Building Your First Growth Team?

A Blueprint to Implementing Startup Growth and Making the Right Hires

Read Time: 3 mins

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The Growth Team Playbook

Build Your Startup's Growth Engine (Without Breaking the Bank)

Most founders ask me: "When should we hire our first growth person?"

Right idea, wrong question.

The real question should actually be “How do we start implementing growth strategies?”

Before this point, you’re not ready to hire a growth expert. ❌

Avoid accumulating growth debt and remain scrappy. ✅

Where are you? Need help? Reach out for guidance.

The Growth Debt Problem 💰

Here's what's happening at 90% of startups: Teams spend months building features that users never discover. You've got this amazing product suite, but your activation rates are terrible and you can't figure out why.

Sound familiar? You've got growth debt.

Growth debt is like technical debt, but worse. It's when you build capabilities without optimizing for adoption. Six months later, you're sitting on unused features wondering why growth has stalled.

This will sink you faster than the titanic. ⛴️☠️

The 3+1 Sprint Framework 🏃‍♀️

Andy Budd from Seedcamp (recent guest on my podcast) shared a brilliant approach that prevents this trap:

Before Series A: Run 3 sprints building features, then 1 sprint optimizing for adoption. Repeat.

Post Series A-B: Hire that analytical designer who gets excited about conversion rates and behavioral science.

Series B+: Build your "Navy SEAL" growth squad.

The Navy SEAL Approach 💡

Traditional product teams get features to build.

Growth teams get problems to solve.

It’s targeted and intentional. Instead of "Build user onboarding flow," they get "Activation is down 15% this month - fix it."

That’s why growth is the ultimate skill for tech professionals.

It requires you to understand the impact of your work.

Key insight: If it’s an acquisition or activation focus, position your growth team between product and marketing. This can prevent territorial battles that kill momentum.

3 Growth Team Essentials

✅ Short-cycle experimentation over long-term roadmaps

✅ Problems to solve instead of features to build

✅ Analytics-driven designers who speak business language

The Essential Bytes

→ Growth debt kills more startups than bad products

→ Growth teams solve problems, product teams build capabilities

→ The 3+1 sprint model prevents feature graveyards

Your Next Step

Audit your last 3 months of development. How many features shipped versus growth experiments run? If it's more than 5:1, you might be accumulating dangerous growth debt. 😵

What's your current build-to-optimize ratio? Comment if you have questions. 💬

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Startup Advising

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Conscious Product-Led Growth Immersion

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