The Holistic Growth Playbook: Chapter I — Building high-performing Growth Team

Insights from surveying 100 companies and best practices from Loom, Amplitude, Canva, and more.

Being in Product Growth for 6+ years, I continuously sought to connect with industry leaders to gain fresh perspectives and insights.

This personal aspiration became the foundation for Growthmates — a platform for learning from industry leaders and an advising practice that guides companies in growing meaningful products by leveraging PLG and enhancing UX quality, together.

Over the 1st year, Growthmates captured as guests leaders from 20+ forward-thinking companies: Dropbox, Loom, Canva, Adobe, Intercom, and more. As a gratitude for this milestone and as a gift to everyone, we have created “The Holistic Growth Playbook” – a reflection of industry trends, conversations with guests, and special perspectives from respected industry experts.

📌 The concept of The Playbook:

The playbook aims to provide fresh perspectives and inspiration for anyone interested in Product-Led Growth (PLG) and building high-quality products with that approach. It includes frameworks and best practices drawn from Growthmates guests and leading Growth experts:

• Insights from 20+ In-Depth Interviews, featuring leaders from Dropbox, Canva, Coda, and more.

• Industry Survey Insights from 100+ companies, including participants from Amplitude, Intercom, Appcues, Maze, Atlassian, PayPal, Lokalise, and others.

• Frameworks and best practices, based on 6+ years in Product-Led Growth as a Growth Advisor and former Head of Growth Design at Miro, where I started as a founding member of the Growth Team and experienced hypergrowth from a 50-person startup to a Series C Unicorn.

📌 Who is this playbook useful for?

• Founders and Company Leaders interested in building and scaling a PLG model across their company at different stages and uplifting the UX quality bar.

• Growth, Product, and Design Leaders who drive teams and want to get fresh perspectives from other industry experts.

• Product Managers, Product Designers, Researchers, and Marketers who want to get practical frameworks, templates, and actionable insights to apply in action for Product Growth.

📌 What’s inside the full Playbook?

Chapter I Building high-performing Growth Team (full deep-dive here👇)

• When it’s the right time to introduce a Growth team

• Top-5 Signals for Starting a Growth Team (based on survey insights form 100+ companies)

• The evolution of Growth teams structures from Startup to Scale-up

• Hiring Criteria for Growth

Chapter II: Emerging Challenges for Growth teams and how to address them

• Activation and User Onboarding

• Driving Monetisation and Revenue Targets

• Building efficient Growth team processes

• Uncovering Growth Opportunities

• Priorities for Growth teams for the next 12 months

Chapter III: Delivering high-quality experience to drive Product Growth (coming soon)

• High-quality principles from the best PLG products

• Core <> Growth collaboration for Product and Design roles

• Growth Framework to Connect Business and User Needs

In this newsletter issue, I’d like to dive into Chapter I — “Building High-performing Growth Teams”. The intention behind this chapter is to inspire the broader community and give some fresh perspectives to look at their existing or emerging growth teams. I hope you’ll find some useful examples for yourself and your team.

Let’s dive in 👇

When it’s the right time to introduce a Growth team

I’ve been observing the emergence of Product-Led Growth (PLG) since its early days. Since 2015, this approach has gained popularity in companies like Slack, Dropbox, Miro, and has now been adopted by the majority of B2B and B2C SaaS products. These companies started building Growth teams and experimenting with new business models, virality, and engagement, with the primary goal of making users stick to the product, thereby increasing revenue through the self-serve model.

Before discussing specific milestones for introducing the Growth function, it's essential to define what a Product-Led Growth Team is.

A Product-Led Growth Team is responsible for distributing core product value within the product ecosystem and through external channels to attract, activate, engage, and convert users to paid customers with minimal human interaction. Throughout this journey, users adopt the core value of the product, build habits, and ultimately become loyal and trusting paying customers.

Survey insight: Top-5 Signals for Starting a Growth Team

For our first Growthmates anniversary, we launched a survey and gathered insights from nearly 100 companies. The majority of respondents were from early-stage startups, with over half coming from Series-A+ and scale-up companies such as Amplitude, Appcues, Maze, Atlassian, PayPal, Lokalise, Intercom, Cisco, and more.

PLG Survey participants (April 2023).

The insights revealed emerging challenges, priorities, success stories, and various approaches to the PLG model. One of the key questions we asked was: