Building a Growth Team

The Guide

5 key steps synthesized from 5 experts.

1

Audit readiness and data infrastructure

Before hiring, ensure you have reached a revenue milestone between $1M and $10M ARR. Build a foundational data team to ensure every growth experiment has a clear, reliable source of truth. Confirm that your retention is healthy enough to support top-of-funnel scaling.

Featured guest perspectives

"In order to get the growth going in the company, a founder and the founding team have to figure out how to make it grow to the first, let's say a million, 5 million, 10 million in ARR. Some of the companies don't even create growth teams until they're a hundred, 200 million in ARR because to figure out your product market fit and how to distribute it's not something that you can outsource to somebody."

— Elena Verna 3.0

2

Map your bottleneck to the first hire profile

Identify the primary friction point in your customer journey. If you lack traffic, hire an Acquisition Growth Marketer. If users are dropping off during onboarding, hire a Growth PM focused on activation. Prioritize a 'Builder' profile over a 'Leader' for your first hire to ensure systems are created from scratch.

Featured guest perspectives

"Your first growth hire’s skill set should be anchored to the biggest growth lever that is currently experiencing friction: acquisition, activation, engagement, or monetization. Is your biggest bottleneck to growth today acquiring new users, activating those users, keeping them retained, or generating revenue?"

— Lenny Rachitsky

"In almost all cases, you want to start by hiring a Builder, to prove your model’s validity. If most of your assumptions were right and you are enjoying early traction, you should move to Optimizers next to capture most of the value, finishing with Innovators to begin iterating on the model."

— Lenny Rachitsky

3

Define the organizational structure

Choose between a centralized model for execution speed and aligned priorities or a decentralized model for embedding growth culture across teams. If pursuing PLG, ensure the growth team has a dedicated sales counterpart early on to bridge the gap between self-serve and enterprise motions. Avoid reporting structures that silo growth solely within Marketing.

Featured guest perspectives

"Centralized growth teams are optimized for velocity. They operate as a lean, mean, execution-hungry machine."

— Lenny Rachitsky

"Historically the way we've been organized is we've got channel based teams that are deploying spend in a given channel. So we've got a paid marketing team, a lifecycle CRM team, we've got a field marketing team, et cetera. And then we've got a product engineering team that is supporting growth and sales and helping each of these channels be more effective that's dedicated to growth. And then separate from that, we've got a small kind of what I call an innovation or skunk work type of team that works on cross-channel."

— Sri Batchu

"If you are serious about your PLG motion, you will need to have a dedicated team working on it. But, importantly, there is no “standard” PLG team setup that works for all companies. And even within a company, the ideal structure will change over time too."

— Lenny Rachitsky

4

Assemble a minimum experiment squad

Launch your growth efforts with a small, cross-functional tiger team. This squad should include a Growth PM, a dedicated growth engineer, and a designer. Focus their initial efforts on high-leverage acquisition or activation wins with 2x to 10x potential rather than minor optimizations.

Featured guest perspectives

"If you are serious about your PLG motion, you will need to have a dedicated team working on it. But, importantly, there is no “standard” PLG team setup that works for all companies. And even within a company, the ideal structure will change over time too."

— Lenny Rachitsky

"If you're serious about PLG, then a dedicated team is necessary. Assigning just one person to manage all the different stakeholders and parts of PLG won't cut it."

— Lenny Rachitsky

5

Operationalize and scale

Transition from proof-of-concept experiments to repeatable systems that integrate with the broader organization. Hire 'Optimizers' like SEO or CRO specialists only after the core model is validated. Establish long-term success metrics to ensure the team remains focused on sustainable business value rather than short-term gains.

Featured guest perspectives

"In almost all cases, you want to start by hiring a Builder, to prove your model’s validity. If most of your assumptions were right and you are enjoying early traction, you should move to Optimizers next to capture most of the value, finishing with Innovators to begin iterating on the model."

— Lenny Rachitsky

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Guest Perspectives

Deep dive into what 4 podcast guests shared about building a growth team.

Adam Fishman 1 quote

Listen to episode →

"I get asked all the time about how do you hire growth people? And it's usually something like, 'Hey, how do we find you but 10 years earlier in your career?' And it feels like that question is missing the first principles approach to hiring a growth person. And if you're doing that, you're just pattern matching to me."

Tactical:

Use a first-principles competency model to identify specific skills needed rather than pattern matching to past hires.
Define a strong set of criteria for the role to prevent mismatches between founder expectations and growth reality.
Focus on hiring practitioners who can build repeatable systems and new growth loops.

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Elena Verna 3.0 1 quote

"In order to get the growth going in the company, a founder and the founding team have to figure out how to make it grow to the first, let's say a million, 5 million, 10 million in ARR. Some of the companies don't even create growth teams until they're a hundred, 200 million in ARR because to figure out your product market fit and how to distribute it's not something that you can outsource to somebody."

Tactical:

Delay hiring a growth team until the company reaches at least $1M to $10M in ARR.
Ensure you have high user volume and reliable data infrastructure before bringing in growth specialists.
Maintain founder-led growth to train the entire company to be responsible for growth levers.

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Luc Levesque 1 quote

Listen to episode →

"We talk about the 10X engineer and we don't really talk about the 10X growth advisor or 10X growth person, but the same dynamic applies. You could argue it applies even more because the right growth advisor can have literally company changing impact."

Tactical:

Target growth advisors who have a proven track record of identifying insights that lead to thousand-percent lifts.
Bring in growth experts at the right time to capitalize on insights that can fundamentally change a company's trajectory.
Seek out advisors who can identify critical leverage points with targeted sentences or specific strategy shifts.

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Sri Batchu 1 quote

Listen to episode →

"Historically the way we've been organized is we've got channel based teams that are deploying spend in a given channel. So we've got a paid marketing team, a lifecycle CRM team, we've got a field marketing team, et cetera. And then we've got a product engineering team that is supporting growth and sales and helping each of these channels be more effective that's dedicated to growth. And then separate from that, we've got a small kind of what I call an innovation or skunk work type of team that works on cross-channel."

Tactical:

Structure growth into channel-specific teams for paid marketing, lifecycle CRM, and field marketing.
Embed a dedicated growth engineering team to build custom technology that improves sales and channel efficiency.
Maintain a small 'skunk work' team to test cross-channel experiments and emerging platforms.

View all skills from Sri Batchu →