How should a company structure its growth function as it scales?

Hila Qu · Jan 18, 2023

A full-funnel growth team — marketing, growth product, analytics, design and engineering sitting together under one owner responsible from acquisition through retention — unlocks far more opportunities and experiments than a team scoped only to acquisition.

Owning the whole funnel from download to signup to first investment to retention to cross-sell surfaces opportunities that a narrowly scoped team never sees.

6:08 20Growth: When To Make Your First Growth Hire? How To Structure the Hiring Process for Growth? Five Core Things the Best Growth Hires Do in the First Week? What to Expect New Growth Hires to Achieve in the First 30 and 90 Days with Hila Qu, Growth Advisor

Guillaume Cabane · Nov 29, 2023

Growth's lack of independence as a function is its core problem: reporting into marketing or product creates conflicts that kill growth teams at late stage

Almost no late-stage company still has a growth team, apart from a few like Facebook and Shopify

59:47 20Growth: The Golden Rule to $100M in ARR, Why CAC to LTV is BS Early On, Why Your First Growth Hire Should Be a Former Founder & How Ramp Does 200 Growth Experiments Per Quarter with Guillaume Cabane

Matt Lerner · May 31, 2024

In a larger company the growth team should stand outside the core functions and be cross-functional and diverse, while maintaining strong relationships across the org

Growth people have a fundamentally different orientation and approach than other groups, and they need to pull resources from people who don't report to them

Scope: larger companies specifically

45:52 20Growth: The Six Channels Startups Need to Dominate to Grow, Why the Best Growth Talent Never Comes from Marketing or Product, Who and How to Hire Growth Leaders and Teams and Why in a World of AI, Growth is More Science than Art with Matt Lerner

Raman Malik · Nov 15, 2024

Growth should be an independent function bridging product and marketing, whose product is the user funnel — acquisition, activation, retention, monetization — not just filling the top of the funnel

The job is to obsess over the whole user life cycle so users become retained power users who can eventually be monetized

6:27 20Growth: Inside Perplexity's Growth Machine: What Worked, What Did Not Work | Why Paid Acquisition is a Drug and Brand Marketing is BS | The Good, Bad and Ugly of A/B Tests and Why Micro-Optimisations are Under-Rated with Raman Malik

Hila Qu · Jan 18, 2023

In B2C, the most powerful growth team is a full-funnel team combining growth marketing (channel/acquisition experts), lifecycle marketing/CRM, a growth product squad (PM, engineer, designer) and a data analyst.

Each component covers a distinct stage of the user journey, so together they can run experiments across the entire journey

Scope: B2C companies

15:02 20Growth: When To Make Your First Growth Hire? How To Structure the Hiring Process for Growth? Five Core Things the Best Growth Hires Do in the First Week? What to Expect New Growth Hires to Achieve in the First 30 and 90 Days with Hila Qu, Growth Advisor

Sri Batchu · Jul 26, 2023

A growth function should be built only post product-market fit, and should own everything high-volume and experimentation-oriented that drives acquisition and retention — paid marketing, SEO, product-led growth and website — under one roof with shared North Stars

These functions are all high-volume, data- and experimentation-driven, so they work best structurally coupled with the same goals

Scope: post product-market fit only; applies to high-volume, experimentation-oriented channels

7:59 20Growth: Biggest Growth Lessons from Instacart and Opendoor, Why 70% of Growth Experiments Should Fail and How to Fail Fast, How to Hire a Growth Team; Secrets and Tips & Why Operator Investors WIll be the Best Investors in 10 Years with Sri Batchu @ Ram

Raman Malik · Nov 15, 2024

Growth marketing and growth product must operate as one cohesive unit because they share the same funnel goal and only differ in tools

You can't iterate on onboarding without product working the flows and marketing working copy and email drips at the same time

7:12 20Growth: Inside Perplexity's Growth Machine: What Worked, What Did Not Work | Why Paid Acquisition is a Drug and Brand Marketing is BS | The Good, Bad and Ugly of A/B Tests and Why Micro-Optimisations are Under-Rated with Raman Malik

Raman Malik · Nov 15, 2024

The thing most in need of change in growth is clarity about what growth actually is — it is growth product plus growth marketing, and the field suffers because ten growth people give ten different answers

Everyone in the discipline defines their job slightly differently, so shared understanding of the two halves would improve the field

53:37 20Growth: Inside Perplexity's Growth Machine: What Worked, What Did Not Work | Why Paid Acquisition is a Drug and Brand Marketing is BS | The Good, Bad and Ugly of A/B Tests and Why Micro-Optimisations are Under-Rated with Raman Malik

Mike Duboe · Feb 15, 2023

If the practice of growth succeeds it should eventually abstract itself away and simply become how product and marketing are run, so a standalone growth team may not be the best long-term answer

Growth is a discipline that can be instilled into other functions

Scope: a standalone team can still be the most pragmatic solution at some stage of a company's journey

12:02 20Growth: Top Five Growth Lessons Scaling Stitchfix to IPO, How to Master the Art of Paid Marketing, Why CAC/LTV is a BS Metric & How To Use Payback Period as an Alternative to CAC/LTV with Mike Duboe, Partner @ Greylock

Adam Grenier · Mar 15, 2023

Most companies do not need a standalone growth team; growth functions should be embedded in the teams they belong to (performance marketing in marketing, funnel ownership in product)

Growth should be infused throughout the business, and at Uber every growth function eventually merged back into the core business until there was no centralized growth team left

Scope: applies to a 'normal growing company'; Uber's original growth team existed because the core product team was already stretched

12:32 20Growth: The Inside Story to Uber's Hypergrowth Scaling; What Worked, What Did Not? | Spending a $1BN Budget at Uber and Why China was the Wild West for Uber | Why You Do Not Need a Growth Team with Adam Grenier

Guillaume Cabane · Nov 29, 2023

Growth rarely works as a standalone function — it typically has to roll into product or marketing

He would love standalone growth to work but has learned he was wrong; companies where it works are true exceptions

Scope: he wishes it were otherwise; lead scoring itself usually sits in ops

45:30 20Growth: The Golden Rule to $100M in ARR, Why CAC to LTV is BS Early On, Why Your First Growth Hire Should Be a Former Founder & How Ramp Does 200 Growth Experiments Per Quarter with Guillaume Cabane

Mike Duboe · Feb 15, 2023

Splitting growth into separate acquisition and retention teams with their own metrics leads teams to optimize their own number at the expense of downstream metrics; growth teams need a holistic, down-funnel KPI instead.

At Stitch Fix, as head of acquisition measured on new users and CAC, he could have destroyed his counterpart's retention metric by letting in low-quality users from channels like affiliates; redefining the KPI to a down-funnel metric was highly impactful

Scope: drawn from the Stitch Fix org structure

8:05 20Growth: Top Five Growth Lessons Scaling Stitchfix to IPO, How to Master the Art of Paid Marketing, Why CAC/LTV is a BS Metric & How To Use Payback Period as an Alternative to CAC/LTV with Mike Duboe, Partner @ Greylock

Mike Duboe · Feb 15, 2023

Organizing growth around the funnel framework leads to siloed teams and missed opportunities to reinvest outputs from one stage into another

Brand marketing owns awareness, performance marketing owns acquisition, a conversion PM owns activation — so no one works the interplay between steps

29:07 20Growth: Top Five Growth Lessons Scaling Stitchfix to IPO, How to Master the Art of Paid Marketing, Why CAC/LTV is a BS Metric & How To Use Payback Period as an Alternative to CAC/LTV with Mike Duboe, Partner @ Greylock

Mike Duboe · Feb 15, 2023

Structuring the org around a funnel causes teams to optimize at each other's expense, whereas a loops-based org forces teams to consider the interplay between components and pursue compounding results

He cites Stitch Fix, where an acquisition team could push through a bunch of poor-quality leads and damage retention

30:02 20Growth: Top Five Growth Lessons Scaling Stitchfix to IPO, How to Master the Art of Paid Marketing, Why CAC/LTV is a BS Metric & How To Use Payback Period as an Alternative to CAC/LTV with Mike Duboe, Partner @ Greylock

Kieran Flanagan · Aug 10, 2022

Companies evolve through three stages of growth maturity: chaotic ad-hoc growth efforts, then a centralized growth team, then decentralized growth principles embedded in how PMs build product

Early attempts move a metric messily but prove growth works, prompting a founder-sponsored central function; eventually growth mechanisms like virality, onboarding and upgrade flows become part of normal product creation

Scope: the decentralized stage is framed as the next iteration rather than current practice

5:33 20 Growth: Why You Need a Growth Hire Pre Product-Market-Fit? Why Every Company Will Be a Media Company and How To Do It | Communities; What Really Are They? How To Build Them? What Makes The Best? Why Do Many Not Work? | Kieran Flanagan, SVP Marketing @

Chandra Narayanan · Mar 13, 2024

Growth should be a standalone centralized team at earlier stages, then move to embedded-but-centralized, and only fully decentralize into product teams once the team is large enough

Centralization lets growth practitioners learn best practices from each other and transfer knowledge across different growth surfaces; if they were separated across the org those learnings wouldn't exist

Scope: stage-dependent; decentralization only appropriate at large team size

33:16 20Growth: Top Five Lessons from Leading Analytics at Facebook and Data Science at Sequoia Capital, The Two Skills Required to do Analytics Well, The Three Types of Execs within Companies and When and How to Hire for Growth with Chandra Narayanan

Kieran Flanagan · Aug 10, 2022

For product-led companies like Calendly, Miro and Figma, the right structure is marketing acquiring demand (including SEO and paid search) and a centralized growth team inside product owning onboarding, monetization and retention

That split is what these companies actually do and it works, provided you build great relationships between marketing and product

Scope: requires strong marketing–product relationships; SEO and paid search almost never sit in growth in this model

13:12 20 Growth: Why You Need a Growth Hire Pre Product-Market-Fit? Why Every Company Will Be a Media Company and How To Do It | Communities; What Really Are They? How To Build Them? What Makes The Best? Why Do Many Not Work? | Kieran Flanagan, SVP Marketing @

Mike Duboe · Feb 15, 2023

If growth must sit under either marketing or product, it is better under product; marketing only makes sense for e-commerce companies with simple linear products

Sustainable growth programs require engineering and product discipline, and growth programs that touch the product belong with product

Scope: performance marketing teams sitting in marketing is fine

13:01 20Growth: Top Five Growth Lessons Scaling Stitchfix to IPO, How to Master the Art of Paid Marketing, Why CAC/LTV is a BS Metric & How To Use Payback Period as an Alternative to CAC/LTV with Mike Duboe, Partner @ Greylock

Casey Winters · Sep 22, 2021

The default best structure for growth is a cross-functional team (engineering, PM, design, analytics) with members reporting into their own functions but sharing goals and OKRs, rather than a standalone growth org under the CEO

Growth is a team sport requiring many skill sets, and functional embedding ensures growth strategy gets infused into the rest of the organization through peer product leaders

8:47 Cross functional embedded team sharing goals beats standalone growth org

Raman Malik · Nov 15, 2024

The right time to invest in a growth function is when you see early retention signals — roughly 30% retention in month three or four

That retention is the kindling in the fire, so it's worth pouring gasoline on it

8:22 Invest in growth when early retention signals emerge not a fixed headcount threshold

Martin Gontovnikas · Feb 14, 2024 · hedged

Growth should ideally be dispersed among all functions, which is the reality for most startups, but as companies grow product teams get consumed by enterprise features, support and bug fixing, so companies end up creating separate innovation and growth teams

As product teams grow they get consumed by enterprise checklist features, support and bug fixing, leaving no room for innovation or growth

16:15 Growth starts dispersed then enterprise demands force separate innovation teams

Guillaume Cabane · Nov 29, 2023

A functioning early growth team should be a startup-within-the-startup of head of growth/PM (a former founder), one engineer, and one marketer/copywriter, formed after the product team and first few marketers

To take VC-like risks the team needs the ability to build and ship; the head of growth doubles as the analyst in the early days

48:25 Startup within a startup trio of former founder engineer and marketer formed after the product team

Chandra Narayanan · Mar 13, 2024

A Series A company can afford a centralized growth team because its growth surface area is narrow enough that a small team of about five people suffices

At Series A you're only working on two or three growth problems at a time, not twenty; spreading effort across everything means doing nothing right, and the team can rotate through problems sequentially

34:51 Series a companies should run a small centralized growth team since surface area is narrow

Adam Grenier · Mar 15, 2023

If you do build a growth team, it should be a full-stack strike team (product, marketing, design, data, engineering) that dives into the current core point of leverage rather than permanently owning a carved-out slice of the business

Anything worth doing has to keep being worked on, and growth-team people typically don't have the DNA to keep maintaining those workstreams

14:19 Growth team should be a full stack strike team attacking the current point of leverage not a permanent silo

Adam Grenier · Mar 15, 2023

Scoping what the growth org should look like a year out is the essential first step, and doing it usually reveals that the company actually wants growth roles embedded in product and marketing rather than an independent team

The exercise forces a realistic conversation about what growth needs to do for the organization and shapes the right recruiting conversations

16:49 Scope the growth orgs desired state a year out first to reveal whether roles should embed in product marketing

Antoine Le Nel · Oct 18, 2024 · hedged

The product team should build the virality engine and the growth team should operate it

Growth has the better analytical framework to measure ROI and efficiency, while product has the better product vision and UX judgment to build the experience

16:05 Product builds virality features while growth operates and optimizes them

Harry Stebbings · Feb 15, 2023

The biggest mistake he sees in portfolio companies is growth teams tinkering with code and leaving; locking growth together with engineering and product creates the alignment that prevents it

Without that lock-in, engineering teams are blindsided by what growth did and why

13:53 Locking growth together with engineering and product prevents blindsiding and code abandonment

Phil Carter · Sep 20, 2024

Founders should determine from first principles what actually drives their business's growth before hiring a growth leader or deciding how to structure a growth team

The right growth hire is entirely different depending on the underlying growth dynamics — a 95%+ organic SEO and word-of-mouth business like Quizlet needs a completely different leader than a high-price paid-acquisition business like MasterClass

5:04 Determine growth drivers from first principles before hiring or structuring team

Kieran Flanagan · Aug 10, 2022

What growth means depends on the go-to-market motion: in marketing- or sales-led businesses growth teams own performance channels and never touch the product, whereas in PLG businesses growth owns acquisition plus onboarding, touchless conversion and retention

The scope of a growth team is determined by whether the product itself is the distribution mechanism

7:11 Growth teams scope depends on whether the gtm motion is plg marketing led or sales led

Alex Schultz · Sep 5, 2025

The right growth structure at scale is a central team owning foundational platforms (SEO, paid ad tech, email infrastructure) plus a dedicated growth team embedded inside each product

You don't want an outside team shipping loads of things into your product, but the foundational pillars are shared across every product

9:27 Central platform team plus embedded product growth teams

Alex Schultz · Sep 5, 2025

Companies under a few hundred people should not have a growth team — the whole company should be working on growth and the CEO should not delegate it; most companies hire a growth team far too early

Growing the company is the single most important job of the CEO, and the transition to delegating it comes far later than most founders assume

10:57 No dedicated growth team below a few hundred employees ceo owns it