MIA #03: Building a Growth Team & Executing a Growth Motion (+ Template)
MIA #03: Building a Growth Team & Executing a Growth Motion (+ Template)
A practical guide to structuring your growth team, and executing Product Led, Sales Led or Hybrid GTM motions.
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🔗 ICYMI: In our last issue, we talked about how to find and hire a growth marketer. Read it here:
Now the truth is that hiring a Growth Marketer will not solve all your Growth or Marketing problems.
Hiring a Growth Marketer is a great first step, but it's not a magic bullet. Just like any other role, a Growth Marketer needs the right support and structure to succeed. That's where building a growth team and establishing a growth process come in.
A single hire, no matter how skilled, cannot substitute for a well-structured growth team and a strategic growth process. Growth requires a collaborative effort, integrating various functions such as product development, customer success, and data analysis.
It's about creating a culture that continuously experiments, learns, and adapts. Without the proper infrastructure and team dynamics, even the most talented Growth Marketer will struggle to deliver sustainable results.
Have you ever been in a position where you were expected to magically drive growth without team alignment and resource support? I’d love to hear your story in the comments!
Growth vs Marketing vs Growth Marketing vs Growth Hacking
Growth—Growth focuses on optimizing the entire customer funnel, integrating marketing, product, and engineering to influence metrics like daily active users, customer lifetime value, and annual recurring revenue.
Marketing—Marketing traditionally focuses on the top of the funnel, such as awareness and acquisition. Marketing teams typically aim for metrics like leads, signups, and new users, using strategies in content, paid acquisition, PR, etc.
Growth Marketing—Growth marketing combines the principles of traditional marketing with a focus on rapid experimentation across various channels and product features. It's data-driven, aiming to find the most efficient ways to drive revenue growth.
Growth Hacking—Growth hacking is a subset of growth marketing, emphasizing creative, low-cost strategies to acquire and retain customers. It often involves unconventional methods and a strong focus on data and metrics to quickly test and iterate on growth ideas.
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Here’s a table that summarizes these terms:
How to Build a Growth Team
Brian Balfour, Julian Shapiro, Elena Verna, Emily Kramer & Kathleen Estreich all share similar thoughts about building a growth team and hiring for growth roles.
I have distilled some of these ideas here:
First, Identify your Go-To-Market (GTM) motion
Your GTM motion is the distinct approach you can adopt to drive a growth strategy, i.e. the major channels you use to acquire and retain customers.
Your GTM might fall into one of these categories:
Product-Led GTM
Sales-Led GTM
Hybrid GTM
The MKT1 duo, Emily Kramer & Kathleen Estreich depicted these motions accurately here:
Second, Define your Growth Team
Your growth team should be cross-functional, encompassing skills in product, engineering, marketing, sales, and data to execute your growth strategy.
It is the responsibility of the founders and company leadership to structure a growth organization and foster a growth mindset. Need a hand? Get templates here.
A growth mindset is typically centered around four tenets:
Learning: Constant learning of your customers, product, and channels, and feeding that learning into the growth process to improve.
Rhythm: Momentum is powerful. Establish a cadence to fight through failures, get to successes, and find momentum.
Autonomy: Individuals decide what they work on to achieve the OKRs.
Accountability: With autonomy comes accountability. Team members are responsible for their decisions and outcomes.
There are a few ways to structure a Growth Team:
Cross-Functional Team Structure
The Growth Team is a set of pods, with members from various departments. You might have a Growth PM who reports to Product and a Growth Marketer who reports to Marketing, and altogether they make up the growth team.
Independent Team Structure
Led by a VP of growth, the growth function is an independent team from others. This team operates autonomously, focusing solely on growth initiatives without direct ties to other departments.
Mixed Team Structure
Led by a growth leader, VP, or Head of Growth, the growth team collaborates closely with other departments while maintaining some level of autonomy. This structure allows for cross-departmental collaboration while ensuring a dedicated focus on growth objectives.
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In our next issue, we take a deep dive into how to build a growth process that sets the foundation for a growth machine that is scalable, predictable, and repeatable.
TL: DR
Get a PDF summary of this article here.
Hiring a Growth Marketer will not solve all your Growth or Marketing problems.
There is a difference between Growth, Marketing, Growth Marketing, and Growth Hacking.
Growth requires collaboration across product, engineering, marketing, sales, and data teams.
First, Identify your Go-To-Market (GTM) motion—Product Led, Sales Led, and Hybrid GTM.
Second, Define your Growth Team—cross-functional, with skills in product, engineering, marketing, sales, and data to execute your growth strategy.
Third, Build a Growth Process that is scalable, predictable, and repeatable.
Was this helpful? Hit that ❤️ and let me know your thoughts in the comments! Want to see more of this content? Restack this post (if you're on Substack) and share it with your friends!
You might find these interesting:
How to Setup a Growth Team for Maximum Impact — How to structure and manage a growth team, focusing on prioritizing impactful opportunities over mere activity.
Growth at Dropbox — How Dropbox structures its growth team.
How to build a Growth Team — Lessons from Uber, Hubspot, and others on the best structure for a Growth Organization.
Hiring within our network:
Head of Marketing at Doist
Chief Marketing Officer at Monkey Tilt
CRO Growth Marketer & Project Manager at Donorbox
Demand Generation Manager at Deel
Product & Partner Recommendations:
James Praise — I partner with founders and marketing teams of Product-Led startups to drive long-term growth using SEO, Performance Marketing, Product Marketing, and Lifecycle Marketing, from acquisition to retention to revenue.
Clay — Clay combines 50+ data providers, real-time scraping, AI, and outbound workflows, so you can send automated, 1-1 personalized campaigns (and book more meetings than your sales team).
Testimonial — Testimonial makes it easy to collect text and video testimonials from your customers in minutes, with no need for a developer or website hosting.
TL:DV — tl;dv helps you (finally) get value from meetings across the organization. Record, transcribe, summarize, generate & automate meeting insights valuable to you and your organization.
Synthesia — Synthesia is the #1 AI Video Creation Platform that enables you to create professional videos without mics, cameras, actors, or studios.
If you want to collaborate or feature your product in this newsletter, shoot me an email.
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