Growth. What are you and where do you belong?
The 20,000ft birdview on a topic that can go wrong oh so easily
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Congratulations, you have been promoted to be the CEO of your company. And your first item on the list is to figure out where to put this new thing in the company called “Growth”.
Half of the people in your company mix it up with Marketing. The other half is too afraid to ask what these “Growth” people should do.
There is something different about “Growth” compared to the other functions.
It’s like an awkward uncle at a family meeting. Everyone knows him, but you’re not quite sure at which table you seat him. Marketing? The Sales table? Is it Product? Who watches Uncle “Growth” so he doesn’t misbehave?
It’s a conversation I’ve had so many times through 2023 that I would like to address it more holistically and also outline what makes this entire discussion so tricky. Let’s map it out.
For f*** sake, what are you “Growth”?
I’ve changed my attempts to explain how I define “Growth” throughout the year as a company function.
Here’s the one that I find the most flexible and yet accurate:
If you think about Marketing, Sales, and Product as functions that form a company that can function, then Growth is more often than not the glue between Marketing and Product to fix an extremely jarring gap:
The activation gap
I’ve talked about it in my 2024 outlook piece: We are dealing with a lot of problems because we have as people the tendency to say “not my job”. This is less of a problem for the people who are in these functions because of how we have built companies.
Silos are inherently not cross-functional, and Marketing is used to bring traffic, and Product is used to do something with that traffic.
The gap between that is so jarring oftentimes that you have fantastic products that have absolutely terrible onboarding experiences: the activation gap.
Marketing doesn’t care; their job is to bring traffic.
Product doesn’t care; their job is to build a product, not “sell” it.
Growth is very often the glue between the two because it cares about the efficiency between the promises made by marketing and the experience the Product delivers.
So far, so good, but that’s not all:
The expansion of “Product”
Here’s where it becomes funny. Growth is an undercover agent for Product in the company. Because growth teams touch on Marketing and Sales (resp. monetization) functions a bit, they serve an important function in expanding the perception of what your product is.
Onboarding is the context in which your customers can experience your product and how you serve them afterward. All of it is part of your product. And that means it’s a part of the price you charge in the end for it.
Let me say it clearly:
A clear, good, simple onboarding or superior service of your product might have absolutely zero to do with the product you’re selling. Yet it allows you to charge more money in the end for the same thing you’re selling. That’s a growth side effect, because your customer perceives it as part of the product they get.
Especially in SaaS, we are in the business of delivering a service. And while we love thinking that we are only solving a problem with a product, how we bring the product to the customer is part of the product itself.
Growth as a function to activate the user the first time, to bridge the activation gap, is a more or less common concept. How do we bring the users to a trial, which hopefully makes them close with us and pay? (And later expand)
What if I tell you they should also be responsible for reactivating them, taking in part responsibility for retention?
If there are retention problems, you have two ways of solving them:
You change the core product with your product teams
or
You analyze and figure out with your growth teams whether those users can be reactivated (without directly changing the product). For instance, by exposing new features they might not be aware of but they could use.
A great example is if you figure out in your analysis that certain customers are processing a lot of single files even though you have batch tools. Who’s problem is this? Product? Growth?
Are the tools shit? (Product problem)
Are the tools unknown? (Growth problem)
Okay, well… that sounds all really smart. But now we have a problem.
Which table?
So, Growth is more or less defined now. How do you fit it into a classical organizational structure?
The old structure had the advantage that Marketing, Sales, and Product were more or less clearly defined. Growth messes with all of them.
It’s like a horizontal thing going over all of it.
But you are the CEO now, and you need to put it somewhere. Where does it go?
The answer is it depends. That is my favorite cop-out answer. Let’s look at four options you have:
Table 1: Under Marketing
This is fairly common still, but I find it problematic:
Shared marketing budget. It could be seen as an acquisition initiative and get slashed first whenever there are budget cuts.
People internally misunderstanding what “Growth” is (and equating it to Marketing) is already a big problem.
Limited to acquisition, there is little influence or interest in retention/monetization.
Over-optimizes as a result a funnel instead of trying to facilitate users to recommend new users.
This is a problem because of how marketing looks at users. For them, everything is a funnel. A visit is a visit. For a growth team, a recommended user is worth far more than a regular visitor. Not only do users who came recommended have a higher chance of becoming customers, but they might have completely different flows.
A growth team under Marketing will be limited often until the users hit the product, then we suddenly forget that they came recommended or other important context.
Limited Cross-functionality. One core ability of growth is to cover this activation gap between product and marketing. A growth team that is far away from the product will constantly have to ask for resources instead of having them available when needed.
This leads to teams naturally avoiding things that require more complex interactions because it’s cumbersome to ask for help. “Sure, we can help, but not this quarter.”A very common particularity you’ll notice is segmented tooling. For some reason, Marketing uses different tools to work with data than Product, introducing another artificial wall. Making it harder for one function to see how it impacts the other.
Not a fan.
Table 2: Under Sales
Salespeople want to own Growth. They are sitting so close to the revenue that it should be them; at least, that’s what they think.
This is relatively uncommon for a good reason:
It’s problematic due to the short-term focus on revenue (closing). Product-led growth and sales tend to focus on expansion revenue. This just amplifies the overreliance on closing and overselling the customer.
Not focussing on customer success, retention will suffer as a result and just be treated as a nice to have, which gets deprioritized all the time.
Sales goal pressure will treat growth as a servant function (Limited monetization flexibility for lower-value accounts)
This is a reality that product already has to deal with; they are usually treated as servants to sales.
“If we just have this feature, we could close this customer.”
“When is feature X delivered?”
“How does our roadmap look like for the entire year?”
The same happens to growth in that constellation and will push customers to sales even if they don’t need it.
Sales is bad at product management and can’t balance retention well. Growth as a subservient function of Sales does not achieve that either. You end up with an inflexible feature factory that might as well not do any research because its backlog is under the control of sales anyway.
This is, in many aspects, the worst option to be future-proof. Especially if you get disrupted by companies who have better setups, they will get more $ per $ spent because they are more likely to attract long-term revenue.
It's not that great often.
Table 3: Under Product
This is another common setup
Allows access to retention changes (product), not limited to top-of-funnel
Highly collaborative due to product team structure being similar
It might be limited to Monetization influence often sitting in Sales, but is overall solid
The step from classical product teams to growth (product) teams is just not that big of a step:

They share a lot of similarities. I go even as far as bringing product team structures closer to how you would build a growth team. You can check my growth guide for a more detailed breakdown of how to approach that:
Pretty good and standard.
Table 4: With Product
This model is gaining in popularity, and when I’m in an interim position where I can influence that, I’m pushing for this model for a couple of reasons:
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