Lesson: Consumer Growth with Jim Scheinman

Step #4 Growth Team: Building your growth team

The new notion of growth hacking teams, I think it's still being sorted out. We really are just starting understand when a company should bring on a growth hacker or have a growth team and how that should be implemented within a company. I think it's critical that the founder and CEO of the company have that as part of their DNA. If it's not going to start from the top then it's not going to happen.

The best example of that is Zuck at Facebook. He was always focused on growth and because of that anybody who came to the company doing whatever they did was also focused on growth to the expense of anything else, including revenue. So it's clear like they had little tiny ads push off aside because they wanted to have people come in. You compare what they had with Myspace which had ads all over the place and that really hurt Myspace's growth. Early on Facebook was focused on growth. They were probably the first team to have an organized growth, the first company to have an organized growth team as far as I know where people were actually part of a marketing team but their job was to focus on growth.

That taught me the lesson that when you have that, it's much more powerful for a company. So I'd like to see my companies think about that first from the CEO down, and then at some point fairly early on after there is product market fit, having someone in the engineering team or product team who's mostly or if not exclusively focused on growth. With that said, you could also have the CEO make it so that everybody in the company is thinking about growth. That could work too if everyone has that as one of their key priorities. I still think it's even more powerful than have a person whose job it is to remind everyone when it comes to this new feature or product or you have two features or products, which one do you go with. You go with the one that is going to more likely lead to growth and that's their job to remind everyone that and they got the blessing of the CEO. If that's not the CEO, it could be the CEO's job.

I think that you see companies go back and forth, they may have a specific growth person or growth team for a while and then maybe the company grows. Then all of a sudden, it doesn't make sense to just have an individual team or person but that should be throughout the whole company so they get dispersed and the growth skills and the expertise around the growth hacking is within marketing product engineering. We're seeing that right now. I think it fluctuates back and forth. I think that where it's going to settle is because there are so many people now who are becoming growth experts, growth hackers is there will be, just like a VP of marketing, there will be VP of growth and there will be teams.