How to put together your Growth Team
Last Updated on February 7, 2022 by justin
We at Growth Hackers Sthlm usually recommend small, fast tests, on a small scale. Virtually no matter what. It is therefore no wonder that it is also our recommendation when it comes to how you should think when putting together a Growth Team.
A Growth Team is always a multidisciplinary team of people with different skills.
Why a Growth Team?
The idea with Growth Teams is to continuously appoint representatives from both Market, Product and Technology Development, but also e.g. Sales, Design and Customer Service in the same room. And then get them to search together for the answer to a single question: How can we increase our growth? (with the mandate to actually do something about it too – this is important! A toothless growth team loses heart quickly and becomes just a cost item)
What happens when we do this is that we escape the silo thought. And achieves synergy effects. When Sales and Marketing start talking to each other, and have the same end goal, the Marketing department stops pulling in as many leads as possible to the sellers, and instead focuses on pulling in the kind of leads that convert best. Which leads to growth.
And when Product and Customer Service start talking to each other, Customer Service stops focusing on how to get faster answers to questions about the website, and instead gives the Product Team enough meat on their bones to be able to make the website so good that those questions never set again. Which also leads to growth.
Find your growth hackers
So start by finding the right people. They may be fearless innovators, but more important is that they are key people in the business who have the mandate to make decisions. Because it is only then that you really get rid of the silo thinking and the long lead times. They must not be afraid to argue for their cause as it will be different wills with different backgrounds that meet.
This is when you can do many, small, fast experiments that increase growth. Experiments so small that they are ready in just a couple of days, so that everyone in the Growth team can see the growth in the data from week to week in your dashboard in the Growth meeting, and decide on new experiments based on that. It will be a good circle of “wins” that gives a hard-hitting momentum and commitment. It is important that you are prepared to roll up your sleeves when something needs to be done because there is no one else who will do what a growth team comes up with, a common growth killer is that the team gets stuck in ideation and nothing is done.
It’s no coincidence that companies that have grown big, such as Uber, AirBnB, Facebook and Google, were all out early with action-packed Growth Teams. Give it a try and be aware that it must take some time to change a way of working. You will not regret it.