Getting Started with Growth Management Part 3

Getting Started with Growth Management Part 3

In the final part of our growth management series, we address the organizational and cultural elements that determine whether a growth function thrives or withers. Part 1 and Part 2 covered the foundational concepts, processes, and systems. This installment focuses on the human side: executive support, cross-functional alignment, and the cultural conditions that make sustained growth possible. Process and methodology matter, but without the right organizational support, even the best growth team will struggle to deliver results.

Executive Sponsorship

Growth initiatives that lack executive sponsorship rarely succeed long-term. The growth team needs a senior leader who champions their work, removes organizational blockers, and ensures that growth remains a strategic priority. Without this support, the team's experiments get deprioritized in favor of other initiatives, engineering resources get pulled to other projects, and momentum is lost.

The executive sponsor does not need to manage the growth team day-to-day. Their role is to provide air cover: protecting the team's resources, advocating for the growth agenda in leadership meetings, and ensuring that the rest of the organization understands why the growth function matters. The most effective sponsors are those who understand the experiment-driven nature of growth work and can communicate its value in terms that resonate with other executives.

Cross-Functional Alignment

Growth work by definition crosses departmental boundaries. The growth team needs to run experiments that touch marketing, product, engineering, sales, and customer success. Without alignment between these functions, the growth team faces constant friction that slows down experimentation and limits impact.

• Ensure the growth team has direct access to engineering resources for building and running experiments. Shared engineering resources that are frequently pulled to other projects are a common bottleneck.
• Align growth objectives with product and marketing goals to avoid conflicting priorities. If the growth team is optimizing for one metric while the product team is optimizing for another, experiments will conflict and neither team will achieve its goals.
• Create regular communication channels between the growth team and other departments. Weekly or bi-weekly growth reviews where results are shared with stakeholders build understanding and support.
• Celebrate wins publicly to build organizational support for the growth function. When the broader organization sees the impact of growth experiments, they become more willing to support future initiatives.
• Establish clear protocols for how the growth team requests and coordinates work with other departments to reduce friction and prevent surprises.

Building a Culture of Experimentation

The cultural dimension of growth management is often underestimated. A growth team operating within a risk-averse, permission-heavy culture will always underperform compared to one embedded in an organization that values learning, tolerates failure, and moves quickly. Building this culture requires intentional effort from leadership.

Start by reframing how the organization thinks about failure. In growth work, a failed experiment is not a failure. It is a successful generation of knowledge. If the experiment was well-designed and the results are clearly documented, the team learned something valuable even if the hypothesis was wrong. Celebrate the learning, not just the wins.

Scaling the Growth Function

As your growth practice matures, you will face decisions about how to scale it. Some companies build a central growth team that serves the entire organization. Others embed growth capabilities within individual product teams. Still others adopt a hybrid model with a central growth team that sets standards and provides expertise while individual teams run their own experiments.

The right structure depends on your company's size, culture, and strategic priorities. What matters most is that growth remains a dedicated function with clear ownership, consistent processes, and the resources needed to drive results. Whichever model you choose, maintain the core principles: structured experimentation, data-driven decision making, cross-functional collaboration, and a commitment to continuous learning.