Pim Van Oerle - Growing Growth: Building Growth Teams In A Product Engineering Organisation (Turing Fest 2022)

Organising engineers, product and data people, designers and marketing people to work together for growth is hard, especially for start-ups and scale-ups that are primarily set up to be great at building products. How do you change your organisation to a model that works better for growth while keeping the great parts of your culture - and keeping people happy and involved, all while still improving, running and maintaining everything you’ve built? In this talk, Pim will share learnings and failures from Skyscanner, TravelNest, Deliveroo and Oda, looking at some of the nuances and practicalities of building teams for growth - what are things to consider and think about at different stages of company maturity, and what are different approaches that you can take to build growth teams that work.

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Transcript

1. Pim van Oerle Growing Growth Building Growth Teams In a Product Engineering Organisation
2. How do you change your organisation to a model that works better for Growth while keeping the great parts of your culture - and keeping people happy and involved, all while still improving, running and maintaining everything you’ve built • We’ll look at some practical examples of how we’ve tried to do this in the past • And will highlight some key learnings and evergreen things to think about when doing this • Mostly focussing on Product Engineering organisations (and with a product eng slant) • Covering start-up and scale-up organisations, rather than very large ones
5. Growth - why is this important? a (very inaccurate) 3-minute primer
6. So what is this Growth thing?
10. https://andrewchen.com/how-to-build-a-growth-team/
11. https://andrewchen.com/how-to-build-a-growth-team/
12. “Growth” and “Product” thinking are not in conflict! https://www.svpg.com/books/empowered-ordinary-people-extraordinary-products/
14. Loads of great talks about Growth at recent TuringFests (and this one!) Yara Paoli - What is The Best Structure for Growth https:// www.turingfest.com/videos/yara-paoli/structure-growth Rebecca Moore - Self-Disrupt for Growth https://www.turingfest.com/ videos/rebecca-moore/self-disrupt-growth Joanna Lord - How to Operationalize Growth for Maximum Revenue https://www.turingfest.com/videos/yara-paoli/structure-growth
15. But how do you implement this?
16. It can feel like a huge change! Lots of questions that tend to come up
 • Team Structure: should they include Growth/Marketing people or not (point out cross functional agile teams here) • Org Structure: where does Growth sit (marketing / product space overlaps) • If international: Global / Local • How do we set direction and stay aligned • Collaboration within the organisation • Ownership and where does ‘Enablement’ come in • How do you get everyone to buy in • How do you find the right people who can work in this way
17. It’s all relative
18. No one-size-fits-all-solution Depends heavily on the specific organisation and the state it is in the moment / where you’d like it to be in a year or two • Current Size of the organisation • The organisation’s expansion and hiring plans • What is the current state of the product, tooling and capabilities for Growth • How fast do you have to move • What is the current buy-in from the team
19. Size of the organisation Start-up Scale-up Large Org
20. Size of the organisation Start-up Scale-up Large Org
22. Approach: pivot to fully growth oriented
25. Approach: Marketing + relevant Product teams into new Growth organisation
26. Learning: fully cross-functional teams (where it makes sense)
27. The best team shape can (and will) change over time!
30. Approach: Separate Growth Product Engineering and Marketing areas
34. Clarity of Ownership - and Internal Open Source
35. Aligned enablement
36. Things that keep coming back (no matter what approach you take)
37. Experimentation *See Erik Ries’s awesome The Lean Startup
38. https://andrewchen.com/how-to-build-a-growth-team/
45. Many more of course Psychological safety. A growth approach can only flourish if people aren’t afraid to try things and to take risks - embracing failure is the only way to learn fast Focus on being Reliable Growth should not mean constantly breaking stuff - the best way to build retention is to reliably be there to solve people’s problems. Hire the right people The importance of interviewing for culture, and including a Growth Mindset in that explicitly - as an integral part of the behaviours and culture you interview for, not just glued on
46. It can feel like a huge change! • Team Structure: should they include Growth/Marketing people or not (point out cross functional agile teams here) • Org Structure: where does Growth sit (marketing / product space overlaps) • Global / Local and how that works • How do we set direction and stay aligned • Collaboration within the organisation • Ownership and where does ‘Enablement’ come in • How do you get everyone to buy in - and still feel safe and happy! • How do you find the right people who can work in this way • Do we have experimentation capabilities and great data (systems/models/everything) • How do we keep the user experience secure, reliable and stable while doing all this
47. The best approach depends on your organisation and its circumstances - mix and match approaches and test to find what works
48. And all of these evolve over time as the organisation evolves!
49. The best approach depends on your organisation and its circumstances - mix and match approaches and test to find what works, and then iterate as you evolve
50. Thanks! (Q&A roundtable at 3 pm :) )