I created this presentation as a central alignment point so everyone is aligned on this team's mission and responsibilities. I originally made it for my team, but since then, it's been great for introducing the team to anyone in the organization. As we're growing, there have been lots of changes and many new leaders joining the company, so I've probably used this presentation more than any other asset I've created.

The growth function is entirely new at Spendesk. We started as a sales-led company, and now we're building more of a self-serve and PLG motion. I'm responsible for the marketing side, and I worked with people on the product side to create this new business model across the whole company.

This is obviously a stock photo, but in the real presentation I used a photo of our team. 

We really started from scratch with this. There were a lot of cross-functional discussions between myself, product, design, and engineering about what "growth" actually means at Spendesk.

Ultimately, we think about it in terms of how a lead would follow the funnel. So I work on the part around acquisition and adoption. Then we have a web team that really focuses on conversion on the website. We also have onboarding and an adoption squad focused on driving expansion and adoption in the account.

I can't share the specific goals publicly, but we generally have goals around adoption, revenue, and number of customers.

The company goals for 2024 inform the OKRs for 2023, and those 2023 OKRs inform my team's activities. Based on that, we create a roadmap for each quarter. Everything is waterfalled, translated, and linked together to ensure that my team's activities link back to the North Stars of the company. Most of these projects are cross-functional, so we obviously have other stakeholders. So, for example, on the Free Spendesk project, I worked very closely with the product team to determine that roadmap together.

I don't always include this slide in the presentation, but sometimes people don't even know what product marketing is, so I keep it in here just in case.

The Web Squad has always been part of the marketing team, but it's moved between different marketing sub-departments. It used to be part of demand gen, and as we started building PLG, it moved onto the product marketing growth team.

The Web Squad has three key goals. The first is building a growth engine. That's where we're really focused on experimentation and driving conversion. Then we also have UX and brand consistency. The third goal is maintaining performance and infrastructure. All three are essential to driving the conversion rate, and they're all interconnected. It was really difficult to separate out any one goal and move it to the product team, because on the marketing side, we already had all the resources and skills. So that's why the Web Squad is on marketing, not product.

This served as onboarding for the product, so most of the skills and resources needed for this work already existed on the product side. That's why we only needed one person here, versus a whole squad for Web and Adoption.

Resource-wise, we were originally short because it's a ton of work to drive adoption programs. So we took inspiration from how product squads are structured with people from different orgs coming together for a particular product. We pulled together a cross-functional squad including product marketers, customer success managers, data and insights to create different adoption campaigns to drive product usage within our accounts.

I update this every quarter with our biggest achievements of the previous quarter. It's so helpful when introducing the team to others who may not know what we do or why we're valuable!

Jana Frejova

I created this presentation as a central alignment point so everyone is aligned on this team's mission and responsibilities. I originally made it for my team, but since then, it's been great for introducing the team to anyone in the organization.

PMM, Growth Overview at Spendesk

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