How to Build a Growth-oriented Team with Guru's VP of Marketing Brittany Bingham

team member. So without further ado, I'll jump right in. So first, let's talk a little bit about the who, the what, the why. Who the heck am I? What are we talking about? And why does it matter? So more specifically, we'll be spending our time today really talking about the role of key tips framing for leadership team members in an organization that are considering investing in growth. So currently, I'm VP of Marketing at Guru. I also have co-created programs and advised and speak at Reforge. I was previously VP of Marketing and Growth at Raise.me, which is an education technology startup, and I also led growth marketing at SurveyMonkey for years, which is now called Momentive, but I'm going to continue to call it SurveyMonkey throughout this presentation. I apologize in advance. And so what I'll be pulling from is a lot of learnings from each of these different experiences, and either things that I've learned through this process, I've observed from others, or things that I wish I knew earlier as well. So we'll spend some time talking about misconceptions about growth, the benefits of investing in growth, and then tips again for leaders to get started. So it's really not difficult to justify the necessity for growth in an organization. It's as leaders what we should be aware of in closing the gaps between the conviction that we need a growth team and the execution and actually bringing it on board is where we'll spend the majority of our time. So let's jump right in. Ideally, we'll jump right in. There we go. So we're going to start out with any sort of misconceptions that I've observed in the idea of growth in organizations. So the first one that we have here is this idea of we've hired ahead of growth, that means we're growth-oriented, right? So that is a major pitfall when you're thinking about the both opportunity sizing of investing in growth and the approach to doing so. Andrew Chen said it best, growth is a tool, it's a process, and the approach that we use to solve problems. And so it's not necessarily the people specifically, but it's more so about the approach to doing so. So it can be a very lone responsibility of an individual if you look at it from this perspective versus a mode of operating across an entire organization. The second one that I've heard quite a bit is growth or engagement investments or analytics or testing or loops and experimentation. All these things aren't for us because we're a B2B sales-led organization. And so most of the time you tend to hear that they can't lean into experimentation or growth like higher volume or transactional businesses. But I challenge that. I really force the organizations to think more broadly about identifying higher volume, near-term measurable behaviors that you can be testing and experimenting on. Focus on the points of friction for your end users, product and identify where you can drive improvement there. And then really experiment freely at the top of the funnel and build strong relationships with your sales counterparts to really lean into that testing and measure rigorously. So we'll spend some time talking broadly about that too. And then I also tend to hear we're too early, too small, or late. You get kind of all the core points here to start thinking about growth. So one thing that's really important is that growth is not necessarily a substitute for product-market fit. You need to go through the process of rigorously understanding your customers and establishing a base of customers prior to really thinking about experimentation on top of that. But I really truly believe that growth is critical at all stages of a company. All right, so I'm going to quickly also chat about why growth is important in organizations. And I don't think it'll take a lot of justification, but these are really good reminders for everyone here. So the first reason why growth is really important is the idea of defensibility. Some competitive pressures are real. The more that you can invest in accelerating and growing your business and creating defensible loops means that you have a better chance of being successful in the face of this competition. The second one I think about a lot is the idea of the insights that you grok from the process of testing, experimentation, and growth. You learn so much about your customer. You learn about your market, your competitors, kind of all of the above through that process. The third one is the idea of purely scaling. So scaling, more growth really compounds on itself. It really helps accelerate the idea of how you'll grow your business. And then the fourth one is the idea of resources and efficiency gained through that. So oftentimes beyond simply growth, we need to think about the efficiency at which we're acquiring customers, growing the business, and really having the ability to have growth beget growth is an opportunity to truly accelerate that flywheel. All right, so it all makes sense. Everybody loves the idea of growth. We've gotten over these misconceptions. How would we go about actually doing this? And again, I want to remind us that generally speaking, this is for leaders, and this is in the order of operations that I may consider when thinking about building a growth-oriented organization. So the first thing that I want to make sure as a leadership team is that you understand and align on your growth model. So in each of these different tips, we'll be talking about what I do recommend you do, maybe some things that you'd avoid and why it's important. And so kicking off here, I think it's really critical to align your organization on truly how your company grows. What is actually driving your flywheel of acquisition of customers, the monetization of those customers, and retention of your customers? And one thing that's really important here is this isn't necessarily a North Star metric or purely just the kind of top-level KRs for your organization. It's about the idea of what are the inputs and the either kind of fuel for your overall growth and acceleration of your business that you would characterize that could help teams understand where to prioritize and invest their time in experimenting. The other thing that's really important is that this is critical that— so that teams who are experimenting or investing in growth have an idea of what targets they should be investing in or what metrics they should be investing in. And it gives them the appropriate context to understand how it might influence the business outcomes. And finally, the last thing that I'll highlight here is it really helps you establish the appropriate incentive model. And so the growth model is really going to be both a qualitative and quantitative representation of how your product grows. And it helps you understand what behaviors or KPIs are indicative of that model. And so when you tie those two together and you give that to a growth organization, it gives them much more context to understand what are the levers that could help accelerate the business in growing it. The second thing that I would then encourage you to go through and think about is the idea of the who, the how, and the where. And so this is who are the people that actually may be tackling growth, how might they go about operating in an organization, and where do they sit. One thing that's super important to note here is that this isn't necessarily going to be prescriptive of how your organization should do it, but more around some of the ideas of operating standards. And this topic in particular could be many, many sessions on top of this. And so I'd be happy to chat after the session with anyone, or if they want to dig into more specific, or in the Q&A. So really, when you're thinking about a growth organization, the most important thing in my mind is that you're focusing on the outcomes that they're trying to drive, not purely the function. And so really specifically, it's not that a growth product, or a growth marketing, or a growth X organization is specifically this, but it's what metric are we trying to move, and then how do we put the appropriate people on that metric. And so in this stage, it's really important to tie your growth model to your company plan and your KRs and the input metrics that are actually laddering up to that growth model, so that you're— and then tying that to the accountable team. So giving them really specific metrics that they can either be owning or stages of the customer journey. The other thing that I really lean into in this particular part of the discussion is encouraging cross-functional accountability and collaboration. And so many people try to characterize a growth organization as purely just product or purely just marketing. And that can work in some organizations. And it's really about the mode in which they operate. But oftentimes, I'd encourage you to say, what is the group of people or the group of functional expertise that could best move this metric? And how do we bring them together to achieve that target? So it may look like research plus analytics plus a designer plus a marketer plus a growth product and a subset of engineering folks. It may look like it's just marketers, it may look like it's just product folks. And so really thinking about who is the team that is best equipped and the best motivated by impact to actually drive that specific metric. And so it may show up differently in organizations. And frankly, this will evolve in any company over time. But oftentimes, I tend to characterize it as either a centralized growth organization, a decentralized growth organization, or this idea of a hybrid growth organization. And so the centralized org is a single growth team. And again, typically, it tends to be either growth product or growth marketing, or those two will kind of sit side by side and collaborate really closely. And that is a central team that has the responsibility for growth experimentation, testing, so on and so forth. And I often get the question here, and not necessarily as much around what growth product is, but more so around what growth marketing is. And so I'd love to take a second just to define it to really orient this team on it. And so growth marketers tend to use triggers and channels and messaging and personalization to bring new and existing customers back into the product to experience its value. And so these teams, both on the product side and on the marketing side, operate differently. They focus on opportunities, not specifically ideas. They're gold on and motivated and really centrally focused on the idea of business outcomes and the impact that they can drive. And really are held accountable and given ownership over a certain subset of metrics. So they go and they find friction in the product. And they really tend to craft hypotheses around how they can specifically move that. A decentralized organization looks more like a fully distributed growth and testing model. And so that's anyone in the organization can test. Anyone has the accountability or the ownership you go about executing those. And so that would sit across all functions or some variation of that. And then this hybrid model is where you may see central teams that have that expertise and serve as almost the center of excellence in how you go about executing and prioritizing growth investments. But you may have distributed execution. And so you have not only that central team really driving some of the big investments in testing and iteration and owning the strategy there, but you have other teams thinking about testing and iteration as well. And so in any of these three, I'd encourage you as leaders to think about what you believe may be most impactful, most enabled to move fast, and most enabled to actually go about driving business metrics. And there's no specific or right answer. It's more so just understanding what the options are there. One thing that I think is really important— well, several things to avoid when thinking about this as an opportunity— is conflating past successes and functional responsibility with the approach to actually how you build out your growth organization. And so when I say this, ultimately what I'm trying to highlight here is the idea of we've done this one thing and we saw that it spiked growth. And so let's just go and only invest in that as an opportunity to drive business outcomes. And so that creates a certain amount of rigidity around how they think about the opportunities in solving either end-user problems or solving for friction in the product or optimizing metrics. And so I've seen this happen in a couple organizations where, oh, PR spiked our growth when we were very early on, or we had this other one specific day that was just massive because we took on X tactic. So that's going to be our growth lever moving forward. And I think when you see that come to life, it actually really narrows the consideration of how you could potentially go about moving those metrics and puts more directive kind of functional execution on that team versus giving them the opportunity to think about how they might go about impacting any sort of business metrics. So why is it important? And this one is definitely one that we could also spend quite a bit of time on. But I really think it's important to think thoughtfully about how you craft your growth organization. One, because the customer has a single journey. We might think of it as marketers, we might think about it as product, but the end user only has one experience with the product and the— or with the brand in itself, and that will span across all of your marketing touchpoints, your product touchpoints, and so on. And so you have to think about the continuity of that journey and the ability to impact it, not just at a single point in time, but really through their whole journey. When you think about cross-functional growth teams as well, it really mitigates the limits of local optimization. And so an example of this is if you have a team that is just email marketers that's thinking about how you may be able to move that metric, you'll constantly optimize towards how can we maximize just the metrics that are associated with email itself. However, if you thought about email, the opportunity to move a metric that's maybe deeper in product with a cross-functional team of email marketers, product managers, UX designers, and engineers, you might find that you can actually lift that metric far beyond what the optimization of purely just the email may drive, so that you can then go and accelerate the end and most important metrics that are really the metrics that matter about your business. And so this risk of local optimization and hitting kind of the asymptote of impact is really often unlocked by creating these cross-functional teams that are thinking more creatively and thinking about a more broad approach to solving the problem. It's also a really great forcing function for sharing priorities. Oftentimes when you see teams work in silos, you'll identify that they are kind of owning a metric and not necessarily thinking about the impact that it can have have on other teams' metrics. And so anytime that you do have to drive collaboration between the teams, there's always that contention between the opportunity to share— to shift any sort of investments of time and energy to help support the other team because they don't have shared goals together. And so having that opportunity to really bring them together around a single metric that they're trying to move will also help them focus prioritize and drive more emphasis on that metric. It also fosters a great deal of creativity. This goes back to the idea of local optimization. If you only think about a single tool that you can use to solve this, then you're not going to get creative in how you could potentially impact that metric in a much broader manner. And then finally, and inarguably most importantly here, it really drives business outcomes. And so you tend to see that it will actually drive not only bigger bets, but also potentially higher swings in driving more business outcomes. OK, we're running up on time, so I'm going to run through this quickly. The third thing that I'd encourage leadership teams to do is really enable data curiosity and testing. And so oftentimes we say we definitely need growth in an organization, but we don't necessarily create the space or the tooling to allow them for that, to allow them to execute on that. And so really encouraging data-informed, both from a qualitative and quantitative, hypotheses that you're crafting and really creative experimentation and learning around that. And create space for testing. Oftentimes we fill up roadmaps and then we say, oh, you should also test in here. But that really narrows how they can think about testing or when they can do it. And then encourage people to really ask the question, why? Why are we seeing this in our customers? Why are we doing things a certain way? Why are we engaging them a certain way? And so systems have to come first. Access to the data has to come first. And a clear growth model really has to come first as well. The thing that I will say is it's important that you avoid being data absent, so not using any sort of data to inform this, or data-only decision-making. Oftentimes when you see people use pure-play data with no other user insights layered, layered on top of it, you tend to ignore the end user. And why is this important? The path between growth model and business outcomes is really tied together with this idea of testing. And then the last thing, which I'll highlight really quick here, is make sure that you're celebrating outcomes, of course, but learnings as well. Oftentimes you will emphasize winning tests only. And what that does is it really will create a risk aversion or lower creativity in how you can go about solving these problems. And so tying it all together, you have this opportunity to drive business outcomes by way of establishing your growth model, understanding the psychology and the overall end user, and then experimenting on top of that. So I knew that this was going to happen. It's a whirlwind session. But in summary, growth orientation in my mind is really a continuous process. It's a shared responsibility that must be valued and created— space created for it by leadership teams. It requires a shared understanding of how the business grows. And really, it's best achieved with cross-functional teams really having the ability to ask why and curate and drive data-driven experimentation. Okay, I'm right under the wire. I didn't leave time for questions, but what I will do is make sure that I snag them and ideally follow up here. Thank you all so much for letting me jump in and chat about this. I'm obviously very passionate about it, so thanks all for, for sitting in on it.