How to structure a Growth Team
With Shopify growth team example + my personal experience
Hey, Pierre-Jean here 👋 Welcome to this new edition of The Growth Mind!
In today’s article, we discuss:
The 3 ways to structure a Growth Team
My personal experience working in the 3 different setups
The Shopify Growth Team example
⏱️ Reading time → 6 minutes
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First, what the hell is a Growth Team?
Structuring a growth team can be tricky.
We don’t really always know:
who should be in the growth team → Marketers? PMs? Engineers? Designers?
where should they sit → Under product? Under marketing? As an independent team?
how resources should be shared → Should the team have a dedicated budget/people? Or shared resources?
On top of that, “Growth” means different things depending on the type of company you’re working for and the region of the world, which adds even more complexity.
So before we start, let’s first align on the definition of a Growth team 👇
A Growth Team is a multidisciplinary group of people working on growing one or multiple KPIs.
A growth team generally has the following characteristics:
The team is composed of people with different skills: Marketers, PMs, Engineers, Designers, Data analysts.
It’s a highly data-driven group, adopting an iterative approach based on experimentations.
→ Ultimately, the goal of the growth team is to find scalable, repeatable ways to grow a product.
What makes a Gowth team different from a classic Marketing or Product team is:
A larger scope → the focus can be on the entire funnel
The multidisciplinary composition → different profiles with cross-functional skills, to operate fast
The data-driven, experimental approach → based on rapid experimentations
Growth is the bridge between Product & Marketing.
So let’s see how you can structure your Growth Team.
The 3 ways to structure a Growth Team
There are 3 main different structures for a growth team, and none of them is perfect. Each has pros and cons. But some might better fit your growth stage, org and business objectives.
A/ Independent Growth Team
In this setup, the Growth Team has a dedicated VP and works as an autonomous team. They have their own budget and members are 100% dedicated to the growth team.
B/ Cross-functional Growth Pod
There is no VP/head of Growth in this setup. Growth profiles from different teams join forces to work on a specific growth project, or to move the needle on a specific KPI/part of the funnel.
C/ Mixed-Structure
This setup is a combination of both structures above. Some people work 100% for the growth team, others might only do it for a part of their work, either for a specific project or as a share of their bandwidth.
My personal experience and opinion, having worked in the 3 setups
Each setup has pros and cons. Depending on your growth stage, resources and company culture, one setup might work better than another. I had the opportunity to work in the 3 different setups:
At BlaBlaCar, the world-leading carpooling platform (800+ employees, scale-up), I both worked in a mixed and cross-functional structure.
At Rayon, a design software for architects and interiors designers (15-20 employees, Series A stage), I’ve worked in an Independent Growth team.
Here is my honest feedback based on my experience with each set-up, in different contexts:
A/ Independent Growth team - Rayon
I’ve worked as a Senior Growth Marketer in the Growth team, with a Content Marketer and a Product Marketer
We had shared KPIs as a team, but each team member had its own objectives and channels. I was working on growing Organic channels (SEO, Pinterest), building the Product-Led Sales funnel and other types of product growth related projects (eg. setting up a referral program for architecture students). It’s by far the best setup if you want to maximize velocity and ship fast. Each member has a strong freedom to execute and is rarely blocked on any initiative. The challenge was to focus on going fast on the right experiments and projects, with the limited resources we had. Perfect for an early-stage startup, where speed of execution is key.
However, we sometimes lacked collaboration with other teams (product, engineering). It was okay at this stage, but would very likely have needed more alignment or switching to a mixed structure at some point to improve collaboration.
B/ Cross-functional growth team - BlaBlacar
I’ve led a project-based cross-functional Growth Squad for our commuting app, BlaBlaCar Daily
The goal was to increase the number of successful drivers (meaning who make their first successful carpool ride). I was coordinating a team with a marketer, a PM, a data analyst and a Product Marketer. We managed to ship great initiatives and grow by 2.5x the number of successful drivers, but it was a constant battle. Shipping rapidly and getting the necessary bandwidth from all squad members was quite hard. Our product-related initiatives were conflicting with the traditional Product roadmap, which was already well established. So we were not able to ship everything we wanted to, and at the pace we wanted to. I’m not saying this setup does not work, as I believe it was a good trade-off for a project-based scenario (no need to hire a team for it) and at the end of the day, we reached our objectives. But I think we could have done better with some growth resources 100% dedicated to this project, and I don’t see it being the best option for an evergreen growth team.
C/ Mixed structure - BlaBlacar
My head of and I were in charge of increasing revenue through Pricing & Monetization
We had engineers, two data analysts, and a data scientist from another team supporting us. We had strong support from C-levels on our initiatives, and all stakeholders were aligned on priorities, so resource sharing was not a problem (but it could have been). So the setup was working pretty smoothly for us and we were able to ship pricing initiatives and experiments rapidly, generally at least every 2 weeks. Also, we had the right type of people composing the team. As BlaBlaCar is a marketplace, pricing and monetization were a complex topic, as any price/model change impacts both supply and demand. Working with a good data scientist was key for building proper experiments and testing methodologies. We were also supported by other PMs on some projects. So it worked well, because pricing was a hot topic and the company decided to invest the necessary resources on it.
My final opinion:
The independent growth team is the best setup for a small to mid-stage startup where speed is king. It can work at scale, but needs strong leadership and alignment.
The mixed structure, with a good C-level support, can 100% work in scale-ups/late stage startups. But I would not recommend in the early days.
The cross-functional pod structure is good for projects, but, in my opinion, not as an evergreen setup and if you truly want a growth team. Ownership is too blurry, and bandwidth is hard to manage.
Shopify Growth Team example → An independent Growth Team at scale
Shopify has managed to build a 600+ people independent Growth team with the following structure:
Their structure differs slightly from typical growth teams but is incredibly smart and built for long-term impact.
Shopify Growth team is divided into 2 main groups:
1️⃣ 𝗚𝗿𝗼𝘄𝘁𝗵 𝗥&𝗗
This group is mainly similar to a classic product org and is composed of 3 teams:
Growth Product: Focuses on landing pages, onboarding, trial incentives, and monetization. Their objective is to convert visitors into active merchants and maximize the GMV value of each cohort.
Enabling Team: Builds internal tools (experimentation platform, BI, Martech) to help growth and product teams work efficiently.
Customer Support (Yes, it’s part of Growth!): Focus on making merchants successful by offering support tools and assistance.
2️⃣ 𝗚𝗿𝗼𝘄𝘁𝗵 𝗠𝗮𝗿𝗸𝗲𝘁𝗶𝗻𝗴
Growth marketing is composed of 4 teams having a common objective: make new merchants discover Shopify.
Paid acquisition: Everything related to online (Meta, Google) and offline ads.
SEO/content: Organic content to drive inbound traffic
Email marketing: Lifecycle communications to engage and convert merchants.
Affiliate marketing: The team running their powerful affiliation program.
Each channel has an LTV/CAC objective.
2 key principles that make their growth team stand out:
They don’t obsess over conversion rates: Instead, they focus on absolute numbers (total activated merchants, total GMV). The whole team's north star is “Total cohort value”. A long-term metric to not be distracted by short-term effects.
They adopt a long-term experimentation mindset: While most companies declare experiment results within a few weeks, Shopify runs long-term holdout experiments (6–12 months) to truly understand their impact.
It’s a very good (and quite rare) example of how one of the hottest tech companies managed to build a growth team, at scale.
And that’s all for today folks! See you next week 👋
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