How to Build & Scale "High Growth Teams"

PRINCIPLES >> PROCESS >> TEAM >> TACTICS

One of the biggest mistakes I see in the implementation of growth teams is starting with tactics. A growth team is not defined by tactics. It is first defined by its principles, then its process, then its team, then finally the tactics. Let's talk about why… Most companies start their hunt for growth by searching for the latest & greatest tactics. You can see this in the popularity of the endless posts entitled something like “37 Tactics To Explode Your Growth.” If you find yourself continually reading articles in that vein, stop right now. You are starting in the wrong place.  

(Principles) BALANCE ART + SCIENCE 

Principles are your foundation. They establish the tone for everything else you do. They are the core values that guide your team towards success. They direct the formation of your process, form part of your hiring template for team members, & help make tough decisions when the answer isn’t clear. 

They should be stable - a constantly shifting foundation makes it hard to execute. I recommend reviewing them, & how you are applying them, annually as a team offsite. When choosing your core principles it will be important to decide is growth an art or science? Some praise the creativity of new business hacks. Others praise the quantitative maneuvering of analytical geniuses. That question has been debated. But are we asking the right question?    

The creative juice brings new ideas around storytelling, great copy-writing, unique ad creative, & never tried before growth tactics. But quantitative science helps us measure the largest friction points, validate areas of opportunity, & understand how users behave at scale.    

It seems the better question is how do we balance both? Truly brilliant teams are ones that figure out how to combine the nature of art & science to accelerate growth.  

(Process) MAXIMIZE LEARNING

How does the team come up with ideas? How do they prioritize competing efforts with limited resources? How do they test those ideas? How do they improve over time? Your process answers all of these questions & scales your team’s capacity for generating growth. Think of it as the operating system for your team - a set of frameworks that help the team make decisions, solve problems, evaluate performance, & improve, without you, as the manager, even being in the room. You input goals & by going through specific steps of brainstorming, prioritizing, testing, etc the process spits out tactics that help you reach your goal.

In growing any business we experience constant internal & external change that pushes us to respond & adapt. Maybe a threatening competitor enters the market, one of our customer acquisition channels changes abruptly, or a new platform like mobile enters the market, changing how our users behave. There is one common thread through all of these changes. We can’t control any of them. What we can control is how much we learn & how we apply those lessons. Your process may adapt quarterly. It typically happens when you’re reflecting on learning at the end of an intense goal period.  

Your team may change monthly. You might not add or subtract team members, but as the manager, assess monthly if you have the right people in the right seats & constantly provide nudges to team members on how they can improve.  

Team

You need a mix of people with a common DNA & set of skills organized to execute your process. But what is that DNA? What skill sets are needed? Those are determined by your principles & process, along with the type of problems your team is tackling. After we walk through the process step by step, we’ll talk about how you hire & structure a team around the process.  

Establishing your initial team

1. Recruit utility players, but have a vision for the future. In the early days, you must hire people who can — & want to — wear many different hats. You can’t afford the luxury of hiring specialists who don’t want to work outside their comfort zone in a all-hands-on-deck environment. Focus on complementary skills. Not only will this allow you to cover more areas of expertise, but it makes decision-making easier if there are clear lines of responsibility. It is critical to cultivate & find shared passion. Sure, you may sell your company next year for $100M. But there’s a better chance you’ll be in this for the next 5 years together & you’re going to face a lot of resistance, so you should both be relentlessly passionate & optimistic about the problem you’re trying to solve.

At the same time, that will not be the case forever, so consider what you want the organization to look like as it grows. Build a functional org chart — functions only, no names — as a game plan for the company’s growth. It’s not until you understand the work that needs to be done that you can start thinking about who best to do that work.

2. Build an “A-team” by leveraging benefits that only startups can provide. The best talent attracts the best talent, & having a team with high talent density accelerates your growth. But how do you attract star candidates who may have offers from companies with cafeterias, yoga rooms & masseuses? You should focus on three benefits only startups & businesses experiencing high growth can provide:

• Impact. Every team member makes a visible, significant contribution to the company’s operations, which can be incredibly empowering.
• Exposure. Wearing many hats is one of the best ways to gain a broad range of experience. Don’t know anything about finance, sales, or operations? You will shortly.
• Opportunity. The risk may be higher, but so is the reward. The potential to play a part in breakneck growth is compelling & entirely unique to startups.

4. Don’t hire anyone without talking to back-channel references. Interviews are a poor predictor of performance & ability, & the references provided by a candidate are not necessarily representative. Thomas Layton, oDesk’s executive chairman, believes you shouldn’t even bring a candidate into the office until you’ve talked to a few “back-channel” references — people you found independent of the candidate’s provided contacts. You can even use the references they give you to find the references they didn’t, by asking, “Who else worked with [name] that I should talk to?”

5. Invest in retaining your top performers. Once you’ve built your A-team, you need to start investing in keeping it. To do so, you should focus on the four dimensions that people care about:

• Impact. This continues to be critical. People want to feel like their work is making an impact on the company, & also that the company is making a positive impact on the world.
• Growth & Development. Great people want to get better; one of the most common reasons that big companies lose great people is they feel like they are stagnating professionally. Help your A-players become A+-players by giving them tough challenges.
• Balance. Give people time to pursue what’s important to them outside the office, & also make sure the office is a place where people feel comfortable & interact regularly. Give careful thought to a common area like a lounge or kitchen that people will really use together.
• Financial Rewards. The above three things are important, but they don’t pay the bills. Remember that even if you have limited resources, compensation can come in many forms—including equity, vacation time, perks, & flexibility.

6. Have high standards & make them known. Every person in the company should have clearly defined objectives. This not only makes it clear who is performing & who is not, but it supports professional development & reinforces each person’s impact. & don’t be afraid to protect your high talent density by taking action when these objectives are not met — as our CFO Greg Stanger says, you don’t fire people who are inadequate, you fire people who are not exceptional.

7. Talk to as many people as you can. Joy’s Law, inspired by a quote from Sun Microsystems co-founder Bill Joy, says that “no matter who you are, most of the smartest people work for someone else.” Use that to your advantage by making your ‘team’ broader than just your direct employees; leverage your board members, advisers, friends & families, consultants, freelancers, etc. Don’t let the fear of someone stealing your idea stop you from talking to others, because it’s really execution that makes the difference between success & failure.

These strategies will help you build the strongest team possible, but remember to stay flexible— your team will always be evolving, as your company’s growth transitions from the jungle to the dirt road & eventually (hopefully) to the mainstream highway. Just hang on & enjoy the ride.

(Tactics) SEEK IMPACT & EMBRACE CHANGE

Finally, tactics. Tactics are the output of your process, which is operated by your team. Tactics are the unique combination of parts that form your growth machine. I say unique, because every company’s set of tactics are different. Your job is to figure out the unique combination that makes your growth scale. 

Every team from product, to marketing, to operations indirectly influences growth. This leads to some questions & challenges: “Why have a growth team? Doesn’t everyone own growth?”Your tactics will change weekly, even daily, for some products. You should be constantly testing new tactics & implementing the ones that work, while questioning old tactics for effectiveness. Throw them out if they no longer produce results that align with your goals. 

Embracing Change? The point is a critical one for any company & is the foundation for growth in many aspects. By nature, humans resist change because adapting can be hard & it’s usually a lot of work. We like to think of things as “done” so we can check them off our to-do list, & move on to the next thing. Any great team is ready for & responsive to change, nimble, & always, always adapting. They go beyond adapting, & truly embrace change building their team, processes & tactics around it. 

Frequency Of Change

This pyramid also represents how often each one of these layers should be changing. As you move up the pyramid, the rate of change for each layer increases.

Using This As A Guide

This should give you the basic keys to building the kingdom & helping you prioritize the structure & value of each layer. If you are struggling to build a high value team, please reach out & start a conversation with us.

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