Let's figure out what it is and who needs it first

User experience begins long before interaction with the product — with the first encounter with marketing communications, that is, with any information about the brand, product or company. And it is on this that the overall success of the company in the market, its reputation and financial results depend. So, when talking about any digital products, their life cycles and development, we must not forget about digital marketing.

The second book by Yaroslav Shuvaev, an expert in corporate innovation, a specialist in UX/UI design, the founder of shuvaev.com and the head of large digital projects for Russian and Western companies, has been published in BOMBOR. “Digital Product Management. From Idea to Ideal”We recommend reading it to anyone who is planning or already implementing digital technologies in their company.

In the meantime, let's talk about what growth teams are, what types of them exist, and who they are suitable for. Make yourself comfortable 🙂

What is a growth team?

A growth team is a special team that is engaged in finding and implementing new growth points in your business.

Unlike traditional marketers, Growth marketers only run short experiments to understand what works and what doesn’t. They also test hypotheses across the entire funnel and build the funnel and the product itself based on the client’s values ​​and goals.

Typically, these teams use an agile approach based on experimentation, analytics, and feedback, and bring together people with different skills, such as marketing, product, design, engineering, and analytics.

Growth teams are used by some of the world's largest companies, such as Airbnb, Uber, Spotify, and Google, to grow their businesses.

Basic Types of Growth Teams

Yaroslav Shuvaev in “Digital Product Management” lists three types of growth teams that are implemented depending on the specifics of the business, product, goals and resources.

1. Independent Growth Team works on all aspects of product growth from acquisition to retention and monetization. This team has a high degree of autonomy and responsibility, and works closely with other teams in product, marketing, sales, etc.

Independent growth teams are easier to implement in established companies, since marketing and product are traditionally separated. The tasks that independent teams solve are focused primarily on attracting and converting new users, such as placing contextual advertising or advertising on social networks.

Perhaps the main disadvantage of such a team is horizontal integration, i.e. no one is fully responsible for the result. In difficult situations, it may turn out that marketing and product “point fingers at each other”: the growth team says that the product is not ready, and the product team says that marketing brought irrelevant clients.

2. Functional Growth Team reports to functional leaders (e.g. product, engineering, etc.) who determine which growth initiatives will be implemented. This team provides greater transparency and balance between growth and non-growth initiatives, and collaborates with other teams in product, marketing, sales, etc. This type of growth team can be found at Pinterst, LinkedIn, Dropbox, BitTorrent.

   In functional growth teams, marketing and product initiatives are essentially not separated. The team works to increase metrics as a single unit. Although here we see an example of vertical integration and the absence of internal conflict, functional teams are not suitable for everyone and not always: such teams show themselves especially well in a product where sales growth is associated with the development of functionality. If the growth team is tasked primarily with external communications to attract new users, then it already looks more like an independent growth team.

3. Hybrid Growth Team combines elements of an independent and functional growth team. These are teams with a high stack of expertise that can independently not only conduct an external advertising campaign, but also refine the product. For example, develop an advertising campaign that greets users with a landing page with unusual tariff conditions. Hybrid growth teams are used by Netflix and LinkedIn.

   This approach provides maximum efficiency in terms of organizational management — there are no internal conflicts at all. On the downside: it is quite difficult to select tasks that would involve the entire stack of team expertise. A good practice in such teams may be to focus on the T-shape of the participants.

Your business needs this

Growth hacking is what the teams we talked about above do. But it’s not just a set of techniques or tools that can be used to increase revenue or customer base. Rather, it’s a culture or philosophy that involves constantly seeking out new opportunities for growth, experimenting, and adapting to changing market conditions.

However, growth hacking is not a universal formula that suits everyone all the time. It requires creativity, adaptation to specific conditions, and continuous learning. To apply growth hacking in your company more effectively, Yaroslav advises:

1. Define goals and metrics. Before you start experimenting, it’s important to know what you want to achieve and how you’ll measure your progress. Define specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and time-bound goals, as well as key metrics that reflect them. For example, signups, conversion, retention, revenue per user, etc.

2. Research customers and competitors. Understand who your customers are, what they want, what motivates them, what problems they solve, what channels they use, etc. Conduct surveys and interviews, observe their behavior. And, of course, analyze your competitors.

3. Generate and test hypotheses. And test them in practice to find the most effective solutions for growth. Cool methods: brainstorming, SWOT analysis, prioritization matrix, Lean Canvas. And then test – with A/B testing, split testing, etc. The main thing is that you test one variable at a time, select a sufficient sample, define success criteria and measure the results.

Scale and optimizeOnce you find something that works, you need to scale your actions to get the maximum effect.