Building & Running a Cross-Functional Team for Growth

Are you ready to break down the silos between Marketing vs. Sales vs. Product vs. Engineering vs. Customer Success, and align your team around growth? Dani Hart is the person you want to talk with. She’s the former Head of Growth at GrowthHackers, currently offers independent consulting services under the name GrowthGal, and also mentors SaaS marketers & founders via Growthmentor.

We love that Dani’s definition of growth goes far beyond simply acquiring new customers. Rather, “growth” includes improving onboarding experiences, boosting customer retention, and even creating product virality. As such a cross-functional effort, “growth” is naturally a sport that’s best played as a team — and building cross-functional growth teams is where Dani really shines.

Dani’s talk is just one workshop of many in our SaaS Marketing Workshop series. Here are the highlights:

Above All, Focus On Providing Value to Customers

First of all, what even is a cross-functional team? Dani defines it as a team made of people with different capabilities (likely from different departments) coming together to optimize growth, or fix a problem within the company. Naturally, then, a growth team’s ultimate goal is to create more value for customers.As Dani puts it:

“Anybody in the organization can lead a growth initiative, and it's hard because it's going against the grain. It's looking at: What goal can we set to actually uncover these growth opportunities? What are the biggest broken parts of the business right now? And then focusing on those.”

Ideally, a growth team’s process should follow these general steps:

1. Identify projects that will meaningfully impact company growth, and choose which to focus on
2. For each project, identify a baseline, then set a goal and timeline to achieve that goal
3. Run the project
4. Analyze the results

Step 1: Ideate

Ideas for growth can (and should!) come from everywhere in the company. In fact, it’s important that people from across different departments feel empowered to give the growth team their input on how the company may improveWhen presenting an idea, Dani explains that it helps to be specific:

“We at GrowthHackers love ‘unbridled ideation.’ Meaning, come up with any idea you want at any time. It doesn't matter. But, it's always helpful to categorize those ideas, then give them a description or hypothesis, such as: What will this idea actually do? What metrics should you be measuring to make sure that you know whether or not this idea works?”

Step 2: Prioritize

Once ideas have been gathered, use the “ICE” framework (Impact / Confidence / Ease) to rank them.Take time to evaluate...

• The Impact an idea could have on the company’s growth.
• How Confident the team feels about the likelihood that it will succeed.
• How Easy it will be to execute the idea.This will provide a framework for which idea should have the highest priority.

It’s important to pay attention to which ideas are consistently endorsed by other members of the team. They may be seeing things you couldn’t perceive on your own. Dani recommends weekly meetings to check in and ask what everyone on the team has learned this week.

Step 3: Test

As the saying goes, the only real failed test is one you can’t measure the results of. For that reason, Dani recommends getting very specific about exactly what measurable results you’re trying to achieve when testing an idea. She offers up this process from her GrowthHackers days:

“[When planning how you’ll test an idea,] Does the test have a clear hypothesis that you're going to measure it on? We would run this through a double check, so the person that created the idea would write a hypothesis.We would run this through a double check, so the person who created the idea would write a hypothesis. But then, before we launched the test, we would have someone else double check to make sure that we had everything in place to actually measure it, so that we weren't caught up afterwards in analyzing it, and saying, ‘Hey, we don't know if this worked or not, because we never gave it any kind of direction.’”

From there, assign a test owner who is passionate about the idea and will diligently work to run it to the best potential outcome. It’s also important to let the rest of the company know that the idea will be tested, so that they can report back on any unexpected results they happen to see.Don’t have a lot of resources or traffic for testing? Dani explains that that’s not necessarily a problem:

“Whatever you have will work, I'm sure, better than nothing at all,” she says. “If you have nothing, then this is a great place to start, and then you can cater it from there. But, prioritize the current objective: What are you actually trying to achieve at that given point?”

Step 4: Analyze

Once you’ve executed on the idea, it’s time to check the results and identify whether the idea worked or not. However, as important as hard numbers are, Dani encourages folks to think beyond just numeric results:

“Additional learnings, I think, are very important to discuss at this stage. Because you'll learn a lot about your team and how they execute and how things are implemented, and that can sometimes throw off an entire experiment. And, if you just say, ‘Hey, it didn't work,’ and then throw it out and no one ever sees it, again, then you never learn something from it, and it was a wasted opportunity.”

When deciding what to next after a test is complete, use the “Stop, Start, Continue” model to guide you. In other words: what does each member of the team feel it’s important to stop doing, start doing, or continue doing during the next round of testing? Creating a regular dialogue around Stop, Start, Continue will encourage healthy, continuous change within the org.We recommend that you listen to Dani’s full talk if you want to learn about building growth. She shares 10 Tactics To Start Building Growth Today, which build upon these basic points in more detail. Dani also shares anecdotes about how they were implemented in real companies and the results of the implementation.