How to Structure a Growth Team

3 min readJan 24, 2019

Originally part of The Growth Weekly, my weekly newsletter on product growth.

The vision is clear and you know what you’ll be working on for the next period. But how do you organise for succes?

Deciding on team(s)

Hopefully, you’ve been quite ambitious while setting your objectives. They probably fall in one (or more) of these categories:

Acquire New Users
Onboarding New Users
Retaining Users

Depending on your company’s size and growth ambitions, you’ll be able to either build one growth team to attain these goals or have a separate team for each.

Although all these individuals / teams should work together, here are some tips on divisions of labour and roles.

The Acquisition Team

Bringing in new users, you’ll either need a (Digital) Marketer that knows different channels or hire an expert / freelancers for the different subdomains. (SEO, SEA, Media Buying, PR, …)

Make sure they have access to Design and Engineering resources. They’ll need to build landing pages, creative visuals and so on. The messaging used by the Marketers will be heavily influenced by the Product Team.

The Onboarding Team

In order to have the best possible new user experience, you’ll need a very decent Product Designer. Together with the Product Manager, he will be own all the flows within your product.

Often, some of the most intriguing ideas here come from the Engineering team. Smart decisions on architecture can result in a way better functioning product or lead to new features.

The Retention Team

This will probably be the most diverse team. The Product Team will be deciding on the actions needed here. Whether it would be user-testing, creating a communication strategy or a/b-testing for feature usage.

The Product Team

A close trio existing of a Product Manager, Data Scientist and Team Lead should take ownership about the product metrics and roadmap.

The Product Manager should know the user’s needs inside-out. The Data Scientist will be fueling the other teams’ dashboards combined with both explorative and directional data analysis. The Team Lead will make sure everyone has access to the necessary resources.