How do you structure an effective growth marketing team?
This lesson walks you through building an early-stage growth team.
Once your product is built, growth marketers are the highest-leverage hires for success. Yet almost no one knows how to structure an early-stage growth team. That's what this resource covers.
1. First, identify your acquisition motion
The first step toward building a growth team is identifying which channels you’re acquiring customers with. These channels must be (1) financially viable and (2) scalable.
Your mixture of channels is called your acquisition motion. Your motion falls into one of four categories:
- Sales-led: Most of your acquisition happens via sales.
- Product-led: Most acquisition happens naturally through the use of the product. (I explain product-led acquisition in Lesson 4.)
- Paid-led: Most customer acquisition happens through you paying for ads and sponsorships.
- WOM/Community-led: Most customer acquisition happens through customers spreading the word—unassisted by the product itself.
If you're unsure which channels will work for you, use LinkedIn Sales Navigator to find people who worked at companies that (1) sell to your customer persona and (2) have a similar business model. Pay these domain experts, say, $500+/hr for a couple hours’ worth of Zoom calls. On these calls, grill them to explore every growth channel that worked and why. Plus ask what qualities and skills were shared by the team members who excelled at those channels.
Expert growth consulting is among the highest-leverage dollars you can spend. Almost no startup does this in their first year, but they should. Do not be afraid to buy directional accuracy.
Once you've identified your likely channels and therefore your acquisition motion, you'll knowthe core competency you must build our growth team around.
For example, if you’re pursuing a product-led motion, you’d hire a Senior Growth Marketer whose core competency is product-led acquisition—not content nor sponsorships.
Thanks to my marketer friends Jeremy Gurewitz (Imperfect Foods, Literati) and Yousuf Bhaijee (Zynga, Disney, Classdojo) for their feedback on this resource.
2. Next, build an MVP growth team
Now that you've defined your acquisition motion, build a minimum-viable growth team around it. This team generally consists of four roles:
Role 1: A full-time, senior growth generalist whose primary job is to set a cadence of regular growth experiments. Your hire should be someone who can roll up their sleeves and do the work themselves—not a pure manager. They have to tactically know what a job well done looks like in the early days.
Hire this senior generalist before hiring a channel expert because this generalist is the glue sitting across all acquisition channels and marketing operations to ensure data is being tracked and acted upon.
The generalist's role consists of:
- Propose growth experiments, oversee their implementation, collect data, share the results with the team, and iterate continuously.
- Oversee funnel optimization to identify and remove conversion bottlenecks.
- Ensure acquisition channel experts are delivering performance.
This generalist doesn’t have to be your head of growth. You can empower a generalist with mid-level seniority and retain the option to hire a veteran above them once you’ve identified what the business ultimately needs to grow.
Good growth marketing teams prioritize whatever is highest ROI:
- First, map out your funnel, such as: Ad → Homepage → Onboarding → Drips → Webinar → App → Purchase → Referral
- Assess the conversion rate between each step.
- Propose significant experiments to increase the conversion rate wherever weak.
- Rinse and repeat until you see diminishing returns. At that point, try rethinking the whole funnel from scratch—and running A/B tests to see what’s best.
Role 2: Full time copywriter-marketer who understands copywriting for acquisition (landing pages and ads) plus copywriting for lifecycle marketing (drip emails, sales collateral, webinar content). It’s a bonus if they can also write longform content marketing pieces (blog, collateral).
Eventually this copywriter will get overwhelmed and be underqualified to run sophisticated marketing operations, at which point you'll hire a dedicated lifecycle marketer to oversee operations and delegate writing to the copywriter.
You can hire or contract this copywriting role depending on how much copywriting work you have.
Role 3: Contract designer or agency. Design is necessary for creating ads and landing pages, producing marketing and sales collateral, and making in-product UX improvements.
If you lack in-house design talent, most companies get away just fine outsourcing this role.
Role 4: Reserve bandwidth from your engineering team to support the growth team’s experiments, marketing tool integrations, in-product changes, and landing page creation. This engineer doesn’t have to be a new, dedicated hire.
Role 5: If you’re a SaaS company who’s scaling, get a full-time Product Marketing Manager. Growing SaaS companies should consider supplementing their marketing team with an experienced Product Marketing Manager (PMM). These hires are typically responsible for managing product launches, beta tests, pricing decisions, product positioning, competitive research, and customer interviews.
Whereas the Senior Growth Generalist, as defined earlier, runs experiments and optimizes funnels, the PMM is a people and process manager.
3. Finally, bring in channel experts
Now that you’ve built a core growth team to support your strategy and operations, it’s time to hire or contract channel-specific experts for each acquisition channel that's part of your acquisition motion.
For example, if you're product-led, you'd hire a product-led acquisition expert. If you're paid-led, perhaps you'd hire a social ads manager or search ads manager.
For each channel, hire a swiss army knife employee who can write copy, design campaigns, optimize performance, and perform basic data analysis. This person should be responsible for fully owning the success of their channel. (But, support them with a designer so they don’t have to do that themselves.)
For every channel, once the channel expert maxes out their bandwidth yet the channel has more juice left to squeeze, hire or contract another specialist alongside them.
What to outsource
Some channels require significant competency to run efficiently, and in such cases it may make more sense to hire an agency instead of an employee. Here’s how I decide:
- I often outsource creative production for paid social. I have an agency create the high-volume of image and video creatives needed by the channel specialists for ads on Pinterest, Snapchat, TikTok, and so on. High-volume creative production is done efficiently by good agencies and you’re going to need that volume to find big wins.
- I often outsource the experimental testing of tertiary channels to an agency before considering bringing it in-house.Examples include Snapchat ads, LinkedIn ads, and Pinterest ads. A good agency can assess a sophisticated channel’s potential with more accuracy and speed than a junior in-house hire can. Once they scale up the channel for you, you can optionally replace them with an internal hire to streamline operations.
- However, I rarely outsource content creation.Anyone writing content should be an expert in your field. Therefore, I rarely outsource copywriting and content production to agencies—unless the agency exclusively creates content for my industry.
To upgrade a channel expert's skills, you can send them through my startup, Demand Curve, which will teach them up-to-date tactics. Or if you want to level up a senior marketer with up-to-date growth theory, consider Reforge.
Vetting growth generalists
Keep in mind that most growth marketers are not good. This is why you must discount their resumes. I’ve seen many founders hire bad growth marketers with seemingly great backgrounds.
The good growth generalists are excellent at continually generating growth experiment ideas. That's the primary objective of the growth team: continually experiment to break out of a local maximum of performance.
A product manager from Facebook, Nikita Bier, puts it like this: “A reproducible testing process is more valuable than any one idea. Innovate here first. All things equal, a team with more shots at bat wins against a team with an audacious vision.”
Therefore, when vetting growth generalist candidates, ensure they're framework-driven thinkers who build and iterate their processes for big task. They can't be haphazardly YOLOing “sick growth hacks."
Strong senior growth marketers often derive good experiment ideas from three places:
- Talking to customers and sales/support teams to see what customers are running into and requesting. Turn these into experiments for new features, value propositions, ad campaigns, drip email series, educational content, sales collateral, and more.
- Competitive analysis to see what related companies in your space are doing for growth. Audit their landing pages, growth funnels, assets, ads, and everything else they do. What’s worth trying?
- Consultants who you hunt down on LinkedIn. Find killer industry insiders and pay them $1000/hr for 2-3 hours of in-depth tactical consulting. Extract every great growth idea they have from their brains and decide which to prioritize.
I use a three-step project to vet growth generalists during the hiring process. It varies significantly per role, and this is not one-size-fits-all:
- The candidate must identify customer acquisition strategies for your startup plus prioritize them (and justify the priority). This tasks reveals their ability to identify high-leverage opportunities and see the big picture.
- They must audit your product then walk through their methodology for optimizing conversion at every major step in your user's journey. This reveals their process-driven approach to spotting bottlenecks and generating hypotheses. Ask them to compile a 90 day plan.
- They create sample content for the specific growth discipline they're being hired for, such as running ads or email marketing. This showcases their tactical competency.
Throughout, strong generalists know to focus on the highest ROI experiments. They can't waste time tweaking button colors. They have to think big and overhaul entire funnels and user experiences.
What's next?
This resource's focus is strictly on early-stage growth teams. (For help with hiring, see Lesson 5.) As your company scales, talk to founders of companies like yours and learn how they've built a more robust, advanced team over time.
