How I built a growth team
Zero to one for growth teams in Southeast Asia
My starting hand
When I joined Traveloka in 2016, I came from a background with limited exposure to media and advertising. Back then, the concept of growth teams was still nascent and first popularized by tech companies in the Silicon Valley after being first coined by Sean Ellis.
There was little to no growth framework as most of the team members in the early days were specialists for specific marketing channels (such as SEO, SEM, Facebook) and did not have a view beyond their direct scope of work.
The early iteration of growth teams in Southeast Asia was nothing more than data driven marketing activities (some call it performance marketing) as there was often a delineation between Product and “Growth” teams, especially if the founders have engineering backgrounds and have a preference to build the company around products (or solutions).
“Growth” was mis-construed in many dimensions and it became this catch-all for anything to do with meeting quantitative targets, be it new customers acquired, booking volume, GMV, optimising CAC etc. The data infrastructure is also built with only input from Product teams (as they sat closely to each other) which resulted in the lack of actionable data for the Growth Marketing team. After a period of frustration, the Marketing department hired their own mini data squad that led to a fragmentation of the data nomenclature and schema which further compounded the problem.
Due to lack of OKRs in the early days, there was also a lot of back and forth between Product and Growth around who should be responsible for falling behind targets of unicorn level ambition. Both teams did not speak the same “language” and it was a constant clash of ideologies and methodologies.
To get around this, we needed to infuse Systems Thinking into each team and enable collaboration and knowledge sharing between different teams and functions.
Cogs and wheels
Sustainable growth only happens when there are intact growth loops but most of the literature out there tend to over simplify the concept by showing only the core flywheel or growth loop.
In reality, the business is a network of multiple loops similar to cogs and wheels in a machine. Growth leaders have to adopt Systems Thinking to be able to make the right trade-offs in every decision and tactical move.
The diagram above is a microcosm of the thought process I go through whenever I discuss monthly budgets with my team members in Indonesia and Vietnam. With a finite amount of dollars, I have to deploy it where it greases the overall machine the most.
In the early days, most of the focus would be on the immediate cogs adjacent to the wheel (coloured in blue) which I like to call the “primary cogs” (coloured in green). Over time, as you gain scale and clout, you will need to start allocating resources into the “secondary cogs” (coloured in yellow) and are usually very tactical in nature.
As you can see, the cogs cut across multiple functions and departments such as business development for supply, customer support, brand management and content production. Product teams have a role to play across most of these cogs as the creators behind solutions for internal user or customer problems. The primary role of a Growth Lead is to marshall resources and obtain multiple stakeholders’ buy-in for various missions that are anchored with the organisation’s OKRs.
The driving force
And how can we forget the key driving force behind Growth teams, the talent themselves. To me, that was the biggest challenge of them all. How do I assemble and retain a team of high performers and keep them motivated and committed to their respective missions?
In terms of the qualities I look for when hiring members for Growth teams:
Natural curiousity and mental acuity to be able to gather information quickly for decision making
High level of self awareness
Able to take a long term view and balance it with short term requirements and resources
Talent retention and motivation
As you would expect, someone who checks all 4 of the boxes above will be a very driven individual who is hungry for personal development. Growth Leads have to be mindful of each team member’s growth aspirations and to always assign them to Growth Missions that best “feed” that hunger.
As long as the individual feels a connection to the organisation’s overarching mission and can clearly see how his or her efforts contribute to the greater machinery, that will go a long way towards improving retention.
Having a common enemy in the form of an overwhelming incumbent competitor is also very helpful in keeping the team laser-focused on external forces and stay motivated.
Team structure
As for the team structure, I would prefer to organise them into growth squads or pods who are each focused on a specific mission (see orange boxes below for missions) each headed by an overall lead.
In the early days when the Company’s growth culture is developing, one of the C suite could lead the mission. For example, the CEO can be the overall lead for “Demand generation” and the COO can be the overall lead for “Operational excellence”. It all boils down to who has the right mix of skill sets and experience to lead the squad.
As the Growth culture in the company matures, the C level can step away from some missions and delegate them to someone from middle management who has accumulated enough social capital or “street cred” within the company to marshall resources across functions. The appointed Growth lead will have a direct reporting line the mission’s “Sponsor” from the C suite.
The illustrative example takes a simplistic view with 4 key missions which each have their own cascading OKRs and their respective Growth team members. Each Growth team is cross-functional to provide context from various functions but still have reporting lines to their respective functional heads.
The dual reporting lines might be tricky for performance appraisal which is why a strong human capital team is critical to keep the performance appraisal framework and process updated and aligned with OKRs.
Parting words
Growth teams are not marketing teams and definitely not magicians. They are usually multi-disciplinary “SWAT” teams dedicated to cracking the most critical growth bottlenecks in the wider system. Western literature on Growth teams are helpful as a starting point but you will need to refine and adapt it to the cultural nuances across countries in Southeast Asia.
The people you hire will make or break the success of any Growth initiative. Most importantly, there has to be C-Level buy-in and support of the change needed in an organisation to adopt Growth teams and frameworks.
Updated: An earlier version omitted the explanation of who should lead a Growth mission.