Building a Startup Growth Team From Scratch
A Founder’s Guide to Creating a Strong Growth Foundation
Jeff Chang | Head of Growth Engineering
Some of the most common questions from founders about growth teams are, who should they hire, and what should the team focus on?
Once a founder has product market fit, it’s off to grow past their initial traction. Enter: the growth team.
What is the growth team’s responsibility?
The priority of the growth team is to build to achieve long-term sustainable growth. In practice, this typically consists of building experiences that contribute to user acquisition, activation, and retention.
How did the Whatnot growth team get started?
The Whatnot growth team started similarly to other engineering teams in the organization. First, by making a few hires to work across key initiatives, and then doubling down impactful initiatives. The unique aspect of the Whatnot growth team is that it is engineering-focused.
How can a startup find its first growth engineering hire?
Growth engineering is a relatively new space, and the talent pool for good growth engineers is small. You might even need to train engineers from scratch. Don’t be afraid to hire less-tenured people with a fast career trajectory.
Like all other hiring, it takes hustle. Your network and the network of your team is key. As a leader, your first hires should come with their own relationships across the industry. Reach out to great people you know and work with recruiters to send out cold emails.
Should a Head of Growth be hired first?
The Head of Growth role should be an opportunistic hire, so hire when you find the best person for the job. This can be an engineering or PM role, as long as the foundation of the team is engineering. A PM Head of Growth should have the proper engineering resources to make an impact. As a plus though, an Engineering Head of Growth makes it easier to hire quality growth engineers in the future.
What types of roles should early startups hire for?
The first hires should be engineers, and then product/design/marketing. If you start by hiring in product or marketing, they might be blocked by engineering. It’s best to start with a foundation of engineering to move at a fast pace.
What qualities should early growth engineering hires have?
Find early team members who are flexible and willing to take initiative. Flexibility is important because, in a startup, there may not be as much resourcing in supporting roles. In addition, hires should be willing to take initiative to own growth end-to-end — from research to ideation to shipping wins.
- Ideation scales with team size
- Everyone feels ownership and responsibility for team goals
- Diverse views prevent bias toward certain opportunities
Founding growth engineers don’t necessarily need growth experience, just a motivation to move numbers and a strong technical capability.
Questions to ask:
- For velocity: Ask how they have executed past projects.
- For analytical ability: Ask which input metrics the company should focus on (this will also help you gauge their understanding of the business).
- For having a big impact: Ask about their motivations. Some engineers look to maximize impact, some look to build technically-complex projects, while others look to build cool products. Go for the first type.
There’s no need to heavily index on senior engineers after the first or second hires. There are few great senior growth engineers out there, and the hustle of early career engineers can be an asset. Experience working in growth at a startup is more relevant than that at a large company, but there are fewer people who fit this description, so they’re harder to hire.
How should the initial team be structured?
Hire the engineer who will likely result in the most impact, not just the one with the most technical experience.
How should the initial team be structured?
Once there have been hires across engineering, product, and design, teams should then own processes end-to-end.
What types of qualities should a startup look for in a Growth PM?
Analytics ability is one of the most important traits of Growth PMs due to its immense value add in growth, in addition to the typical important PM traits like prioritization and building alignment. You’ll also want to hire a PM who can operate projects in a way that overall increases the speed of the team.
Might you be Whatnot’s first Growth PM? Message me on LinkedIn. See other Whatnot roles on our careers site.
A version of this talk was given at the ELC Annual Summit in October 2022 (along with moderator and Whatnot Head of Community Engineering Sophia Feng).
