How to Build & Structure a Growth Team That Actually Works

It’s easy to say you want to grow. It’s harder to build the team that makes it happen. Growth doesn’t happen just because everyone says it’s important. For a growth strategy to succeed, a dedicated team with clear roles, solid process, and the right structure is essential.

Here are the key things to think through when hiring and structuring a growth team, plus how to make the setup work for your organisation.

When to Invest in a Growth Team

A growth team becomes particularly valuable when:

• Product‑market fit has been achieved.
• Revenue has reached a stable base.
• The business wants to accelerate scaling.
• There’s a need to improve conversion, retention, or expand customer base.

In other words: when growth can be measured and there are levers to pull, it’s time to invest.

What Roles & Specialisations to Consider

A strong growth team typically covers multiple skillsets—not all at once, but growing over time. Here are key areas:

• User Experience / Product Optimisation
  Focuses on improving the journey users take. Reduces friction, boosts engagement, and ensures people stick around.
• Top‑of‑Funnel & Acquisition
  Creative ideas, marketing strategy, content, SEO, partnerships—anything that brings new users in.
• Strategy, Pricing & Retention
  Later‑stage growth: optimising pricing models, improving retention, cross‑selling or upselling, and developing expansion opportunities.

Each specialisation brings different strengths. The goal is not to hire every role immediately, but to sequence hires so that each stage builds on what came before.

What to Look for in Early Growth Leaders

In the beginning, ideal growth leaders tend to:

• Be comfortable wearing multiple hats—experimenting, analysing data, thinking creatively.
• Have strong analytical and measurement skills: defining what “good” looks like, testing, iterating.
• Be able to interpret metrics, funnels, and customer behaviour.
• Be adaptable and growth‑oriented: willing to try, fail, adjust, and try again.

Senior growth leaders may bring experience across acquisition, conversion, retention, or expansion, depending on what stage the company is at.

Structuring the Team: Models & Reporting

Here are a couple of effective structures to consider:

• Dedicated Growth Team
  A standalone unit focused entirely on growth. Clear ownership, accountability for growth levers, and direct alignment on measurable goals.
• Cross‑Functional / SWAT Model
  People from marketing, product, engineering, design, etc., come together for specific growth projects or experiments. Useful for rapid iteration and when resources are lean.

One thing to watch: unless someone is responsible for growth outcomes, growth efforts risk being deprioritised. Clear ownership, paired with cross‑functional execution, tends to work best.

Scaling the Team Over Time

As growth becomes more predictable and investments scale, you’ll likely need to:

• Add specialists in engineering or product to build features or infrastructure that support growth.
• Introduce roles focused on retention, expansion, and customer success.
• Increase capacity for testing, experimentation, and data analysis.
• Ensure proper tooling, analytics, and platform support to measure and scale successful experiments.

Growth is not a single hire—it’s a team and a system.

Ask These Questions Before Making Growth Hires

To decide whether a candidate or role is right for your growth team, ask:

• “What experiments have been run before? What worked, what didn’t, and why?”
• “Which part of the customer journey needs the most attention now based on current metrics?”
• “What would major obstacles look like over the next few years?”
• “Can this person grow into broader responsibilities as the company grows?”

Final Thought

A growth team doesn’t fix everything—but done right, it can unlock sustainable momentum. With clarity on structure, roles, ownership, and stage‑appropriate hires, growth becomes something you manage, not something you hope for.