Quick Take #1: Error in Growth Engines
Unify your teams to scale your growth.
Quick Takes are illustrations of complex topics meant to stimulate discussion. Comments are welcome for further exploration.
Most companies separate their teams into “revenue generating” and “revenue supporting” organizations. On the generation side, marketing or sales is responsible for bringing in customers. On the support side, product, engineering, and design are responsible for providing the value that marketing or sales promised.
The two arrows represent the primary communication channels between these two sub-organizations. Marketing and sales are tasked with communicating what is selling and what will sell. Product teams are responsible for validating and reporting on the effort and growth impact of adding new user value.
This topology is error-prone. Insights generated by any team have some level of inaccuracy. The communication of need and impact is “lossy” and requires interpretation by the receiving team. The cycle time for each loop is long enough that adjustments or refinement in need/impact outpace the execution of new features or new marketing/sales activities.
Reducing this error while retaining the organizational structure invites the creation of feedback loops to shorten cycle time and provide more precise inputs for each step of the process.
The resulting system is overly complex. The number of communication events (meetings?) per user acquisition or delivered feature increases exponentially. These deliveries may be more accurate, but the overhead is immense.
What if, instead of separating our teams by revenue generating and revenue supporting, we instead assumed that all teams are responsible for growing the business?
In this model, our efforts are all growth-supporting. Our teams, consisting of marketing, sales, and product folks, are organized cross-functionally to support the end-to-end experience of a user as they flow through the funnel and (hopefully) become long-term users.
The benefit here is that the system is quite simple. Information flows from our inputs to our definition stages, go through testing and development, and feed our outputs, which are the same as our inputs.
With a unified team model, the sources of error are reduced and the number of meetings and points of communication are minimized. We enable our teams to own the definition of user need and the validation of delivered user value while responding more quickly to new information as it arises.
How does your company organize its growth teams? Would you benefit from this unified approach?
Sam Gimbel is co-owner of honest., a product studio based in New York City. In a former life he built out unified growth teams as co-founder of Clark and VP of Product at Clover.