How to sequence your growth squads

Don’t get cute with the Growth team order. Build them in the right sequence.

May 09, 2025

Your company decided to invest in Growth.

Let’s say you’ve won the budget battle, earned leadership buy-in, and secured headcount. Now what?

Most companies start by dabbling - running a few experiments or asking a solo PM to “own a metric” (check out my post on six rules of hiring for growth that answers the question of “When is the right time to hire my first full-time growth person?” And “What should I look for when hiring for growth?”) That’s not what we’re talking about. We’re talking fully staffed, cross-functional squads built to move key Growth levers.

And here’s the real unlock: the order matters.

Growth typically breaks down into four focus areas: activation, monetization, acquisition, and retention. Build in the wrong sequence, and you’ll end up chasing outcomes you can’t actually influence, while the biggest opportunities go untouched.

And the order should go something like this:

🎤 But first… a brief interruption from your regularly scheduled growth musings: I’m kicking off Optimizely’s FREE virtual Test & Learn event on May 21st with the opening keynote! I don’t speak at many conferences - because, well, introvert life 😅 - but this is one of the rare exceptions.
We’ll get into:
Difference between shipping to release vs. shipping to validate
Why your experiment backlog is bloated with defense when it needs more offense
And how AI is quietly rewriting the experimentation rulebook while we’re still arguing over sample sizes
Come for the hot takes, stay for the data.
Register here - and yes, it’s totally free!

Always, always, always start with activation

Did I mention you should start with activation!?

Too often, companies kick off Growth by chasing surface-level problems - low acquisition, free-to-paid conversion, or weak retention. So they spin up a squad to fix that one thing.

But here’s the catch: those are usually symptoms. The real disease? Poor activation.

15 Product Onboarding Best Practices for 2023

You can spend all day driving traffic and launching pricing experiments, but without activation, it’s just churn with extra steps (I’m coining this phrase).

Fix activation, and suddenly monetization improves, retention goes up, and acquisition loops actually start to work. Truly, like magic.

Here’s a tight list of 5 core responsibilities for the Activation Squad:

Define and measure activation: Identify the real "aha" moment and track the behaviors that lead to it.
Optimize onboarding: Design flows, prompts, emails, and guided experiences that get users to value.
Shorten time-to-value: Remove friction in setup, offer templates, and surface the right features at the right time. Every minute counts here, people!
Drive early engagement and habit loops: Use nudges, reminders, and in-product cues to reinforce key behaviors.
Accelerate team activation (for B2B): Encourage invites and collaboration to get full accounts activated, not just individuals.

For example, in Miro, true activation isn’t drawing a sticky note. It’s collaborating with someone else - that’s when the product really clicks, all measured on Weekly Active Team basis.

→ Metric ownership: a number of activated accounts. Hint - you should be activating 40-50% of your ICP sign ups.

So before you optimize conversion or retention, fix activation. Every. Single. Time.

Check out a post I did on “I bet you are doing product activation all wrong.”

Then, address monetization

Now that you’re reliably getting users to value, it’s time to make all the moneys. 💸

And here’s why monetization should always come after activation: First of all, better activation will drive better monetization on its own. Second of all, once activation is humming, you’ll have more engaged users that may look slightly different (adjacent users and all)… but not all of them will be paying. That’s a clue to:

Optimize your monetization for awareness and conversion (your newly activated users may not even know what’s behind the paywalls)
Fix your pricing and packaging that is no longer aligned with the users you’ve successfully activated.

Enter the Monetization Squad: their job is to turn value into dollars by focusing on:

Free-to-paid conversion
Plan upgrades and expansion revenue
Churn reduction
Paywall placement and messaging
Add-ons, reverse trials, promos, and upgrade nudges
Pricing model experiments (value metric, plan structure, etc.)

Basically, all the levers that turn product usage into predictable, scalable revenue. Top line metric this team owns is total number of paying users + revenue per user, focusing on both inflow (conversion) and renewals (paid churn).

And remember: monetization isn’t just about price tags - it’s about matching willingness to pay with perceived value, and making sure your packaging reflects the journey users actually go on.

Relevant reads:

Next up, acquisition

At this point, you’ve activated your users and started monetizing them. Now it’s time to pour the fuel on the engine by bringing in MOAR users.

This is when you should build a Growth squad focused on acquisition to lead TOFU initiatives like product-led growth loops, virality, user-generated content, growth marketing, and new channels.

The key here is that acquisition only truly makes sense after you’ve solved activation and monetization. Otherwise, you’re pouring water into a leaky bucket. But once those foundations are in place, acquisition becomes a high ROI lever. You’re feeding more users into a system that you already know can activate and convert.

Activities of this squad are:

Own top-of-funnel growth: Drive qualified traffic through paid, organic, and referral channels.
Optimize conversion paths: Test and improve landing pages, sign-up flows, and CTAs to boost visitor-to-signup rates.
Build and scale growth loops: Implement viral, content, or partner-driven loops that self-reinforce over time.
Experiment with new channels: Rapidly test emerging platforms, influencers, SEO wedges, and performance marketing bets.
Improve targeting and messaging: Personalize acquisition by segment, intent, or use case to increase relevance and impact.

Notice I combined growth marketing (like paid channels) with product-led growth activities (like virality), because having a single acquisition team is an underrated superpower. Their north star? Sign ups (within ICP, of course).

Relevant reads:

With the activation - monetization - acquisition loop set up, you can now close the cycle by creating a retention squad.

End with retention

I know - sounds counterintuitive. Retention is the KING, they say. How dare I to ignore it for so long. But here’s why: retention should already be owned by Core Product. If Growth is responsible for merging users onto the highway (aka your product), Core *should* keep them moving and retained - by adding features, driving feature usage, fixing bugs, and improving product performance.

Unlike activation and monetization (which often fall into ownership no-man’s land), retention usually gets some love from the start (that is how, after all, product-market fit is measured). So instead of diving in headfirst, Growth should start by spotting blind spots and amplifying what’s already working - not duplicating core efforts.

That said, Growth can still play a big role in retention through systems and nudges that reinforce behavior - like reward loops, notifications, or lifecycle comms. These are amplifiers, not core infrastructure.

Typical work includes:

Lifecycle communications: Email, push, in-app nudges triggered by behavior (or lack of it)
Habit-building flows: Streaks, milestones, reward loops, or progress tracking
Re-engagement tactics: Winback campaigns, personalized prompts, feature resurfacing
Completion flows: Nudging users to finish projects, tasks, or workflows that drive retention
Usage analytics + segmentation: Identifying drop-off points and targeting users before they churn

The metric they will own will be Daily/Weekly/Monthly active users/teams/workspaces.

Rogue growth squads

As your Growth organization matures, you might feel the need to add a few more rogue squads:

Growth infrastructure squad

Once you have three Growth squads set up, you’ll start to accumulate tech debt, platform needs, and process gaps. That’s the time to create a Growth Infrastructure squad.

This team doesn’t run experiments, they enable them.

They’re responsible for A/B testing, in-app messaging tools, email platforms, billing systems, authentication platforms, and shared growth surfaces. Their goal is to remove friction from all other Growth squads, allowing them to focus purely on Growth work.

Experimentation squad

This squad is a privilege, and not every company can afford it.

But if you’re lucky enough, a rogue experimentation squad can be one of the most powerful assets in your Growth organization.

They’re not tied to any specific metric, lever, or squad. Instead, think of them as a SWAT team that moves across the entire user journey, hunting for the biggest untapped opportunities.

They test bold ideas, explore non-obvious hypotheses, and surface patterns that don’t fit into activation, monetization, or acquisition, but might lead to the next breakout initiative.

Loop specific squad

A Growth Squad focused on a specific growth loop (e.g. referrals, content, product virality, integrations, etc.) is all about building compounding systems, not just one metric. These teams aren’t chasing one conversion point - they’re creating repeatable, scalable engines that feed the business continuously. Aka loops.

They’ll obsess over removing friction from the loop, improving the “why” and “how” users share or invite, and baking incentives directly into the product experience. Done right, these squads can turn one customer into many - without paid acquisition.

Loop-focused squads only make sense when there’s a dominant loop already embedded in the product’s DNA - something that naturally drives growth as users engage. Think: file sharing in Dropbox, collaboration in Figma, or user-generated templates in Canva. These loops aren’t side features - they’re core to the product experience and central to how the product spreads.

Check out how my Growth team was set up at Dropbox, with one squad being exclusively responsible for sharing - a major growth loop.

Growth should be ~25% of your R&D budget

If you’re wondering when to start heavily investing in Growth, here’s my take: for startups, the sweet spot is usually around $30M in ARR. That’s when you’ve validated product-market fit, have a meaningful user base, and can start running experiments with real data.

Now, how much should you invest?

Growth is one of the four R&D specializations (the other 3 being Core Product, Infrastructure, and Innovation). Your budget should be split somewhat evenly across the four.

There will be times when you either ramp up Innovation or tone it down, depending on the company’s stage. But, overall, Growth should account for 25% (max. 30%) of your R&D budget. That is assuming that PLG and self-serve are central to your product strategy, of course.

Elena's Growth Scoop

Discussion about this post