If you told me at the start of my career that my superpower would become building and running stunning teams, I’d have wept tears of relief. My first experience managing someone was pretty awful - but more on that some other time.

But fast forward to today, it's the first and best thing I bring to the table. This skill is a patchwork of failures and the support of amazing teammates.

In this and upcoming posts in my Growth 1-1 series, I'll dive into the habits and structures I've refined through trial and error. This post is a summary of the team make up (who to hire) and the routines (weekly sessions for collaboration) that I keep coming back to again and again.

Crafting the right team

What’s in a Growth Team?

First things first, let me state the obvious - there’s no one-size-fits-all. There are two things you need to consider as a CEO/CMO/VP/Growth Lead:

1. What are the company’s needs?

   Is it a B2B? B2C? Who is your audience? What are their touchpoints? This helps you answer any experience you may need in your team.

2. What are your team needs?

   Are you a generalist? Do you suck at creative ideation? Be honest here. Figure out what you do well, and what you need balanced in your team. Bring diversity of thought and skill - and do not hire mini-me’s. That’s a fast track to an echo chamber.

Identifying these elements gives you a rough sketch of the ideal candidate profile and their potential skill set. But remember, specific and exclusive channel expertise shouldn’t be a hiring priority. Here’s why: Growth teams are typically split into two models: channel-focused or funnel-focused.

1. Channel split assigns experts to each channel (paid, social, TV, etc)

2. Funnel split divides roles based on user/customer stages - like awareness, acquisition, retention

I advocate for a funnel split in early stage startups, given the flexibility it offers in the face of uncertain channel effectiveness. Whether or not thats the best model to use as you grow, is a separate issue- But if we’re talking pre-Seed to Series A - that’s usually what I would recommend.

Focus on hiring for drive, proactivity, and adaptability. The right person can learn and excel in any channel – flexibility and agency are key. I know that’s said across all roles and all functions, but it’s easy to get caught up in the different terminologies used for roles in growth and marketing. It’s hard to keep up with the number of specialisations - but you don’t need to. Look for diversity in their experience. Try to avoid specialists who only have experience in one channel, and when interviewing, keep referring back to that channel. They’re likely to miss opportunities that fall outside of their comfort zone.

In an ideal world, here’s my startup dream team:

Funnel based:

• Awareness lead - this person is responsible for bringing volumes to the startup

• Acquisition lead - this person is responsible for converting the volumes

• Community lead - this person is responsible for driving the network effects

Foundational:

• Creative lead - this person is responsible for your brand’s look & feel

• Growth explorer - this person is responsible for looking at new areas to test, runs the tests, and hands over what has scaling potential (more on this role in a later post - because I strongly believe that it's the make or break of any growth team)

• Growth analyst - this person develops the analysis, and supports teams in their performance and brings focus

Bonus:

• Growth engineer - this person is responsible for any tech needs (website, landing page, product changes that are growth related, etc)

Adapting to constraints:

Obviously, this team is far bigger than what most early stage companies can afford. So adjust accordingly. If I were a one-person lead, I’d probably hire a good generalist-doer first (to free me up for more strategic/explorative work), a then growth explorer with good enough analytical skills, and then a part-time creative. But again, it also depends on what you bring to the table and how deeply you can afford to get involved. Are you a CEO with little marketing knowledge, and need to focus on other things? Or are you a senior Growth lead in need of people who will complement your skills? I, for example, know I’m strong at reading data, creative and strategic thinking, and people management. I look for people who have strong organisational skills, can bring an idea to life, add visuals, and have good attention to detail.

You’ve got your team, now what?

Once you have your team in place - where do you go from here? I’ll dive deeper into workflows, squad structures, and developing initiatives in later posts, but for now, let’s look at the two basic skills you want to foster and develop in every team: Creativity and analysis. With the right routines, you’ll enable the two attributes to shine and work together.

Generally, we think of growth people as split into two: either creatives, or analysts. The truth is, while you’ll build a team with diverse skills, you need to foster and develop both in each team member. Don’t leave your analysts out of creative sessions, and don't take your creatives out of analytics reviews. You run the risk of ending up with a team that creates a beautiful brand that doesn’t actually lead to what you want: results.

So how do you leverage the two? Intentionality. Make time and space for both - and invite everyone to contribute.

With a lot of trial and error, I’ve ended up with a weekly calendar that I keep reusing with every team. Here’s what that looks like:

• Monday: Data and performance review, rotating the host to ensure wide understanding and diverse interpretation of data. It’s uncomfortable at first, but you’ll soon reap the benefits when your junior creative hire comes and says “so I was looking at our conversion stats and think there’s something in this cohort that we can boost by doing x, y, z” - queue happily ever after for your team.

• Wednesday: Collaborative creative session! Here we tackle creative brainstorming and discuss blockers or opportunities - as a team. We talk about narratives, creative campaign ideas, etc. Push your team to let all the bad ideas out first - you don’t want anyone to censor themselves, you want a really open, creative, transparent session where no idea - no matter how eccentric it is - is left unsaid.

• Friday: Games. It may sound ridiculous (what do you mean, you spend +$800 of people’s hours per week to play games?!). But the truth is: You can’t run a good growth team without creativity, trust, and openness. And there’s no better way to tap into these than through play. Setting aside time to be playful allows you to bring that “secret sauce” into your team’s day to day. One of the best teams I ever worked with managed to reduce CAC by 70% within 6 months. I can guarantee you that without play, we’d be nowhere near that number.

Every team will have different needs, and every startup will have different ways of working. But this structure and routine is one that - with the right adaptations - gives growth teams a solid foundation to come together and build really great stuff.

Building a successful growth team is about finding the right balance between structure, creativity, and team dynamics. Stay tuned for more deep dives into each of these aspects in my upcoming posts. Until then, if you want to chat about building successful growth teams - reach out on sofie@bramble.club