How to structure a growth marketing team: roles and rhythm

The short answer

A growth team needs one owner for one growth goal, plus skills to ship and read experiments: engineering, design and data analysis. Give it one backlog and a weekly rhythm, then decide which roles to hire and which to borrow.

This page is for the growth lead who has just joined, or has just been handed growth. The board wants results. You have marketing people, and probably an agency, but nobody runs growth work across the whole path from first visit to paying customer. You have to decide the seats, where the team sits, how it works each week and what to hire.

We cover those four decisions here. What a team costs against a hire is covered on a separate page.

What a growth team does that a marketing team does not

A marketing team runs the channels that reach people: paid media, search, email, content and events. Channels bring people to you. Growth work asks what happens after that, and changes whatever holds the numbers back.

That is growth marketing in plain words: testing changes anywhere in the funnel against one measurable goal. The funnel is the path a customer takes from first visit to sign-up, purchase and repeat use. A change might sit in an advert, a landing page, a sign-up form, the first week in the product or a renewal email.

Each change runs as an experiment. An experiment is a change you make on purpose, with a written prediction of what it will do, measured against the goal so you can tell whether it helped. Some experiments work and many do not. Both results teach the team something.

The goal has to be something you can count: more conversions, more sign-ups, better retention, more referrals. Retention means customers who keep using or paying. Growth experiments can also test whether a new market wants your product before you spend on scale.

Put simply, marketing reaches people, and growth work keeps improving what happens once they arrive. That is why growth needs a team, not one person. Shipping a test takes engineering. Making it usable takes design. Knowing whether it worked takes data analysis. Few people hold all three in depth, so the structure has to bring them together around one goal.

The four seats most growth teams need

Think of these as seats, not people. Each seat is a skill the team must be able to call on every week. Who fills it is a separate decision, covered further down.

The owner: the growth lead

The growth lead owns one goal and the backlog. The backlog is a single ranked list of test ideas. The lead decides what gets tested next and answers to leadership for the result.

A good growth lead is T-shaped. That means broad working knowledge across marketing, product, design and data, plus one deep specialism of their own. The breadth lets them work with every other seat and judge its output. It does not mean they do every seat's job.

The engineer

The engineer ships the tests: new versions of pages, changes to forms, small changes in the product, and the tracking changes that record what people do. Without engineering time the team has ideas but cannot run them, and tests wait behind the product roadmap.

The designer

The designer shapes the pages and the flows. A flow is the set of steps a person moves through, such as signing up or checking out. The designer also runs usability tests: watching real people try a page to see where they get stuck.

The analyst

The analyst owns the tracking plan, the written list of what the team records and how. The analyst also reads the results and tells the team whether a test won, lost or needs longer. This seat decides whether the team learns anything at all. For more on this work, see our guide on how data analytics improves marketing strategy.

Specialists in paid media, search, email and content join the experiments that need them, and step back when the test is done. In many companies this is where an agency already sits. In a small team, one person may cover two seats, such as an engineer who can build simple page designs, or a growth lead who does the analysis. That can work, as long as every skill is covered each week.

Where the team sits in your marketing team structure

There are three common places to put a growth team. Each has a trade-off. The right one depends on where most of your goal's levers sit.

Inside marketing

The team sits next to the channels and the campaign budget. Tests on adverts, landing pages and emails move quickly. The trade-off is the product: changes there need another team's engineers, so tests inside the product move slowly.

Inside product

The team sits next to the engineers and the product itself. This suits a goal about what people do after they sign up, such as getting started or staying. The trade-off is reach: the team can drift away from how customers arrive, and the channel data often sits with marketing.

On its own

The team reports to a senior leader and works across the whole funnel. This suits a goal that spans arrival, sign-up and repeat use. The trade-off is that it borrows time from both marketing and product. It needs a sponsor with the authority to settle disputes, and clear rules on who can change what.

Whichever you choose, write down who can approve a change to the website and to the product. Tests that wait for permission stop being weekly.

The weekly rhythm

The structure runs on four things:

• One goal. The number the team is trying to move this quarter.
• One backlog. Every test idea in one ranked list, whoever suggested it.
• One experiment log. A record of every test, covered in the next section.
• One weekly meeting. The place where results are read and the next tests are chosen.

The weekly meeting has three jobs:

1. Review the tests that finished, and record what each result means for the goal.
2. Check the tests still running, and leave them alone until they have enough data to read.
3. Pick the next tests from the backlog, and give each one an owner.

To rank the backlog, judge each idea on three plain questions: how much could it move the goal, how sure are we, and how much work is it? Experiments vary in length from days to weeks or even months, so not every test reports every week. The meeting deals with whatever has a result.

Weekly is our advice, not a rule. What matters is that the rhythm is fixed, so the team keeps shipping and reading tests without waiting to be asked.

The shared standards that keep results readable

If you cannot tell which change moved which number, the team cannot learn. Three shared standards prevent that, and they matter most when several people and an agency all touch the same funnel.

A naming scheme for your data

Agree one set of names for the actions you track, such as sign-up, trial started and purchase. Do the same for campaigns and pages, and use those names everywhere. Without a scheme, the same action shows up under three names in three reports, and nobody trusts any of them.

Tracking tags on every link

Tracking tags are short labels added to the end of a link. They tell your analytics tool where a visit came from: which source, which kind of channel and which campaign. They are usually called UTM tags. Agree one format and keep one shared list, so your team and your agency tag links the same way.

The experiment log

Keep one record for each test. Note the idea, the prediction, the goal it serves, the start and end dates, the result and the decision taken. Over time the log becomes the team's memory. It stops you running a failed test again, and it shows leadership what the team has learned, not only what it has shipped.

Which seats to hire and which to borrow

Keep the owner in-house. The goal, the backlog and the decisions need to sit with someone who answers to your leadership and stays when a contract ends.

For the other seats, ask how much of each seat you need. A seat you want as an employee, inside the business every day, is a hire. A seat needed a few hours a week can be borrowed from an agency, a freelancer or a monthly service.

Your backlog shows you the answer. If the team ships tests every week and most of them need code, engineering may be a daily seat. If design and analysis are needed for a few tests a month, those seats may be part-time for now. Look again as the backlog grows, and move a seat from borrowed to hired when the hours justify it.

For what it costs against a hire, see what a fractional growth team costs.

Where does your existing agency fit?

Two worries are common here: there is no time to set up a team, and you already have an agency.

On time: setting up a team does cost time at the start. You have to agree the goal, build the first backlog, write the tracking plan and hold the first meeting. After that, the structure saves the lead's time. Your attention goes on one goal, one backlog and one weekly meeting, not on every task.

On the agency: keep it. Give it a defined seat, usually channel execution, where it already does the work. The growth team keeps the goal, the backlog, the tracking and the reading of results. That way every test is judged against the same goal and the same data, whichever channel it runs in. Ask the agency to use your naming scheme and your tracking tags, and bring its results to the weekly meeting.

If the gap in your structure is design, development or analysis hours rather than channels, a monthly service can sit beside the agency. Our Run is one such service: Run can cover those hours, and the agency keeps the channels.

Where Run fits, and where it does not

If your growth engine already runs and your structure is short of design, development or analysis hours, Run gives you ongoing access to senior designers, developers, analysts and digital specialists through a predictable monthly engagement. It is best taken straight after a Build.

It is not the right answer in three cases:

• You have no growth engine yet. Run is not the first step. Read the section "If you have no growth engine yet" on our page about what a fractional growth team costs.
• You want us to supply the growth lead. Run does not supply the growth lead. The owner seat stays with you.
• You want the person on your payroll. A seat you want as an employee, inside the business every day, is a hire.

See how Run works.