Growth Marketing: How I structured my team to help us excel

Do you know how to create a place where your team owns the company goals, has space to grow and autonomy to think outside the box?

Obviously there are no simple or unique answers to that. But one thing is certain: don’t underestimate the org design definition process. It is key to truly creating a growth marketing team.

Although medium and big companies often enforce cultural messages of simplification and fight to lessen bureaucracy, it might not be enough if the business itself isn’t essentialist to its core. It is necessary that the teams’ scope is lean and business growth oriented as it helps to shape how the team thinks, prioritizes and acts.

Let me share my experience with you.

Although it differs, usually marketing teams are structured like this:

Now, I invite you to get to know the example below:

By splitting your team into two different business goals such as Acquisition and Retention you will have the team tailored to achieving the business goals. For example: Maybe you don’t need a PR analyst to acquire new clients because your company is focused on digital channels, so you can place the analyst in the Retention Squad to maintain a good brand-relationship with clients.

Also, some roles will have to be repeated, but that doesn’t mean you need one person for each speciality: you can recruit versatile employees that match different specializations into one role.

You can adapt the structure to better suit your specific needs. For example, if you have a conference-based sales strategy and your budget is low, I truly recommend you to have a horizontal team with specialists that deliver projects to both Acquisition and Retention squads, so you can gain in cost optimization. That is the same for the designer’s team. You could call these teams “corners”.

Nevertheless, your acquisition and retention team leaders need to be as close as possible to other growth peers, like product managers, product designers, engineers and also the business leaders. Also, do not forget the front office consultants and leaders!

Now let’s talk about the gains of this approach:

• Growth mindset: Your team will work to ensure the company goals and not the delivery of communication projects or sales conferences delivered;
• Ownership: If their professional goal is the same as the company’s, then they will own the company goal;
• Autonomy: Your team will go above and beyond the job description box to ensure the team achieves the company goals;
• Professional growth: Your team will also have the chance to learn within different specialisations along with their coworkers. That allows cross-learning and career opportunities;
• Prioritisation: Your team will naturally prioritise actions that will achieve the goal instead of the delivery of communication projects or sales conferences.

What about the losses? Well, let’s look at the downside:

• Different squads can be part of the same company initiative, like the launch of a product or service, and they might not share daily what’s going on. In that sense your team will be spending precious time on rework;
• It might be hard to see what a colleague that belongs in another squad is focused on, so sharing ideas might be hard;
• Branding projects will be stuck right in the middle of both squads.

Okay, that seems bad. But that is exactly where you as a leader need to act upon.

Okay.. So, what is your role as manager?

• Guarantee that the company brand is on track;
• Take good care about company initiatives shared between squads and promote alignment moments;
• Be part of project kick offs and key moments to analyse results;
• Invite both squads to brainstorming moments about the main projects in each squad;
• Invite people to reflect about how the squads can be more aligned and how they can interact better;
• Have key team touchpoints to guarantee sprint alignment;
• And don’t forget about the company goals: have moments to reassess if the team is achieving its objectives.

Well, so far that has worked for me. What can you tell about your experience?

Defining and redefining your team’s scope is essential to success. And you as a team leader are the sole responsible for guaranteeing the team performs well and have opportunities to grow and learn. Prioritise it!

Like Adam Grant said:

“Expertise isn’t about being consistently right. It’s about becoming decreasingly wrong. A hallmark of understanding is the ability to rule out inaccurate theories and flawed evidence, and thereby move closer to the truth. Learning is the art of discarding mistaken ideas.”