A message for Growth team naysayers.

Growth teams are here to stay, so get onboard.

Growth is the hottest role in tech (proof), so it will naturally have naysayers.

I hear it all the time: “You don’t need a Growth team! Everyone should be working on growth.” Or “Growth is a mindset.” Or “Growth is just marketing with a fancy title.”

Some of this may be PMs who are mad about a Growth teams that mess up their roadmaps, but a lot of it comes down to pure misunderstanding what Growth actually is.

Which… is fair. Even with plenty of helpful definitions out there, there are still multiple layers of confusion.

Here’s what I think is going on:

1. Layer #1: “Growth” is a super ambiguous term with lots of different meanings.

2. Layer #2: Growth teams can be Growth Marketing or Growth Product - or both.

3. Layer #3: Growth is really a software thing, and software is eating the world.

Let’s take them one by one.

Issue #1: When I say ‘Growth,’ you think… what?

The most obvious issue is that the word ‘Growth’ actually means a lot of different things in the business world. Here are just a few:

Growth model: Every company has a growth model - whether you call it that or not. Your ‘growth model’ is just your financial forecast. In a software context, this is your ARR output, coupled with GTM and Product strategy levers: How does the business acquire, retain, and monetize the customers to get to a desirable revenue output? Whether you write it out or not, having a growth model is unavoidable. If you don’t have one, you are not a business - you’re a hobby, or maybe a non-profit.

Growth initiatives: These are the projects aimed at meeting their forecasted goals. This could be driven by any number of teams, or simply by the company leadership. Lots of different types of teams can be responsible for hitting specific metrics to ensure the company achieves its financial forecast.

Growth-mindset: A growth mindset is all about believing that abilities and intelligence can be developed with effort, learning, and persistence. Instead of thinking "I’m just not good at this," it’s shifting to "I can get better at this if I keep trying." It’s about embracing challenges, seeing failures as opportunities to improve, and always being open to feedback and growth.

So every company has a growth model and most (should) have growth initiatives. Some employees have growth mindsets and others don’t. But… NONE of these are actually the same as ‘Growth Team’! Growth - as in ‘Head of Growth’ or ‘Growth team’ - is its own thing. A Growth team takes an experimentation-first approach to driving specific metrics within the growth model, aiming to increase the product's distribution. More on this, later.

See how this can be confusing? But wait, it gets worse!

Layer #2: Hey, Growth team: Are you marketing or product?

Pre-requisites to Growth teams are:

1. Company has achieved a product-market fit (because you can’t scale something you haven’t validated the need for yet)

2. Company has enough data to apply experimentation-first approach (otherwise just keep launching and doing pre-post analysis)

But things get crazy again when you ask: Is this a marketing thing or a product thing?

Growth teams can actually be focused on Growth Marketing or Growth Product - or both.

→ Growth marketing teams typically specialize in demand capture, working on launching and optimizing new distribution channels and websites. Examples here include seo, sem, social, and email lifecycle.

→ Growth product teams focus on optimizing in-product experiences, treating product surface areas as ‘marketing channel’. Examples here include onboarding, activation, monetization, and feature adoption.

These teams aim to drive acquisition, retention, and monetization by improving key metrics through optimizations that increase distribution of the existing product's value.

Side note: This confusion has only gotten worse as people have attempted to rebrand themselves and their departments. Why be called Paid Marketing Manager when you can be called Growth Marketing Manager and charge a 30% premium? Well, understanding trends and what sounds good is a big part of marketing, so we can’t really fault the marketers who do this.

But in the end, both Growth marketing and Growth product functions are simply specializations under wider Marketing and Product umbrellas. They’ve always existed, however they’ve became more prominent with the rise of… software.

Issue #3: Rise of Growth

The final layer to why people don’t understand the idea of dedicated Growth teams is that they apply to specific type of companies - digital, software companies.

Data everywhere

At this point, nearly every part of our lives has been shaped by software - from our digital meetings to our digital games to our digital refrigerators.

And one of the byproducts of all this digitization is… data. So much data. Soooo much data. All of our interactions on apps and websites can be tracked and quantified.

And you know what data is really good for? Scientific method.

Oh scientific method - that amazing set of tools that humans use to figure out stuff that we don’t know. And the speed at which you complete the scientific method depends on the information you have to power it. In other words: The quality and quantity of your data will determine how quickly you can learn stuff.

This means that, with everything having software components and becoming digital, there is now a completely unprecedented opportunity to learn and iterate on our product experiences A LOT more quickly.

Growth = Distribution Science

Growth specialization emerged as a way to leverage vast amounts of data and quickly learn what improves customer experiences or drives more revenue - whether through digital acquisition channels or digital product experiences. This unlocks an unprecedented capacity to iterate and discover optimal business outcomes.

And this is the crazy thing: This rapid iteration is happening in both the marketing AND the product itself.

Iteration in marketing is a more familiar concept and most people get it, intuitively: ”Hey, that ad campaign didn’t work… we’ll have to try something else.” But the Internet introduced a completely new element: Immediate distribution. For marketers, this means digital distribution channels that can be updated and tracked near real-time in a way that billboards and newspapers and old-school TV ads could not be. Digital marketers (which is pretty much what Growth Marketers are) can learn about their audiences, try out value props, and compare different channels head-to-head in a way that previous generations never could.

But the ability to iterate on your product is a completely different story. To understand the size of this change, consider the difference between traditional products and modern, cloud-based software products:

As you can see… this new type of software involves some fundamentally different assumptions. Being able to ship new versions quickly and with little or no cost means… rapid product iteration is now a thing.

And that’s how you get Product Growth teams, who can learn about their customers and how they use the product and ship updates, sometimes even faster than their marketing counterparts. The availability of all this data is what leads to a totally new approach to distribution.

Does that mean you must have a growth team if you're a digital software product? Not necessarily - your product and marketing teams will naturally engage in growth activities to succeed. However, as your company scales and you start creating specialized roles (like hiring specifically for SEO marketing or an infrastructure product manager), the question of growth specialization naturally arises, which is where most of the Growth teams are born. (Check out my ‘Six rules of hiring for Growth’ post)

And while some industries simply don’t have the data volume or frequency to use this methodology, software is eating the world… so every company is becoming a tech company. More and more orgs will need to take advantage of what Growth teams can offer.

Plus: It’s all relatively new.

Startups were the first ones to figure this out - after all, startup founders have to figure everything out from scratch and scientific method is a great way to learn. Why guess if you can AB test? The birthplace of Growth teams - Facebook - developed the first Growth team in 2011 to harness its vast volume of user data and accelerate growth. I was fortunate to catch on early, because there were personal connections between the leadership at SurveyMonkey (where I worked) and the FB leadership team.

But in general - this is still a fairly new area. So, the best practices and trends are still emerging.

Which brings me back to the naysayers: If you (or someone you know) have thought that Growth teams doesn’t make sense, I get it. It can definitely be confusing. But! This approach to building companies is here to stay - like it or not, this methodology isn’t going anywhere.

Except, you know - doubling users instead of making half of them disappear.

As the saying goes: If you can’t beat us, join us!

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Edited with the help of Jonathan Yagel.

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