Building and Scaling Growth Teams
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Albert Cheng, Head of Product at Grammarly, discussed the core principles of building a growth team, when to hire, and how to focus efforts across acquisition, retention, and monetization. Drawing on his experience at top tech companies such as YouTube, SoFi, and Duolingo, Albert offered valuable insights into how growth teams operate and why they are essential for companies looking to scale.
This blog post will highlight key takeaways from Albert’s session, breaking down the roles of different types of teams, the first growth hire, and the unique challenges growth teams face when compared to traditional product development teams.
You can also watch the full session here 👇
But First, Product-Market Fit
Before building a growth team, companies must ensure they have a product that resonates with their audience. Achieving basic product-market fit is essential because it lays the foundation for all future growth efforts. If the product doesn’t meet user needs, any efforts to grow the user base will fall flat. Core product teams are tasked with continuously refining the product to strengthen its alignment with market demand.
Platform: Scaling the Infrastructure, Trust, and Internal Tools
In addition to core product work, the product team also ensures the scalability of the product by working on infrastructure, trust, and safety, as well as internal tools that support growth.
For example, platform teams at companies like Duolingo and Grammarly ensure that as the user base grows, the product can handle the increasing demand without sacrificing performance or security. Trust and safety are especially important as users expect seamless and safe experiences across all touchpoints.
Expansion: New Markets, Segments, and Technology
Once product-market fit is established and the platform is robust, companies can begin thinking about expansion. This Involves exploring new markets, customer segments, and technology shifts. Albert mentioned that many companies find themselves at an inflection point where they must decide what’s next: geographic expansion, new product verticals, or exploring different customer bases.
At this stage, a dedicated growth team can play a pivotal role in determining where the most valuable opportunities lie and how to capitalize on them.
Growth: Connecting Users to the Value of the Product
At its core, a growth team’s mission is simple: connect users to the value of the product. Albert emphasized that growth teams are different from traditional product teams because they are multi-disciplinary and focused on optimizing every stage of the user journey—whether it's acquisition, retention, or monetization.
While core product teams focus on delivering value through features, growth teams ensure that users actually experience that value by improving the product's accessibility, onboarding, and engagement strategies.
The First Hire: Who and When to Hire
A common misconception among companies is that growth should be the sole responsibility of the growth team. However, Albert highlighted that growth is a company-wide initiative. While the growth team plays a vital role in reigniting and accelerating growth, it should not be the only team focused on expanding the business.
One of the most critical decisions when building a growth team is knowing who to hire first. Don’t rush into hiring a growth expert prematurely. Before doing so, companies should ensure they have the following as mentioned earlier:
Product-market fit: Without this, growth efforts will lack direction.
Data infrastructure: Having systems in place to track user behavior, run experiments, and measure outcomes is crucial.
An opinion on growth priorities: Whether the focus is on acquisition, retention, or monetization, there must be clarity on what the business needs most.
Once a company has decided to build a growth team, the next challenge is determining who to hire based on what the company wants to achieve.
Acquisition
If a company’s top priority is to bring in more customers, hiring a growth marketer as the first hire makes sense. A growth marketer will focus on setting up and testing various acquisition channels, including paid advertising, SEO, and community building. Their expertise can help evaluate which channels are most effective in driving sustainable growth.
Retention
For companies struggling with user retention, hiring a Product Manager (PM) to focus on retention might be the best approach. Some users may love your product, but if many users aren’t sticking around, the company should focus on improving the onboarding flow, engagement strategies, and personalized messaging.
Retention-driven product managers help design features that improve how users experience the product after they sign up. They can also introduce product mechanics that encourage users to return and stay engaged over time.
Monetization
If the product is growing quickly but the company has not yet figured out how to make money from it, hire a business-oriented PM to focus on monetization. This person can experiment with different revenue models such as subscriptions, in-app purchases, advertising, or sales. Understanding the balance between growth and revenue generation is critical, and this role will focus on maximizing user lifetime value.
If you are an early stage company, and still figuring things out, generalists are often the best choice as the first hire because they can work across multiple aspects of growth and help establish the foundation for the team. Specialists are ideal for companies that already have an established growth model and need someone to focus on optimizing particular levers of the business.
Growth is a Multi-Function Discipline
Growth teams are inherently multi-functional, operating very differently from traditional product, engineering, and design (EPD) teams. Growth teams require a variety of skill sets, and they typically function under a model coined by Miro as “AMPED”—which stands for Analytics, Marketing, Product, Engineering, and Design. This structure allows growth teams to be agile and focused on rapid experimentation and iteration.
Scaling the Growth Team
Once the initial growth hire is in place, the next step is to scale the team. As the company grows, the complexity of growth initiatives will also increase. At this point, it’s essential to expand the growth team to cover more areas of the customer journey—whether it’s user acquisition, retention, or monetization.
Albert stressed that growth teams should be able to adapt to the company’s evolving needs. As the company expands into new markets, launches new products, or refines its monetization strategy, the growth team should be structured in a way that allows for flexibility and rapid iteration.
Key Characteristics of a Growth Hire
When hiring for a growth team, there are a few key traits to look for beyond just technical expertise. The most important qualities he highlighted were curiosity, data fluency, and a collaborative mindset.
Curiosity: Growth hires are curious people about user behavior, asking questions and running experiments to uncover what drives growth.
Data Fluency: Being comfortable with data is an essential trait to look for in the first growth hire. Growth team members should use data to guide decisions and translate insights into clear actions.
Collaborative Mindset: Growth is a cross-functional effort, requiring seamless collaboration with product, engineering, design, and marketing teams to run effective experiments and scale successful strategies.
When interviewing candidates, Albert likes to assess their ability to think critically about user value and growth principles. One of his favorite interview questions is: “Tell me about a product you love and why it’s successful.” This question helps him gauge whether the candidate can articulate the core value of a product, identify key drivers of growth, and think strategically about what makes a product resonate with users.
Building and scaling a growth team is a pivotal moment for any company that has found product-market fit and is ready to accelerate its expansion. As Albert Cheng outlined, the key is to ensure that growth teams are multi-functional, data-driven, and focused on connecting users with the product’s core value.
By taking a strategic approach to hiring and scaling, companies can build growth teams that drive sustainable success across acquisition, retention, and monetization. Whether you’re at the start of your growth journey or looking to scale, the insights from this session provide a clear framework for building a high-impact growth team.
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PLGTM Jobs
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