4. Hiring a Growth Team to Scale with Focus and Discipline
- Abhishek Patil Co-Founder, GrowthX
Abhishek outlines the essential roles for a growth team, explaining what to look for in a PM, marketer, engineer, designer, and analyst, and why hiring for aptitude and expertise in specific channels is critical.
There are five key roles you need to fill up when hiring a Growth team — a PM, a Marketer, an Engineer, a Designer and an Analyst.
For the PM role, hire somebody who understands hypotheses. Typically, hire a PM who understands backend and frontend tech and also slightly understands marketing.
You don't need to hire a seasoned Growth PM when you're starting out at a pre-seed stage. That's for Series A. At your stage, hire people with great aptitude and understanding of how to solve problems.
Along with the PM, you need a T‑shaped marketer — somebody who is great at one channel. To figure out the best person to hire, start from your industry and your major acquisition channel.
This marketer’s core competence should be in that channel. Every other skill can be learned. But they should have expertise in the one channel that’s most important to you.
Let’s say you are Grammarly. Their whole model is based on the CAC to LTV ratio, and they invest a lot of money in paid ads. So, their whole growth team has to be experts in performance marketing.
Alternatively, if I’m selling employee insurance, my target will be LinkedIn and Twitter because that’s where most of my buyers are.
While hiring a marketer, think about your ideal customer who will make the buying decision. Consider the channel they are spending most of their time on. Your t-shaped marketer in the growth team should spend most of their time on those channels. So, figure out which channel will work and then only hire the marketer.
For the full-stack developer, try to optimize for the person who is great at the backend because you will also have designers to help out on the front end.
But ensure this person gets your work done as quickly as possible. Do not hire a big-tech engineer.
Pay as much as you want. You will get 100x ROI on it. Do not compromise on engineering quality. Six months later, when you are going full throttle into growth, you will regret it.
It is a great advantage if the engineer has worked in marketing intelligence, advertising, ed-tech, or something similar. They will work with people who will mainly discuss marketing and products, and such experience will help them communicate.
There are no specifics for designers. Just make sure that you get young folks with great proof of work and great Dribble and Behance profiles. Don’t go by which companies they belong to, because designers with brand names will be much more expensive. If you try to hire an average designer from Cred, they will cost you 30 to 40 lakh rupees.
Even for analysts, don’t hire somebody who can just run SQL queries. That’s not the person you want. Hire a kid who understands SQL queries and can also talk to the product manager about the insight.
You want an insights person, somebody who loves going into the details and understand why the churn rate is what it is, why the retention curve is falling, how different cohorts are behaving and so on.
This is what the insights person has to do. So, you need somebody who is super excited about data and always coming back with insights.
Once you’ve hired the growth team, the next question is who they should report to. When there are less than ten people at the pre-seed or seed stage, the Founder is the PM.
As an early-stage founder, you are not hiring a PM. You cannot hire somebody else to do that job when there is such high ambiguity. They will never have as much context as you have.
At early stages, the team can report to the Founder. But once you're, say, a 200-person company, Growth teams typically report to the Head of Product. Only in very sales-driven companies do Growth teams report to CMOs. They have figured out the product, know what pricing will work, and are very sales-driven.
But then again, you realize what your organization’s DNA will be, and that’s how you decide on the reporting. This can also change depending on which quarter you are focusing on what.
At Cred, for example, the Growth team used to report directly to Kunal. This is much easier if you have multiple co-founders because then one of you can always look after Growth.
Abhishek discusses the reporting structure for growth teams, the importance of aligning them with the right metrics, and how to differentiate between growth and revenue teams based on your business goals.
It can be challenging to differentiate between your growth and revenue teams. It’s a simple litmus test.
What's your north star metric right now for the business? If it's revenue, you don't have two teams. You have one team. Your growth team is your revenue team. But if your north star metric is not revenue, then your growth team and revenue teams are different.
Growth teams are only optimized for that one growth metric. For example, in product led companies, growth teams will often be responsible for DAUs. These teams can’t take up two goals. That’s not how growth teams could function.
When you work on products whose future LTV is sometimes unknown, like Dunzo or Cred, the way you get the Growth team to move the revenue metric is by asking them to focus on getting the right kind of users. You focus your Growth team on an input metric like user quality.
Growth teams can't always move the revenue metric, because they can't influence it. But they can acquire the right kind of users based on their appetite to pay, their credit score, their credit cards or whatever your qualification criteria might be.
For example, in Dunzo he lives in Indiranagar, these are pet supplies, so he has a dog, so he must be high LTV. All of that, right. So, you give that as a signal for user quality.
Another important question you can ask is what’s your biggest acquisition channel right now? That’s an piece to figuring out what your growth team would look like.
For example, if you want to build something like referrals as an acquisition channel, you will have to have a product driven org behind it. This team cannot be sales-led.
Because initiatives like consumer referrals won’t work one is to one. You have to build a product for people to refer others. Your growth team will only look at this. If you don’t have anybody looking at that separately, it’s going to be too stressful for you.
A full-fledged growth team should be post PMF. Because by post PMF you’re very clear what you’re to go after. Because there’s no point discussing growth if you don’t have PMF.