Don't call it a Growth team

In this episode of Datadrivet, Joni Lindgren and Jasmin Yaya answer a question that came up in the Facebook group “Product Owners & Agile Coaches”: how do you start a growth team? Joni’s first piece of advice is the title of the episode. Don’t call it a growth team.

The point is about framing. The team’s job is to experiment widely to find out how the product can grow. In some organizations the language of testing and experimenting reads as just playing around, and in others “growth team” lands the wrong way too. So the hosts argue that you lead with the problem and the shape of the team instead: we need to solve our problem of growing, so we need a cross-functional team. The terminology matters, and it lands differently across organizational cultures.

On where the team belongs, the hosts make the case for putting it under Product rather than Marketing or somewhere else. The reasoning is concrete. The way the work gets done sits closer to product teams, it leans on analysis and technical skill, and staying user-centric is easier when you are measured on product metrics rather than marketing metrics.

On where to start, the recommendation is Activation and Onboarding as the focus of the first experiments. It’s an early, high-impact part of the journey, and a clear place to point a new team before it spreads its attention.

The takeaway is that getting a growth team off the ground is as much about naming, placement and framing as it is about method.

Listen to the full episode of Datadrivet for the full walkthrough of how to set the team up.