Hello and welcome to the BottomUp skills podcast. I'm Mike Parsons, the CEO of Qualitance and we have reached the final instalment. Of our growth marketing series here on the podcast. That's all right. We are going to tackle this final chapter growth teams and, you know, growth teams are really critical to the success of a growth marketing program, because it is such a diverse, um, more multidisciplinary team than a traditional marketing team.

We do need to sort of. Revisit this whole idea of team. And the interesting thing is in a, in a world, which is full of data and automation, I am here to tell you that if you want to have, uh, great results in growth [00:01:00] marketing, you're still going to need good all human beings to do some of the work. So let's discover together how you can build a cross-functional growth team and how you can get your product into as many hands of users as possible.

Now where I want to start this story is with our, one of our sort of benchmark growth companies, which is Revolut. Now we did a very in-depth case study on Revolut, which has proven to be really popular. In fact, I think it's almost challenging design thinking as being the most popular course on bottom-up dot IO.

And of course, if you're interested in that you can jump over there. Bottom-up dot IO, the course, uh, for design thinking the case study on Revolut, these are all free. So just jump in and enjoy all right back to Revolut and growth teams. Now, the thing with Revolut, uh, what has driven their incredible growth [00:02:00] story, uh, is that they have employed the use of a de-centralized cross-functional growth team.

Now in their case, what they do is they tend to have the country manager head up their growth thing, and then they have. Four or five roles, basically that work within this team. Someone who's sort of a marketing expert, an expert in business development, a comms manager and a community manager. And so this is actually a pretty front end marketing flavored, uh, growth team.

So this has been a big part of their success, but you can also get a little bit more heavier on the data side as well. Um, so if you imagine, uh, like a really heavy. Uh, a growth team that is in the same market as the core product team, you might have like a growth PM and that they would work with a growth engineer, a growth marketer, and here's another really important one, a growth data analyst, right?

So this might be a BA or a form of analyst that is really crunching [00:03:00] data and then a pretty versatile designer to pull things. Together be it really simple email, uh, social stuff, or a bit more on the landing page. So there you go. That's two ways in, on who we might throw in the mix there, um, to build a growth team and plenty of companies have used this model.

I'm focusing at the moment, I'm telling this through the lens of Revolut, but you can pretty much look at everything from Airbnb to Pinterest. They've all had. Amazing success, building growth teams. Now I want to put growth teams and perhaps growth in a bigger picture because you know, If you've been listening to our podcasts and if you've taken some of our courses you'll know we're big on products.

And the interesting thing is despite being big on product, this is not to say that we don't appreciate the value of marketing. [00:04:00] In fact, if you really challenged me, I'm going to tell you that product innovation and growth marketing. Or in the end does product and marketing are the two most fundamental things to grow your business, to innovate, to create the new.

And in fact, they are co-dependence product and marketing brother and sister Batman and Robin, they need each other. Because just because you've got a great product, it doesn't guarantee success in terms of growth. And if you just think, Hey, I'm just going to build a great product and I'll leave the rest to chance.

Um, it's that sort of old mentality. If I build it, they will come kind of thinking. And what you have to realize is that. We're in a world where we're competing for the attention of a customers, our potential customers, and they simply, they just don't care about our products. Like we might, as creators of those very products, there's a whole bias, [00:05:00] um, that you can study, um, how creators are always sort of blind to the level of disinterest, their potential customers actually have towards their product.

And that's natural because you may have spent and committed a lot of your life to building this product. So you think it's. Damn important in the eyes of everyone. The truth is, is not. You have to be proud. You have to go out and pitch your message to the world. Because if you don't, what happens is you launch your product.

You get a little bit of a spike in, in engagement and usage on the product, but then it flattens out. So you fall into what we call the product desk cycle. So you, then you add features. You've watched the features, you get another little spike. Uh, but then grow flattens again and just try and have more features.

So this is sort of a spiral if you're not careful. So by now I hope I've made some sort of case for building a growth team. Let's have a look at the sort of fundamental formula that I encourage you to follow. We'll start with where [00:06:00] you should recruit your people from. So whether you will get to structure in a second, but.

Regardless of where you find these people, this is what you're going to need. And it's a formula of full. So let's say the hypothesis we have is we want to grow like crazy. We want our products to be in the hands of millions of users. Okay. No problem. But let's start by making sure we've got some product people involved.

This is people that can give us insight into what problems the product solves and may even make things like signup and onboarding easier so that we can grow. So that's number one, we need some product people. Number two, naturally we need marketing people. There's people know how to tell a story, connect with an audience and a segment.

They have some real need desire to be forensic and to really find the early adopters, the early majority, maybe even in the innovators, in your segmentation, but they really want to get there. And next it's all about [00:07:00] data. And this third group of people you need are. Analysts of data. They find story in the data and they not only report what the data is saying.

They interpret the data and the best data people give you actionable insights, meaning like here's what happened. Here's the causation here's the correlations is the context of this. Therefore, we recommend that that's the perfect narrative from a data specialist. And then lastly, but not least we need engineering people because we want to automate their hell out of this process so that we can scale.

And do you know what the keyword is? So we can. Grow as fast as possible so that I have, uh, four, uh, key levels of expertise that we need, product marketing, data and engineering. Now, just to build on this, I want to bring you back to where growth marketing sort of intersects with agile. I want to [00:08:00] talk about the process so naturally if you're following good agile practice, you'll have a small autonomous team, but the really.

Crucial thing in how they work is that they employ a build measure, learn mentality to remind you, we go into depth on this in the lean masterclass, go over to bottom-up dot IO. If you want to get really deep on lean, but the shortcut here is everything you build, you ...