Breaking Down Growth Teams with Marlo Struve

INTRODUCTION: Welcome to The Daily Bolster. Each day we welcome transformational executives to share their real world experiences and practical advice about scaling yourself, your team, and your business.

Matt Blumberg: Welcome to The Daily Bolster. I'm Matt Blumberg, co- founder and CEO of Bolster, and I am here today with Marlo Struve. Marlo is a marketing and product leader and advisor who focuses on growth in mid and late stage startups. Marlo, welcome to The Daily Bolster.

Marlo Struve: Thanks so much. Appreciate you having me here.

Matt Blumberg: Absolutely. So, I love this topic that we're going to get into, which is growth and a growth team and growth leader, and it seems like a title that's popped up in the last five years. It used to be called marketing, but maybe it's not quite marketing, maybe it's different. So my question to you is: what is a growth team? When in the company's life do you need a growth team? And then what are the top three things that a company should look for in the leader of the growth team?

Marlo Struve: Yeah, of course. All great questions. So what is a growth team? A growth team can be one of two things really, but ultimately your growth team is focused on moving critical business metrics for the company. Now that might be acquisition metrics, but it also might be engagement or retention metrics. So I think the critical thing when you're defining a growth team is to say: what are the top couple of metrics that are not maybe under control right now, or they're not moving the way you want them to, and then establish a team around that. So, I've seen growth teams be very marketing focused. I've also seen growth teams be very product focused, because say you have a SaaS product and you have an easy time acquiring customers, but you have a really hard time getting them to renew, and so then you might need more product- led growth. So your growth team can be marketing focused, sales focused, product focused. It really depends on what that company is.

Matt Blumberg: So part two of the question is: when does a company create a growth team? Is it-

Marlo Struve: Ooh, yes.

Matt Blumberg: ...immediately after you have product market fit? Is it a little bit later once you've honed in on unit economics and key metrics?

Marlo Struve: So it totally depends on the company. In some companies you've found the growth team when the company has started, because for some founders, they like to create a growth mentality from the start and they do it themselves. They found that growth team. I've seen most companies be successful with it when they found early product market fit and they have a small number of avid, avid customers, but now they need to establish a repeatable process for how they're going to acquire the next set of customers and put together a set of compounding tactics that chain link together over time, that you can then actually push into a flywheel effect.

Matt Blumberg: Got it. Okay. So that's an interesting way of framing it, and that could be at lots of different points in the company-

Marlo Struve: Yes, it really could.

Matt Blumberg: So you're a CEO, you've decided, " I need a growth team." What are you looking for? What are the top three quick things that you're looking for in a growth leader?

Marlo Struve: Yeah. So the first thing that you want to look for is their ability to use data above everything else, because the things with growth is maybe what you did with your last company might work with this next company or might not at all. Maybe the market has shifted. 10 years ago we could rely on Facebook for a lot of dependable growth and we can't anymore. And so oftentimes historical playbooks don't work in growth worlds, or the company is different, or the macroeconomics are different. So I would say the biggest thing that you want to look for is a willingness to use data and let data guide you, not necessarily anything else. The second is their ability to create an experimentation mentality, including a mentality around failing within their small or large growth team, because you're going to have to fail and they have to get really comfortable with that.

Matt Blumberg: Totally, and that goes really nicely with the data mentality.

Marlo Struve: Exactly, exactly.

Matt Blumberg: And then what's the third thing that you'd look for?

Marlo Struve: Then the third thing, I typically have looked for, is the ability to play within multiple different departments or at least create really good relationships with other departments, because as I mentioned at the beginning, sometimes growth is within acquisition, but sometimes it's within products, sometimes it's within sales. Sometimes you need your CFO working with you really closely on the unit economics to make it work.

Matt Blumberg: So, this is a bonus question here at the end. Have you ever seen a structure where a company has a head of marketing, a head of product, a head of sales, and a head of growth? Or is head of growth usually replace and augment one of those?

Marlo Struve: I have seen it where they have a fourth kind of leader in that growth position. When that happens, the growth leader is not often on the executive team, but often they're like a director or a senior leader that runs what they call more of like a tiger team. That goes after metrics just for a short amount of time and then switches between them. And oftentimes it's their remit to establish a growth mentality within all of those other departments as well, so that there's sustainable practices that are created, while they're jumping around to problems.

Matt Blumberg: Okay. Marlo Struve, Growth Executive, great to have you here.

Marlo Struve: Thanks so much. Appreciate it.