How to Structure and Hire a High-Impact Growth Team
Every company has a different optimal growth strategy, so every company needs a different kind of growth team to find and execute on that strategy.
Jeff Chang, Technical Lead, Growth @ Pinterest goes over the team structure and roles that make up Pinterest's growth team, and how to hire for competitive roles: growth engineers, growth designers and PMs.
Team Structure & Roles
Single product managers can't generate enough quality ideas to keep engineering teams busy. Instead, great growth teams pair engineers and designers together to own the experimentation process, while the PM brings together multiple pairs to form one coherent strategy.
To avoid bottlenecks, early-stage growth teams need flexible team members, like PMs or engineers, who can handle basic analytics. Everyone should be responsible for ideation to ensure that:
- Ideation scales with team size.
- Everyone feels ownership and responsibility for team goals.
- Diverse views prevent bias towards certain opportunities.
Hiring Growth Engineers
The talent pool for good growth engineers is small, so most will need to be trained from scratch. There's little correlation between seniority and overall impact, so don’t be afraid to hire junior engineers. Key skills include the ability to learn from data and quickly execute experiments.
Responsibilities:
- Determine technical product strategy
- Experiment ideation, execution and result analysis
- Monitor and resolve metrics incidents
Hiring A Growth PM
Growth PMs are relatively easy to hire, as many PMs have experience with product strategy. Growth PMs need metrics expertise and the ability to focus on high-leverage opportunities.
Responsibilities:
- Work with other team leads to develop overall team strategy
- Experiment ideation, prioritization and result analysis
- Remove blockers
- Lead cross-team projects
Hiring Growth Designers
There are very few growth designers on the market. Growth designers need to execute quickly, enjoy working on many smaller design projects instead of fewer large ones, and balance user experience with metrics wins.
Responsibilities:
- Work with PM to develop overall team strategy
- Determine product design principles
- Experiment ideation and execution
Summarized by Reforge. Original article by Jeff Chang • Tech Lead, Growth @ Pinterest