Growth Teams Are Structured Wrong. Here’s Why They Stall.

A growth team is a cross-functional unit built to identify, test, and scale the levers that drive sustainable business growth, typically sitting across product, marketing, data, and commercial functions. Done well, it is one of the most commercially effective structures in modern go-to-market strategy. Done badly, it becomes a rebranded experimentation squad with no authority, no budget ownership, and no real connection to revenue.

Most growth teams stall not because the people are wrong, but because the structure is. The mandate is too narrow, the metrics are too shallow, and the team ends up optimising the funnel that already exists rather than building the one the business actually needs.

What Does a Growth Team Actually Do?

The label gets used loosely. I have seen growth teams that were essentially paid acquisition squads with a fancier name. I have seen others that were product analytics teams with a growth slide deck bolted on. Neither is wrong exactly, but neither is complete.

A properly scoped growth team owns the full commercial loop: acquisition, activation, retention, and expansion. It is not a department that sits above or below marketing. It is a function that cuts across the business to find where growth is actually constrained, and then removes those constraints systematically.

That sounds straightforward. In practice, it requires the team to have real authority over budget, product roadmap access, and data infrastructure. Without those three things, the team is advisory at best, and decorative at worst.

The go-to-market context matters enormously here. If you are building a growth team inside a business that has not yet nailed its go-to-market motion, you are asking the team to scale something that is not yet working. That is a different problem from asking a growth team to accelerate something that is already working but not efficiently. Most businesses conflate the two. The Go-To-Market and Growth Strategy hub covers the broader landscape of how these functions connect, and it is worth understanding that context before you build the team structure.

Why Most Growth Teams Are Structured Wrong

Early in my career, I overvalued lower-funnel performance. It felt concrete. You could point to it. Conversion rates, cost per acquisition, return on ad spend: the numbers were clean and the story was easy to tell in a boardroom. It took me longer than I would like to admit to recognise that much of what we were crediting to performance activity was going to happen anyway. We were capturing intent that already existed, not creating demand that would not have existed without us.

Growth teams built on this logic have a hard ceiling. They get very good at harvesting the orchard that is already there, but they never plant new trees. Eventually the orchard runs out.

The structural problem is usually one of three things:

• Too narrow a mandate. The team is focused on one part of the funnel, usually acquisition, and has no visibility into or ownership of what happens after the first conversion.
• Too thin a data layer. The team is running experiments without the infrastructure to measure them properly, which means they are generating noise and calling it learning.
• Too little organisational authority. The team can identify problems but cannot fix them because the fixes require changes to product, pricing, or customer experience that sit in other departments with different priorities.

The BCG commercial transformation research is useful context here. The pattern it identifies is consistent with what I have seen across agencies and client-side businesses: growth initiatives fail not because of poor tactics, but because of poor organisational design. The team is assembled, the ambition is stated, and then the business continues to operate in functional silos that make the team’s mandate impossible to execute.

The Difference Between a Growth Team and a Marketing Team

This is a question that comes up constantly, and the honest answer is that the line is blurry and context-dependent. But there are meaningful differences in orientation.

A marketing team is typically organised around campaigns, channels, and brand. It is measured on reach, engagement, leads, and sometimes revenue attribution. It operates on a quarterly or annual planning cycle. It has a budget that is allocated at the start of the year and defended at the end of it.

A growth team is organised around hypotheses and experiments. It is measured on the rate at which it identifies and validates growth levers. It operates on a much shorter cycle, often weekly or fortnightly. Its budget is more fluid because it needs to reallocate quickly when something is working or not working.

The tension between these two modes is real and often productive. The problem comes when organisations try to run a growth team inside a marketing department that is still operating on a traditional planning cycle. The growth team ends up constrained by the marketing team’s cadence, which defeats the purpose.

I spent several years running agencies where the fastest-moving clients were the ones who had separated these two functions structurally, not politically. The marketing team owned brand, content, and channel strategy. The growth team owned the experimentation loop. They shared data and they collaborated on prioritisation, but they operated on different rhythms. That separation is what made both functions work better.

Who Should Be on a Growth Team?

The composition question is where most businesses get distracted. They spend a lot of time debating whether to hire a Head of Growth or a VP of Growth, whether the team should sit in product or marketing, and whether they need a data scientist or a data analyst. These are real questions, but they are secondary to the more important question: what problem are you actually trying to solve?

A growth team solving an acquisition problem looks different from a growth team solving a retention problem. A growth team in a B2B SaaS business looks different from one in a D2C retail business. The composition should follow the constraint, not the other way around.

That said, there are some roles that appear in almost every effective growth team regardless of context:

• A growth lead with commercial authority. Someone who can make decisions, not just recommendations. This person needs to be able to move budget, change test parameters, and escalate blockers without going through three approval layers.
• An analyst who can work fast. Not necessarily a data scientist. Someone who can pull and interpret data quickly enough to inform weekly decisions, not someone who produces polished reports on a monthly cycle.
• A product or engineering contact with genuine availability. Not a liaison. An actual resource who can implement changes when experiments require them. Without this, the team can only test things that do not require product changes, which severely limits what they can learn.
• A channel specialist relevant to the primary growth constraint. If the constraint is acquisition, someone who understands paid media or SEO or content at a technical level. If the constraint is activation, someone who understands onboarding and email.

The Semrush overview of growth tools is a reasonable starting point for understanding the tooling landscape, though I would caution against letting tooling decisions drive team structure. Tools should serve the team’s mandate, not define it.

The Metrics Problem: What Growth Teams Should Actually Measure

When I was judging the Effie Awards, one of the consistent patterns in the work that did not win was the reliance on metrics that were easy to move. Engagement rates. Click-through rates. Cost per lead. These numbers can all improve while the business is going backwards. They are not wrong to track, but they are not sufficient as primary measures of growth.

Effective growth teams anchor their measurement to metrics that are hard to fake: revenue per customer, net revenue retention, payback period, customer lifetime value relative to acquisition cost. These numbers are harder to move, which means they are more honest signals of whether the team is actually creating value or just creating activity.

The secondary metrics, the ones that predict movement in the primary metrics, are where the day-to-day work lives. But the team needs to be clear about which metrics are leading indicators and which are the actual outcomes. Conflating the two is one of the most common ways growth teams lose credibility with the rest of the business.

There is also a measurement infrastructure question that gets underestimated. Vidyard’s research on GTM teams points to a consistent gap between the pipeline data businesses think they have and the pipeline visibility they actually have. Growth teams that are operating on incomplete or unreliable data are not running experiments. They are running guesses.

The Experimentation Trap

There is a version of growth team culture that fetishises experimentation velocity. Run more tests. Ship faster. Fail faster. The logic sounds right, but in practice it produces teams that are very busy and not very smart.

The problem is that running tests is easy. Running tests that teach you something useful is hard. A test that is underpowered statistically teaches you nothing. A test that is run for two weeks when the buying cycle is six months teaches you nothing. A test that changes three variables simultaneously teaches you nothing about which variable mattered.

I have managed teams where the weekly experiment count was a point of pride. It took a while to reorient the culture around the quality of learning rather than the volume of tests. Once we did, the number of tests we ran went down and the number of useful decisions we made went up. The business results followed.

The discipline required is not just methodological. It is about being honest with the business about what you know and what you do not know. Growth teams that overstate the confidence of their findings to maintain internal credibility end up making bad decisions at scale. The culture has to reward intellectual honesty, including the honesty to say a test was inconclusive.

Where Growth Teams Fit in the Go-To-Market Structure

The organisational placement question matters more than most businesses acknowledge. A growth team that reports into the CMO operates differently from one that reports into the CEO or the CPO. The reporting line shapes the mandate, the budget access, and the political capital the team has to make things happen.

There is no single right answer, but there are some useful principles. Growth teams that sit inside marketing tend to be stronger on acquisition and weaker on product-led growth levers. Growth teams that sit inside product tend to be stronger on activation and retention but weaker on demand generation. Growth teams that report directly to the CEO or a dedicated Chief Growth Officer tend to have the broadest mandate but also the highest expectations and the least structural support.

The BCG work on marketing and HR alignment in go-to-market strategy makes a point that is easy to overlook: the structural alignment between functions is often more predictive of commercial outcomes than the quality of the individual functions themselves. A brilliant growth team that cannot get product resources or data access will underperform a decent growth team that has both.

The GTM context is also shifting. GTM execution is getting harder across the board, partly because buyers are more informed and more sceptical, and partly because the channels that used to work predictably are now more competitive and more expensive. Growth teams that were built for a lower-friction environment need to adapt their models, not just their tactics.

The New Audience Problem

Think about a clothes shop. Someone who tries something on is many times more likely to buy than someone who walks past the window. The window display creates awareness. The fitting room creates consideration. The growth team’s job is not just to improve the conversion rate inside the fitting room. It is to get more of the right people through the door in the first place.

Most growth teams are very good at the fitting room. They optimise the experience, reduce friction, improve the offer. But they are often structurally disconnected from the window display, which is the brand and content work that creates the audience in the first place. That disconnection is why growth teams plateau.

Reaching new audiences, people who have no existing intent and no existing relationship with the brand, requires a different set of tools and a different set of metrics. It requires patience that is structurally difficult for a team that is measured on short-cycle experimentation. But without it, the growth team is competing for a fixed pool of demand rather than expanding the pool.

Creator partnerships are one of the more effective mechanisms for reaching genuinely new audiences at scale. Later’s work on creator-led go-to-market campaigns is worth reviewing for teams that are looking to extend reach without simply increasing paid media spend. The logic is sound: creators have audiences that trust them, and that trust transfers, at least partially, to the brands they work with authentically.

Building a Growth Team That Lasts

The first week I joined Cybercom, I found myself standing at a whiteboard in a brainstorm for Guinness. The founder had been called to a client meeting and handed me the pen on his way out. My internal reaction was something close to panic. I did not know the client, I did not know the team, and I was being asked to lead a room of people who had every reason to be sceptical of a new face. I did it anyway. And the thing I learned in that room, which has stayed with me across every leadership role since, is that authority is not given by a title or a reporting line. It is earned by being the clearest thinker in the room when clarity is what the room needs.

Growth teams need that quality in their leadership. Not the loudest voice. Not the most confident presenter. The clearest thinker. The person who can look at a set of results and tell you honestly what they mean, what they do not mean, and what the business should do next.

Building a growth team that lasts also requires the business to be honest about what it is asking the team to do. If the ask is to grow revenue by 40% in twelve months without additional budget or product resource, that is not a growth team brief. That is a pressure release valve. The team will burn out, the results will disappoint, and the function will be restructured or disbanded.

The businesses that get sustained value from growth teams are the ones that treat the function as a long-term capability, not a short-term fix. They invest in the data infrastructure. They give the team genuine cross-functional authority. They measure the team on the quality of decisions made, not just the outcomes delivered, because outcomes in growth are always partly a function of market conditions that the team cannot control.

If you are working through how your growth team connects to the broader commercial structure of your business, the Go-To-Market and Growth Strategy hub covers the frameworks and decisions that sit upstream of team design. Getting those right first makes the team design question considerably easier to answer.

About the Author

Keith Lacy is a marketing strategist and former agency CEO with 20+ years of experience across agency leadership, performance marketing, and commercial strategy. He writes The Marketing Juice to cut through the noise and share what works.

Frequently Asked Questions