Facebook launched the growth team when it had ~50 million monthly active users (with roughly flat month-on-month growth). The growth team and its surrounding program became a key driver of Facebook's rapid expansion to 2 billion monthly active users today, as well as the evolution of the core Facebook product.

it's best not to hire a full-fledged growth team (defined in "Building Your Growth Team" section) to put major ad dollars into growth until you've ensured you don't have a "leaky bucket" problem.

the most important thing is to make sure that the long-term retention is stable and parallel to the x-axis

It is important to benchmark your retention against companies in your specific vertical. For example, stable long-term retention of 10% is poor if you are a social network.

Determine whether newer cohorts are performing progressively better than older cohorts. If the retention of newer cohorts are better than older cohorts, it implies that you are improving your product and value proposition.

Below, we have included average long-term retention targets for 5 business verticals.

The reason a company forms a dedicated growth team is to pour gasoline into product market fit by launching structured experiments to drive a desired behavior/action.If you have proven sustainable retention, you can focus on building a dedicated team to improve retention even further while acquiring and activating and retaining incremental new users.

Most companies made their first hire when they had about 15 engineers on the team working on product.

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.

"The scariest day is when numbers are down, the second scariest day is when numbers are up and you don't know why."

More than 90% of the experts mentioned that prior growth experience is an important characteristic for the team lead to have.

Interestingly, 60% of growth experts in our interviews were former founders.

The goal needs to be an absolute number. (For example, "achieve 5M first-time room nights this year"). Note that this is an absolute milestone 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". You want to set something that is a stretch, but at the same time motivate the team such that it is realistic to achieve.

The most common framework growth experts use to identify channels is based on existing user behavior. The two key questions to ask are the following:

Most products find 1-2 relevant channels early on that really work for them. ~70% of experts mentioned that referrals were the top channel within the first year.

A company at scale typically runs 1 experiment per growth engineer per week. With that future state in mind, it's vital to start early with a solid growth experiment dashboard.

"Don't test things you wouldn't ship to everybody"

The End Goal: Growth is in the Company's DNA