Growth Team vs Marketing Team

Hi there,

This sounds like the start of a bad joke: 

“What’s the difference between a growth team and a marketing team…?”

But the punchline would be too long to be funny, and it’s actually a real issue in the growth industry.

Time and time again, I’ve seen companies place growth under marketing, essentially equating them to be the same thing. 

But they’re not the same thing, and this lack of distinction will halt your potential growth. 

So today, we’re going to answer this question once and for all, and provide you with a simple solution instead.

The Problem

Companies allow growth to fall under marketing, either by having the same team responsible for it or by making your growth employee report solely to marketing. 

By treating growth as marketing, you get caught up in channel solutions, such as small-win experiments and social ads.

But you never take it the necessary step further to look holistically at what drives growth. 

Your perspective will remain narrowed and miss the bigger picture.

You’ll look only at marketing opportunities for growth, and miss all the potential present in other parts of the organisation.

The Need

If you don’t get a wide range of people involved in growth, you’ll likely focus on the wrong areas and inadvertently shoot yourself in the foot.

Ouch.

90% of the time, when I look at issues for scaling channels, something fundamental is wrong.

It’ll always be something simple, like the messaging, pricing or activation journey.

And these aren’t things that marketing would be able to fix, they require a bigger task force.

Often the best growth opportunities are customer and product-led, so why are those voices not being included in your growth team?

The Solution

To ensure your company is primed for growth, consciously select a growth team that involves a wide range of individuals based on your company’s goals, growth levers and organisational structure. 

There are three key types of growth teams to choose from:

1. Independent

This is when growth is seen as an independent department, and the individuals that make up this team are solely focused on growth.

They’re dedicated to this goal, and the result is rapid growth, but this is quite an investment to make for many companies. This structure is present in Uber, Airbnb and Facebook.

2. Cross-functional

This is when (almost) everyone is part of a growth team, and the key here is that you create multiple teams, each with its own goal. For example, one could be focused solely on the customer journey.

They also have their day-to-day responsibilities alongside it. This structure is present in Pinterest and Hubspot.

3. Mixed model

This is a mix of the former two models - hence the clever name! Individuals report to their own departments but work together as a growth team as well.

It allows you to utilise experts without dedicating an entire team to it.

Your growth lead may report to marketing or product, but they don’t belong wholeheartedly to either department, thus allowing them to stay focused.

Which one should you pick? 

Sorry to disappoint you, but the answer is that it really depends. Most early-stage start-ups will begin with the 2nd or 3rd model. If you’d like some input, we can always chat about what set-up would work best for you.

Recommendation

In every edition of Growth Waves, I also share a related book, individual or newsletter to check out related to the week's topic.

Unfortunately, there are few resources available that cover growth team structures in detail.

I’ve created an ultimate guide to growth teams that discusses each type of growth team, how they scale and the advantages and disadvantages of each model. 

It isn't publicly available but I wanted to share it with you:

Bringing onboard a new growth hire?

With building a growth team you might be bringing on new growth team members. Sadly, the onboarding of growth hires often goes wrong and they aren't setup for success.

That is why Rosie Hoggmascall and I have created a growth onboarding checklist (for both founders and growth hires) to help ensure growth hires can be impactful in their new roles. 

Thanks for tuning in for a subject that I’m so passionate about! As mentioned previously, it was a rather long punchline to an all-too-common joke.

Growth isn't marketing and if you see that you start to find bigger growth opportunities then ever before,

Daphne