How to Set Up, Hire, and Scale a Growth Strategy and Team: Growth, Hiring, KPI - The End Goal: Growth is in the Company's DNA

How to Set Up, Hire, and Scale a Growth Strategy and Team: Growth, Hiring, KPI - The End Goal: Growth is in the Company's DNA

In today's competitive business landscape, companies are constantly looking for ways to accelerate their growth trajectory. While success cannot be attributed to the growth team alone, having a growth team in place early on helps accelerate the overall growth trajectory of the company. Facebook is a prime example of how a growth team can drive rapid expansion. They launched their growth team when they had around 50 million monthly active users and saw their user base skyrocket to 2 billion monthly active users today.

However, it's best not to hire a full-fledged growth team until you've ensured you don't have a "leaky bucket" problem. In other words, it's crucial to make sure that your long-term retention is stable and parallel to the x-axis. This can be done by benchmarking your retention against companies in your specific vertical. For example, if you are a social network, a stable long-term retention of 10% would be considered poor. It's important to determine whether newer cohorts are performing progressively better than older cohorts, as this indicates an improvement in your product and value proposition.

Once you have proven sustainable retention, you can focus on building a dedicated team to improve retention further while acquiring, activating, and retaining incremental new users. Most companies made their first hire for the growth team when they had about 15 engineers on the product team. Prior growth experience is an important characteristic for the team lead to have, with 60% of growth experts being former founders themselves.

Setting goals is crucial for a growth team. The goal needs to be an absolute number that the entire team needs to hit. The most common advice from growth experts is to set a goal that is halfway between "sandbagging" and "too hard to achieve." This means setting a stretch goal that motivates the team but is still realistic to achieve. It's important to remember that growth is a long-term game, and setting achievable yet ambitious goals is the key to success.

When it comes to identifying growth channels, most experts use a framework based on existing user behavior. Referrals were mentioned by approximately 70% of experts as the top channel within the first year. It's important to find 1-2 relevant channels early on that really work for your product. As the company scales, it's typical to run one experiment per growth engineer per week. To facilitate this, it's vital to start early with a solid growth experiment dashboard.

In addition to growth strategies, it's essential to address the concept of user experience (UX) debt. Just like technical debt, UX debt refers to the small problems that arise from prioritizing short-term solutions over a more thoughtful approach. Ignoring these issues can lead to an accumulation of UX debt over time. It's important to create mechanisms to address and tackle UX debt.

To effectively manage UX debt, companies should establish processes and frameworks that prioritize addressing UX debt alongside other important initiatives. By doing so, they can ensure that UX debt doesn't hinder the overall user experience and growth potential of the product.

In conclusion, setting up, hiring, and scaling a growth strategy and team requires a thoughtful approach. It's crucial to prioritize long-term retention and benchmark against industry standards. Building a dedicated growth team with experienced leaders is essential, and setting realistic yet ambitious goals is key. Identifying relevant growth channels and running regular experiments are vital for sustained growth. Additionally, addressing UX debt and establishing mechanisms to tackle it is crucial for maintaining a positive user experience. By incorporating these strategies and insights, companies can ensure that growth becomes an integral part of their DNA.