken by growth teams is more effective than the conventional ways. So, if your business is steadily scaling upwards and you don’t have a growth team yet, it’s high time to hire a competent one. Let that growth curve only point upwards from here on.