The Holistic Growth Playbook: Chapter I — Building high-performing Growth Team
Insights from surveying 100 companies and best practices from Loom, Amplitude, Canva, and more.
Being in Product Growth for 6+ years, I continuously sought to connect with industry leaders to gain fresh perspectives and insights.
This personal aspiration became the foundation for Growthmates — a platform for learning from industry leaders and an advising practice that guides companies in growing meaningful products by leveraging PLG and enhancing UX quality, together.
Over the 1st year, Growthmates captured as guests leaders from 20+ forward-thinking companies: Dropbox, Loom, Canva, Adobe, Intercom, and more. As a gratitude for this milestone and as a gift to everyone, we have created “The Holistic Growth Playbook” – a reflection of industry trends, conversations with guests, and special perspectives from respected industry experts.
📌 The concept of The Playbook:
The playbook aims to provide fresh perspectives and inspiration for anyone interested in Product-Led Growth (PLG) and building high-quality products with that approach. It includes frameworks and best practices drawn from Growthmates guests and leading Growth experts:
Insights from 20+ In-Depth Interviews, featuring leaders from Dropbox, Canva, Coda, and more.
Industry Survey Insights from 100+ companies, including participants from Amplitude, Intercom, Appcues, Maze, Atlassian, PayPal, Lokalise, and others.
Frameworks and best practices, based on 6+ years in Product-Led Growth as a Growth Advisor and former Head of Growth Design at Miro, where I started as a founding member of the Growth Team and experienced hypergrowth from a 50-person startup to a Series C Unicorn.
📌 Who is this playbook useful for?
Founders and Company Leaders interested in building and scaling a PLG model across their company at different stages and uplifting the UX quality bar.
Growth, Product, and Design Leaders who drive teams and want to get fresh perspectives from other industry experts.
Product Managers, Product Designers, Researchers, and Marketers who want to get practical frameworks, templates, and actionable insights to apply in action for Product Growth.
📌 What’s inside the full Playbook?
Chapter I Building high-performing Growth Team (full deep-dive here👇)
When it’s the right time to introduce a Growth team
Top-5 Signals for Starting a Growth Team (based on survey insights form 100+ companies)
The evolution of Growth teams structures from Startup to Scale-up
Hiring Criteria for Growth
Chapter II: Emerging Challenges for Growth teams and how to address them
Activation and User Onboarding
Driving Monetisation and Revenue Targets
Building efficient Growth team processes
Uncovering Growth Opportunities
Priorities for Growth teams for the next 12 months
Chapter III: Delivering high-quality experience to drive Product Growth (coming soon)
High-quality principles from the best PLG products
Core <> Growth collaboration for Product and Design roles
Growth Framework to Connect Business and User Needs
In this newsletter issue, I’d like to dive into Chapter I — “Building High-performing Growth Teams”. The intention behind this chapter is to inspire the broader community and give some fresh perspectives to look at their existing or emerging growth teams. I hope you’ll find some useful examples for yourself and your team.
Let’s dive in 👇
When it’s the right time to introduce a Growth team
I’ve been observing the emergence of Product-Led Growth (PLG) since its early days. Since 2015, this approach has gained popularity in companies like Slack, Dropbox, Miro, and has now been adopted by the majority of B2B and B2C SaaS products. These companies started building Growth teams and experimenting with new business models, virality, and engagement, with the primary goal of making users stick to the product, thereby increasing revenue through the self-serve model.
Before discussing specific milestones for introducing the Growth function, it's essential to define what a Product-Led Growth Team is.
A Product-Led Growth Team is responsible for distributing core product value within the product ecosystem and through external channels to attract, activate, engage, and convert users to paid customers with minimal human interaction. Throughout this journey, users adopt the core value of the product, build habits, and ultimately become loyal and trusting paying customers.
Survey insight: Top-5 Signals for Starting a Growth Team
For our first Growthmates anniversary, we launched a survey and gathered insights from nearly 100 companies. The majority of respondents were from early-stage startups, with over half coming from Series-A+ and scale-up companies such as Amplitude, Appcues, Maze, Atlassian, PayPal, Lokalise, Intercom, Cisco, and more.
The insights revealed emerging challenges, priorities, success stories, and various approaches to the PLG model. One of the key questions we asked was:
“What specific milestone or outcome gave you confidence in starting to build a Growth function?”
Here are some signals from both those who have established growth teams and those considering it.
Top-5 Signals for Starting a Growth Team (based on a survey)
Revenue and Financial Milestones (≈30%)
Reaching critical revenue goals or securing significant funding rounds. This includes early revenue targets for newer companies and more substantial financial achievements for those scaling up.
Product-Market Fit and User Engagement (≈25%)
Demonstrating strong product-market fit through high retention rates, user engagement, and key usage metrics. Early signs might include initial user adoption or feedback, while more mature signs involve stable growth metrics.
Organizational Readiness and Strategic Changes (≈20%)
Adjustments in strategy or achieving a certain level of organizational maturity. This may involve recognizing the need for strategic shifts, achieving a certain team size, or the executive team's readiness to adopt new growth methodologies.
Operational Indicators and Challenges (≈15%)
Identifying specific operational inefficiencies or opportunities such as the need to optimize conversion rates or improve activation processes without extensive sales involvement. This also includes overcoming significant business model changes.
Community Building and Engagement Metrics (≈10%)
Developing an active community around the product or achieving specific engagement metrics like referral rates. This signal is especially relevant for businesses leveraging organic growth strategies or those with a strong focus on customer-centric development and word-of-mouth.
Despite the industry's attraction to the PLG model, it's crucial to recognize when your company is ready to make such an investment. While some companies have dedicated Growth teams, the majority are still in the process of building them.
I asked the Head of Product at Manychat (Series A), one of my Growth Advising clients, how they decided to start a Growth team. Here’s what they shared:
It’s an interesting insight and pattern that noticed across other responses as well — defining the Activation metric and its impact on business (NRR) gave confidence to build a Growth team.
The evolution of Growth team structures
Traditionally, the Core Product team focuses on creating and delivering product value, while the Growth team is responsible for distributing this value in a relevant and engaging way to end-users. In the early stages of product development, your initial Product Team often handles both Core and Growth responsibilities.
Even in later stages, both Core and Growth teams are serving one common goal – delivering core product value to end-users and reaching sustainable business growth.
To dive deeper into Growth and Core team differences, I asked leaders from Canva and Loom how they define that:
To conclude this part: each company has its own approach to building a Growth team. Typically, it starts with a small cross-functional team that eventually evolves into a separate function. Next, we will explore some examples of growth structures for companies at different phases: Seed, Series A, and Scale-up.
3 Approaches to Growth Function at Different Phases
1. Startup, Seed (10 people) – Dopt.
I asked
(Co-Founder and CPO at Dopt) to share their approach. Dopt's founding team is handling both Core value creation and distribution through holistic user journeys (PLG). It’s important to build a holistic understanding of ICP and PMF (core value proposition) before making a decision about building a dedicated Growth team. While validating the foundations as ICP and PMF, it’s still possible to balance some first growth metrics (e.g. Retention) with value creation within one backlog.
2. Series A (100+ people) – Manychat.
First, Manychat validated the concept of PLG with a “virtual” team. They defined key metrics (e.g. NRR + Activation), then validated approach with existing team having one shared backlog for Core and Growth initiatives. Once the metric and WSLL got validated over 6+ months, they started building the Growth team. A dedicated Growth team is available when your company matured enough to take holistic Growth loops and work with the whole funnel within that loop. Then it’s best to start building the first Growth team by attracting individual contributors with a “builder” and “generalist” mindset who can cover the whole funnel and execute solutions.
3. Growth at Scale (500+ people) – Amplitude.
As the company grows, the Growth function becomes a complex ecosystem with sub-streams for Acquisition, Retention, and Monetisation, and also requires a better connection between Growth Product, Engineering, and Marketing.
Amplitude Growth streams have focused on both Growth Marketing and Product functions that complement each other, while driving shared metrics. For example, in the Retention sub-stream the teams are focused on Activation and Engagement – marketing is focused on “out-of-product” experiences, and the product is focused on in-product setup and self-serve UX.
Another example of the Growth function at Dropbox was recently shared by
Verna. Check out her article Growth at Dropbox to see how they uniquely structure Growth Product Management and integrate Data within the Growth team.In conversations with founders and employees, I observed a tendency to connect Core and Growth functions. Here are some patterns:
Early-stage Startups started thinking earlier of Product-led Growth.
Companies are thinking of value distribution, while still working on creating this value (Dopt example).
Series C+ and Scale-ups created a deeper alignment between Core and Growth.
This synergy is visible especially when working on strategic initiatives (Loom and Canva examples). Beyond that, some other companies.
Reorganized teams and simplified Growth structure.
At scale, companies noticed duplicative work across streams and started moving some “value creation” teams to the Core Product Groups.
Embedded “Growth experts”.
Companies invite growth expects into Core teams to make the product development approach more data-informed and iterative.
While coordinating Core and Growth collaboration remains challenging, there is now a positive shift towards building synergy between value creation and value distribution. This should lead to higher production quality and more thoughtful Growth strategies.
Next, we will explore some insights on hiring people who should support sustainable Product Growth for years ahead.
Hiring Criteria for Growth
On the Growthmates podcast, we spoke with multiple Growth Product and Design leaders to explore how they attract talent at different company stages. First, let’s take a broader view and look at some insights from our conversation with Tom Scott, who has helped companies attract Top-1% talent at various phases of growth.
We also explored additional examples for Series A/B+ companies and Scale-ups (Series-C and beyond) — you can find them in a full version of the e-Playbook.
When it comes to hiring for Growth Teams specifically, there’s certain criteria that teams can use to evaluate these candidates. On Growthmates, we asked Iain Dowling (Growth Design Lead at Canva) to share his perspective:
During my time at Miro, I had a chance to observe and contribute to the scale of the Growth stream from a single team to a business unit comprising five sub-streams with over 170 individuals. This involved hiring individual contributors (Product Designers, UX Researchers, PMs) and evaluating Group Leaders for Growth. Combining this experience with advising practice and insights from Growthmates, I developed criteria and questions that can help you evaluate and attract the right talent.
To broaden this perspective, I usually ask Growthmates guests how they approach hiring for Growth – here’s a perspective from Janie Lee (Head of Product at Loom):
If you’re building a Growth Team — Check yourself:
If you don’t have a Growth team yet — is it the right time to introduce it?
✅ Check Top-5 Signals for Starting a Growth Team
While Building a Growth Team:
✅ Check the team structures for Startup, Series A, Scale-up
When Hiring for Growth and beyond:
✅ Check the difference Startups, Series A/B+, Scale-ups
✅ Use some of the Hiring criteria and Interview questions
Introducing Chapter II — Emerging Challenges for Growth teams and how to address them
The Playbook continues with best practices from Coda, Dropbox, and industry experts like
, on emerging challenges for Growth. Based on insights from 100+ companies, we uncovered key challenges and collected best practices to help your team address them. In this chapter, you will learn more about:Activation and User Onboarding
Driving Monetisation and Revenue Targets
Building efficient Growth team processes
Uncovering Growth Opportunities
Priorities for Growth teams for the next 12 months
and more!
🎁 Bonus: Resources to get more insights for Growth Teams
- — revealing hidden tactics behind today's best companies for SaaS revenue growth.
Growth Scoop by
— product-led growth, product-led sales, and solopreneurship advice.How To Pick Your Ideal Growth Team Structure by
and on Reforge.- — highly actionable deep dives into the greatest companies' strategies, and growth motions.
- — direct advice for Senior Leadership for Growth at scale.
- — deep dives into succeeding as a PM, product leadership, and how to get your next PM job. Chek their last article with 🔥
Nir and Far by
— the legendary book “Hooked” and more tactics on building transformative habits for work and life.- — product-led news, analysis and knowledge for people who work in tech (especially love their focus on UX patterns!)
P.S. Did you know that I’m also helping companies with different Growth challenges? Book an intro call with me, and I’d be happy to discuss your challenge and explore how I can help.
This is all for today, dear readers. If you found this helpful — please share this with your like-minded colleagues and friends, it would give a huge support for me to continue creating this 💜
Connect with me on LinkedIn and learn more about my work on Growthmates.club.
With best regards,
Kate Syuma
Excellent coverage 👏 and thanks for the mention too!
Love this!
Thanks for the shoutout 🙏