Building a growth team is an important step to take after launching a product. The team will focus on finding growth opportunities together, implement them and measure the results.
The team’s structure may vary according to the resources available. For example, startups do not usually have as many resources to spare as big companies, and no time to build a big team. So it is essential to measure every single step and implement efficient hacks.
So, what should be the structure of a growth team? According to Sean Ellis, there are some key members of the team that play different roles in helping a company to grow. In this post, we describe the desired profiles for a well-structured growth team.
- Growth lead
It is important to have someone in charge of the entire team, preferably someone close to the decision-making process to simplify implementation as a whole and to prioritise tasks.
In a startup, the CEO may be in charge of this role, on contrast to big companies where the growth lead is usually someone with the power to assign different tasks and change some parts of the roadmap so as to make the whole process more agile.
The growth lead will define goals, measure results, enthusiastically suggest hacks, report directly to managers, and conduct growth meetings.
- Marketing
Someone from the marketing department should always be on hand, as most of the techniques used are focused on experimentation in the various layers of the marketing funnel.
The funnel needs to be well structured and clear, making it mandatory to check each and every little step that the customer takes so as to study their behaviour and figure out the best way to acquire new customers and retain existing ones.
The type of marketing specialist to include on the team will vary according to the type and level of development of the company.
- UX/UI
A lot of hacks need UX/UI designers to implement or suggest visual changes. Some simple things such as adjusting the way actions are presented to the user or moving a few components from one place to another may make retention rates increase exponentially.
Most of the time, users will not navigate as expected. A/B testing is a valuable tool to verify the effectiveness of previously implemented hacks.
- Developers
It is very important that the people responsible for the implementation of a specific feature understand why they are doing it and the benefits for the overall quality of the product.
Developers are more familiar with the product than anyone else and may have valuable insights and hacks to try out.
- Product manager
The main reason for a product manager to attend the meetings is their overview of the state of product development and power to schedule important new tasks that may have a high priority.
The roadmap may need to be reorganised to take account any new requirements and ideas that come up. In some startups, this role is played by the founder.
- Data scientist
Maybe the most important role of this specific team is to measure and report the data collected, helping lead to rational and reasonable decisions. In the ideal scenario, there is a data scientist assigned full time to the team.
The insights provided by this element of the team are extremely valuable and should not be undervalued as all steps taken following an experiment should take into account data from previous ones.
There are further things to take into consideration, such as the importance of using updated growth hacking techniques (which we have previously written about),different ways to organise meetings, and strategies to build an effective growth plan (to be discussed here in future).
Building a growth team from scratch may be a challenging task as you need time to bring together the right people and allocate suitable resources to the tasks, but it will definitely boost your business.
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