Should content teams specialize by channel or work as generalists across all channels?

Harry Stebbings · Sep 28, 2022

Companies should not be on every channel; channels are specialist enough that winning on each requires a dedicated team per channel

People who spread across every channel execute all of them poorly, and winning on YouTube is a different craft from winning on LinkedIn or Twitter

6:23 20Growth: Hubspot CMO Kipp Bodnar on Why the Best Marketers Think Like VCs | Why the Best Companies Do Not Start with Product Marketing | New Channels; When To Do, How Much To Spend, How To Test, When To Stop

Harry Stebbings · Jan 19, 2024

The biggest problem with content teams is that working across all channels builds no verticalized per-channel knowledge, leaving them merely okay at everything

Spreading people across all channels prevents depth in any one

18:24 20VC: How Duolingo Scaled to 8M TikTok Followers, How to Create Viral Content, Why Most Companies Suck at Content Marketing and How to Change & Why You Should Not Work with Content Agencies with Zaria Parvez, Global Social Media Manager @ Duolingo

Zaria Parvez · Jan 19, 2024

Having in-house experts for each channel who give each other feedback is more valuable than generalists, even on a small team

The TikTok expert can critique the Reels manager's content and vice versa

Scope: small teams still have to stretch across whatever is needed

18:33 20VC: How Duolingo Scaled to 8M TikTok Followers, How to Create Viral Content, Why Most Companies Suck at Content Marketing and How to Change & Why You Should Not Work with Content Agencies with Zaria Parvez, Global Social Media Manager @ Duolingo

Antoine Le Nel · Oct 18, 2024

Growth teams should be staffed with channel specialists rather than generalists; generalist marketers are good in managerial roles but not at doing the work

Very few people genuinely have sight of the whole funnel, so you need experts in upper, mid and lower funnel separately

22:03 20Growth: Revolut's Chief Growth Officer on The Growth Playbook Revolut Used to Scale to $2.2BN in Revenue | How Revolut Launch and Grow Products | Why the Best PMs Don't Need A/B Tests & Why CAC is a BS Metric with Antoine Le Nel

Luke Harries · May 23, 2025

Their biggest distribution mistake was not staffing dedicated owners on channels early enough; once a channel shows signs of life you should put one person on it with a laser focus on that channel's KPIs

Affiliates was built by one engineer in a week and now does tens of thousands of MRR per month despite nobody touching it since — untended channels leave obvious growth on the table

Scope: assumes overall product-market fit already exists

33:16 20VC: ElevenLabs Head of Growth on Why You Do Not Need PMs | The 7-Part Launch Playbook That Gets 700K+ Views Per Product | The Truth About CAC, Payback & Performance Marketing in AI with Luke Harries

Zaria Parvez · Jan 19, 2024

Assigning channels by generational divide — elder millennials on Instagram, interns on Shorts — produces better cross-channel adaptation

Age gaps in how people consume media mean a colleague from the right cohort can flag that a TikTok-native concept won't hit on Reels and suggest small iterations that make it work

17:29 Assign channels by generational cohort

Harry Stebbings · Dec 13, 2024

Content that performs on one platform does not necessarily perform on others

Posts that bang on LinkedIn don't transfer when he takes them elsewhere

45:17 Content performance does not transfer across platforms

Omer Shai · Jan 31, 2026

Channel ownership should be structured by skill type — centralized paid traffic buying across all channels, but per-channel ownership for community and SEO

It depends on the skill of the people and what work the channel actually requires

33:30 Centralize paid buying but own community and seo per channel