I’ve had many discussions with founders and growth leaders about how growth can be most effective within a company. After drawing this idea repeatedly on whiteboards for founders, I decided it was time to document and share it. Here’s how I envision growth as an organization wide approach.
Anyone who raises venture capital recognizes the need to grow fast. Founders forecast dramatic and exciting results and then overpromise them in return for cash. As they get their startup gets some traction, they think “I should probably hire a growth person.”
Later on, that growth person hires more people and they become a Growth Team. In another part of the company, there’s a Product Team and probably a Marketing Team and an Engineering Team and a Design Team. Many teams on many missions.
The problem is that growth should be one, unified mission.
What seems to happen is that the Growth Team sets up its own infrastructure and hires its own people and does its own “growth thing” and hits roadblocks elsewhere in the company from people who “don’t get growth” and they end up running a few Facebook ad campaigns and changing a few buttons from blue to green and calling it growth.
I think there’s a better way to make growth effective.
What if growth was a skillset that was spread throughout a company? What if growth was embedded alongside other disciplines?
Here’s where metric teams come in.
Metrics Teams
Starting at a high level, you would organize responsibility by metric (a.k.a. the returns you want to drive). Each team would still need to collaborate with other metric teams but they could work across the product in any way that drives their one clear goal. For now, I’ll name these teams after the Pirate Metrics framework:
- Acquisition
- Activation
- Revenue
- Retention
- Referral
To figure out which of these metrics teams you need, break down your OKRs or the numbers you’re presenting at board meetings. If you’re focused on weekly active users, you need a retention team. If you’re focused on sign ups and conversions to paid, you might need acquisition, activation and revenue teams. You can break these down more granularly too. For Lyft, maybe there’s a “driver activation team” and a “rider activation team.” You’d also need respective retention teams too.
Below that, you would create cross-functional teams laser focused on projects that drive that metric. A team that is aiming at one goal will be more successful than a team aiming at three.
“Growth is not just a concern of sales and marketing, but of product, engineering and support too. It is this organization-wide commitment to growth that ultimately sets these companies apart.”
— Sean Ellis
Focus Teams
To identify what these teams should work on, convene an entire metric team (e.g. Retention Team) to identify the biggest potential opportunities. What are some areas that could return big wins? Then, break into task force teams that can focus on those.
Rather than have a feed team and a profiles team, those team members can aim to get people creating higher quality articles that can keep people coming back for more. They can be free to achieve that goal anywhere in the product and they are not in a deadly hamster-wheel of pointless JIRA tickets. And when they are done, they can disband and be put on the next high priority project that will drive growth.
Growth Skills on Each Team
The key to these teams is that growth is embedded on each team. It might also be possible to have Growth Leads for each metric area (almost as advisors) but the most effective growth seems to happen when it’s in the hands of the makers.
Each team needs the following skills:
- Growth Lead (this could be a person solely focused on growth or it could be a role that is held by one of the below disciplines)
- Product
- Design
- Engineering
- Any additional functions that make sense like Content Strategy or QA or Support
Growth Leads tend to be Product Managers but I see big benefits in opening that role up. You get new ideas and new approaches based on the discipline lens.
Where This Model Might Breakdown
I know what you’re thinking — not everyone at your company is focused on growth.
For functions that are truly not a part of growth, like perhaps HR or office management, they can still keep their original set up. There’s no reason to move people around if they’re meeting their goals.
If you decide you still need — what some companies call — the “lights on team,” consider that even that work could be organized by metric. Perhaps you don’t need a growth lead on every team but every team should be driving towards a goal. If they’re keeping the lights on, they’re making money so that’s either revenue or retention. They should be well integrated with anyone else growing those metrics rather than in a sad basement somewhere applying for new jobs on LinkedIn.
Just Focus
There’s no reason to be dogmatic about how the teams are set up. The main idea is to focus people on explicit, singular goals and to give them the freedom to determine how they achieve that goal. There is added benefit in moving people around so they can bring fresh thinking to opportunities.
I’ve seen this model be effective on smaller teams and would love to see more companies experimenting with how their organization structure benefits or hinders growth. The more focused you are, the better results you’ll see.
If you’re interested in growth, check out the Designing for Growth Facebook Group or find me on Twitter @calexity.
