Are Product Growth teams an answer to functional silos?
In most organizations, product teams focus on developing features, marketing teams drive acquisition and pipeline generation, and sales teams pursue high-value prospects. But who takes ownership of activation, engagement, conversions, feature adoption, self-serve monetization, and the overall user experience? While it’s often assumed that everyone shares responsibility, in reality, when ownership is too distributed, it tends to fall through the cracks. As a result, key areas like activation, retention, and monetization often lack focus. In my view, this gap gave rise to the emergence of product growth teams in many organizations.
Product growth teams are designed to unite professionals from diverse functions—such as product management, engineering, data, and marketing—around a common goal: driving key business metrics. These teams are composed of individuals dedicated to growth efforts, sharing the following key characteristics:
- Data-driven decision-making
- High execution velocity
- A focus on moving business metrics
- Flexibility to pivot across initiatives
Product growth teams may report either to traditional product management and engineering functions or to an independent growth function. Since this is a relatively new discipline, there’s no standardized approach to running these teams. However, their efforts typically revolve around the following areas:
1. Identifying growth opportunities:
These teams spend considerable time analyzing data, brainstorming, and collecting ideas to uncover growth potential. They often rely on product analytics to visualize funnels and business intelligence tools to spot gaps.
2. Creating targeted user experiences:
They design and automate personalized experiences both inside the product and through external channels (such as email and websites) to drive user conversions and feature adoption.
3. Experimentation-driven growth:
Product growth teams prioritize experimentation, constantly running tests to measure outcomes and validate their strategies.
4. Building a growth platform:
They work to integrate analytics, experimentation, onboarding, messaging, and personalization into a cohesive system, enabling the broader product organization to scale growth efforts.
In conclusion, product growth teams have emerged as a solution to the functional silos between product, marketing, data, and sales teams. As long as these silos exist, growth teams will continue to drive value by improving collaboration, efficiency, and business outcomes.