Dan McGaw: You Only Need One Growth Team

Dan McGaw: You Only Need One Growth Team

Dan McGaw is a vocal advocate for centralized growth teams. His core argument is that splitting growth responsibilities across multiple departments leads to duplication, misalignment, and slower learning. One focused, cross-functional growth team produces better results than several fragmented efforts because it maintains a unified view of the customer journey and can optimize for total business growth rather than departmental metrics.

The Problem with Distributed Growth

According to McGaw, the problem with distributed growth efforts is that each team optimizes for its own metrics without considering the full customer journey. Marketing optimizes for leads, product optimizes for engagement, and sales optimizes for deals, but nobody owns the complete picture. A single growth team that spans these functions can optimize for what actually matters: overall business growth.

The consequences of distributed growth extend beyond suboptimal metrics. Teams working in isolation often run conflicting experiments, duplicate each other's work, and miss opportunities that exist at the boundaries between departments. The accumulated learning from experiments is scattered across teams, preventing the kind of institutional knowledge building that drives compounding growth over time.

The Case for Centralization

A centralized growth team eliminates these problems by creating a single unit that sees and owns the entire customer lifecycle. Our guide to organizational design for growth explores different structural models. When one team is responsible for acquisition, activation, retention, and revenue, they naturally make trade-offs that optimize for the whole rather than the parts. They can identify when improving activation is more valuable than acquiring more users, or when investing in retention has a higher return than expanding to new channels.

Centralization also accelerates learning. When all experiments are run by one team, insights from acquisition experiments inform retention strategies, and patterns discovered in one part of the funnel are applied to others. This cross-pollination of ideas and insights is one of the most powerful advantages of a centralized approach.

How to Structure It

• The growth team should include members from marketing, product, engineering, and data, ensuring all the skills needed for end-to-end experimentation are available within the team.
• Give the team a clear mandate and the autonomy to run experiments across the full funnel, from acquisition through retention and monetization.
• Use a shared set of metrics that the entire team is accountable for. These should reflect total business growth, not just individual functional metrics.
• Hold weekly growth meetings where the team reviews results, shares learnings, and prioritizes next steps. This cadence creates accountability and ensures continuous momentum.
• Maintain a single, unified experiment backlog that covers all stages of the customer lifecycle.

Making It Work

The key to a successful centralized growth team is executive support and clear interfaces with other departments. The growth team should not operate in a vacuum. It needs to collaborate closely with product, sales, and customer success. But having a single team that owns the growth process ensures consistency, speed, and a holistic view of what drives the business forward.

McGaw acknowledges that centralization requires organizational buy-in and can face resistance from departments that are accustomed to owning their own growth metrics. The most effective approach is to start small, prove results, and gradually expand the team's scope. See our guide to building your growth team for practical advice on getting started as it earns organizational trust and support.