Updated: June 19, 2025- 14 min read
Every product team hits a ceiling. Sometimes it’s slow growth. Sometimes it’s a stalled funnel. Sometimes it’s just… lack of talent. Speaking from experience, that’s when companies realize that surface-level advice and a team that “knows the theory” of product-led growth strategy is not enough. You need a team that’s focused and well-versed on unlocking growth.
That’s where the growth team comes in. Not as a marketing gimmick, but as a cross-functional engine that meticulously tests, learns, and removes friction at every step of the user journey.
In this one, we’ll break down what a growth team really is, how it fits into a product-led organization, and how to put together a structure that actually drives impact. We’ll also look at the key roles inside a growth team, how other known companies structure theirs, and what it takes to go from good product to real traction.
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What Is a Growth Team?
A growth team is a cross-functional group focused on accelerating user and revenue growth through rapid experimentation, data-driven product management, and tight collaboration across product team, product marketing, engineering, and data analysis.
Some teams — especially startups — refer to this as a growth hacking team. While the term gained traction during the early days of product-led growth, the modern version goes beyond hacks. Today’s growth teams are not just running experiments for quick wins, they’re building systems that scale.
Unlike traditional product or marketing teams that might focus on building or promoting features, growth teams are tasked with finding and scaling what works.
They test, learn, and optimize every step of the user flow — from customer acquisition and user retention to monetization strategies.
Growth teams gained traction in the early 2010s, thanks to companies like Facebook, LinkedIn, and Airbnb. These companies realized that growth wasn’t a side effect of a good product. It was a function that deserved its own focus, goals, and team.
Let’s take a closer look at how these teams actually work.
The purpose of a growth team
The primary purpose of a growth team is to remove friction and unlock opportunities across the product lifecycle.
This often includes:
Improving activation and onboarding
Driving personalized upsells or expansion
Optimizing growth loops and virality
Experimenting with product pricing, paywalls, and feature gating
Identifying and doubling down on high-performing acquisition channels
In short, growth teams don’t own the entire product. Instead, they own the OKRs tied to growth.
How growth departments function within an organization
A well-functioning growth marketing team sits at the intersection of product, data, engineering, and marketing. It’s a focused unit that plugs into the company’s broader product goals but operates with agility and autonomy.
“To do product-led growth at scale, you have to run tests. That's the ultimate way you learn and iterate. Instead of debating that hypothesis for days, you go test it fast.”
— Karen Ng, SVP of Product at Hubspot, on The Product Podcast
Growth teams typically:
Work in short cycles, running frequent A/B tests or iterative testing
Use data to inform every hypothesis, often with dedicated Data Product Managers
Prioritize impact over perfection, shipping MVPs and other types of prototypes
Collaborate closely with core product teams but stay laser-focused on Product Adoption Metrics like conversion rate, churn, or lifetime value
In larger organizations, the growth team might report into product or even operate as its own department. In startups, the “growth team” might start as one person wearing multiple hats. The key is focus on answering who’s thinking about growth, full-time.
What makes growth teams different from product teams
At a glance, they might look similar. But their mindset, process, and product success metrics are different.
Traditional product teams focus on product development process, feature roadmaps, and long-term user value.
Growth teams focus on optimizing the journey around that product. They are locked in on turning more signups into power users, more free users into paying customers, and more usage into habit. They generally like outcome-based product roadmaps over other types of roadmaps.
Product teams ask: “What do users need?”
Growth teams ask: “Where are users dropping off — and how do we fix it?”
Both are essential. But growth teams help uncover the hidden levers that drive compounding impact.
How to Build and Structure a Growth Team
Growth happens when smart people with growth skillsets are given the space, structure, and mandate to relentlessly chase outcomes. But here’s the catch: building a growth team isn’t just about posting a few job ads or reorganizing a few roles. It requires alignment, clear strategy, and a willingness to rethink traditional team boundaries.
Let’s walk through what it takes to build a growth team that works. We won’t just chime in on theory, but consider the messy, complex reality of product-led companies.
Start with the why: What problem is the growth team solving?
Before hiring or restructuring, ask why do you need a growth team right now?
There’s a difference between needing growth and being ready for a growth team. Some companies jump in because “that’s what successful startups do,” without defining what problem they’re solving.
You’re ready for a growth team if:
Your core product is stable but underperforming on Product-led Growth Metrics (activation, retention, monetization)
You’re launching a new product or feature and want to accelerate product adoption
Your product teams are overloaded and can’t prioritize growth initiatives
You want a structured way to run experiments and drive learning at speed
This clarity sets the stage for hiring the right roles and aligning stakeholders around what the team is actually responsible for.
Understand the structure: Models for growth teams
Growth teams go beyond a single structure. They evolve based on company size, product goals, and product complexity. There are three common models:
Independent growth team
A standalone team with its own product manager, data product manager, engineers, product designers, analysts, growth marketers, and more. Independent growth teams often function as a “mini startup” inside the company. They move fast, test hypotheses, and ship experiments independently of the core product roadmap. Best for companies with the resources and leadership buy-in to give growth its own lane. Works well at scale.Embedded growth function
Growth specialists sit within core product teams and own specific success metrics. For example, you might have a growth-focused PM and engineer embedded in the onboarding team, another in the payments team, and another in referrals. Each one owns specific growth metrics related to their domain (e.g., signup conversion, onboarding drop-off, upgrade funnel). Great for aligning growth work with product ownership, but harder to centralize learnings and processes.Hybrid model
A central growth team sets effective growth strategy, AI tools, and frameworks, while embedded members execute across product areas. For example, the central team might define the growth strategy for improving user activation, then work with embedded growth leads in the onboarding, mobile, and core product teams to implement and test ideas. Common in larger organizations where coordination is key but autonomy is needed.
Choose the model that matches your current stage—not your aspirational future. And remember, structure should serve OKRs, not hierarchy.
Build the stack: Key growth team roles
Growth teams are inherently cross-functional. These are the roles you’ll typically see—and why each one matters.
Growth Product ManagerOwns the growth strategy and coordinates experiments across the funnel. Needs strong analytical chops, deep customer understanding, and the ability to prioritize speed over polish. This is not an Associate PM role—it requires judgment.
Growth Engineer
Writes code for experiments, integrations, tracking, and growth loops. Often a full-stack engineer comfortable with quick iteration and scrappy solutions. Should understand the “why,” not just the “what.”Growth Designer
Specializes in flows that convert—signups, onboarding, paywalls, upgrades. Understands behavioral psychology, cognitive load, and how to test ideas quickly without sacrificing usability.Data Product Manager (or Growth Analyst)
Turns product data into insights, builds dashboards, defines success metrics, and helps validate experiments. Without this role, growth teams fly blind or waste time chasing noise.Growth Marketing Manager
Connects the dots between acquisition and in-product experience. Focuses on campaigns, landing pages, messaging experiments, and activation. Especially important in B2C or hybrid PLG/Sales-led models.
In the early days, one person might cover multiple roles—but over time, specialization increases efficiency and impact.
Hiring for a growth mindset: What to look for
Growth is primarily a mindset and then a skillset. The best growth team members share a few key traits:
Comfort with ambiguity and speed
Growth is messy. You’ll be testing things without full information. Hire people who get energy from figuring things out — not waiting for perfect product specification toolbox.Hypothesis-driven thinking
Growth is a game of bets. You want people who can form strong opinions, test them using prototypes, and let go quickly if they’re wrong.Collaboration across functions
Growth sits between silos. You need people who can speak the language of product, design, engineering, marketing, and leadership. They need to move work forward even when lines are blurry.Bias for experimentation over polish
Success often comes from running 100 small tests, not building one perfect user flow. Hire people who care more about outcomes than ownership.
Look for candidates who’ve shipped something experimental, not just maintained something safe. That’s a better indicator of real-world growth ability than any resume keyword.
Set them up to succeed: Challenges to anticipate
Growth teams often face internal resistance. Not because people don’t want growth, but because it threatens existing product priorities. You’ll need to:
Define success clearly (e.g., “Increase activation by 15% in 2 quarters”).
Set realistic timelines (growth experiments compound, they don’t always pop overnight).
Avoid turf wars by aligning with core product teams and showing how growth efforts complement — not compete with — them.
Get executive buy-in early and visibly.
Create air cover for iterative testing, including space to fail without political fallout.
Don’t underestimate the cultural transformation required. A growth team brings a new operating model: fast decisions, small bets, continuous learning. Without support, it can get buried under business-as-usual.
How Real Companies Structure Their Growth Teams
There’s no one-size-fits-all growth team. The structure you choose depends on your product lifecycle, scale, speed, and leadership philosophy. It’s helpful to look at how successful companies have built their teams over time, especially those known for their growth engines.
Here are a few examples that show how theory turns into organizational design.
Facebook: The original independent growth team
Facebook was one of the first companies to treat growth strategy as its own function. It created a fully independent growth team in the early 2010s, complete with its own PMs, engineers, designers, analysts, and data scientists. They owned core parts of the product, like the “People You May Know” feature, friend suggestions, and invite flows.
This structure worked because Facebook had already achieved product-market fit and was laser-focused on scaling to billions of users. The growth team operated like a startup within the company, with executive-level buy-in, a clear mission, and success metrics that mattered (like DAU/MAU and international adoption).
Dropbox: A hybrid model built around growth loops
Dropbox is well known for its referral loop, which drove much of its early exponential growth. But behind that was a hybrid growth team structure. Dropbox had a central growth team that set the experimentation process, identified funnel gaps, and maintained growth tooling. Meanwhile, individual growth contributors were embedded in different areas — onboarding, mobile, shared folders — depending on the focus.
Their growth work touched product, marketing, and customer success, and was deeply integrated with engineering. They ran constant A/B tests, using data to refine every interaction from signup to file sharing.
Airbnb: Growth embedded within the product org
Airbnb took a slightly different approach. Rather than spinning up an entirely separate growth team, they embedded growth responsibilities within core product teams. For example, the host onboarding team had a growth PM focused specifically on activation, while the guest booking team focused on conversion.
They still had centralized support — such as data science and experimentation infrastructure — but most of the growth execution happened within product squads. This allowed growth to stay tightly connected to product experience and product ownership.
Pinterest: From centralized to hybrid as scale increased
Pinterest started with a centralized growth team when it was in the early growth phase. That team focused on fixing funnel issues, running onboarding experiments, and driving SEO-driven acquisition. But as the product matured, the team evolved into a hybrid structure.
Now, they have growth pillars embedded across product areas like international growth, creator growth, and retention. A core growth team maintains growth systems and shared infrastructure. This setup gives them focus on key initiatives while still scaling experimentation across a large organization
Why Growth Teams Should Know Product-led Growth Systems
For growth teams to drive meaningful, compounding results, they need to go beyond surface-level optimizations.
It’s not enough to tweak onboarding flows or run A/B tests in isolation. Long-term growth comes from understanding the systems behind it — the underlying engines that create momentum, sustain user engagement, and feed product expansion.
Two of the most critical systems are growth loops and the product-led growth flywheel. They offer different perspectives, but both help teams shift from linear thinking to exponential thinking. Let’s break them down.
Growth loops: turning outcomes into inputs
Unlike traditional funnels, where users move through a one-way path and conversions eventually "leak," growth loops are closed systems where the output of one user action fuels the input of another.
The image above shows six common types of growth loops:
Referral loops – A user joins, loves the product, and shares it
UGC loops – Users create content that draws in more users
Viral loops – One action (like a share) leads to a cascade of new users
Collaborative loops – A user invites others to use the product with them
Product usage loops – One user’s engagement drives others to engage
Marketplace loops – More sellers attract more buyers, and vice versa
The key insight here is this: growth loops feed themselves.
But they only work when product, marketing, and engineering teams collaborate to design and optimize them deliberately. Growth teams need to identify which loops are native to their product — and where the friction points are that prevent those loops from spinning faster.
If you're only thinking in funnels, you're missing the compounding potential of loop-based systems.
Product-led growth flywheel: aligning teams around user momentum
The product-led growth flywheel reframes the user journey as a cyclical, continuous experience, not a one-time conversion event. It’s built around the idea that users can progress through stages — Strangers → Explorers → Beginners → Regulars → Champions — as long as the product consistently delivers value.
Each stage ties into one part of the user mindset and product experience:
Strangers evaluate the product
Explorers try it for the first time
Beginners start seeing value
Regulars return consistently
Champions advocate and expand usage
As users move through the flywheel, their behavior fuels growth:
Champions refer others, driving acquisition
Regulars adopt new features, increasing retention
Explorers and beginners provide feedback, refining activation
For growth teams, the flywheel becomes a shared mental model. It helps teams ask better questions:
What’s slowing people down between Explorer and Beginner?
How do we help more Regulars become Champions?
What experiments can unblock movement at each stage?
Where funnels emphasize conversion, the flywheel emphasizes momentum—and that’s what modern growth teams need to optimize for.
Growth Teams Are the Engine Behind Modern Product Success
Great products don’t grow themselves. Behind every successful product-led company is a growth team that knows how to turn insight into action, friction into opportunity, and momentum into impact.
Growth teams are system builders. They understand loops, flywheels, and user behavior at a granular level. And more importantly, they align product, data, and marketing around one shared outcome: sustainable product success.
If you want your product to scale, intelligently, efficiently, and repeatedly, build a growth team and thank us later.
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Updated: June 19, 2025
