Starting a Growth Team (Growth Design Monthly)

March 2021

Hi Readers,There was only one guarantee when I accepted the job offer to lead GitLab’s Growth and Fulfillment Teams: Adversity. Starting growth-focused product teams is truly uncharted territory. All who journey here must have a firm belief that adventure is the keyword in misadventure. Almost 18 months since signing my offer letter, I can humbly provide this community with a few dos and don’ts for starting your practice. When I started writing this newsletter, I realize I had a lot to say on the subject. Below is an excerpt.

I’d like to note that my only experience coming into this role was what I’d read written by others in our emerging field. So the fact that you’re even reading this means you probably have as much experience as I had. If I’m practicing growth design, you can too.Iteratively yours,JackiProduct Design Manager, GitLab

Product/Market Fit First

GitLab defines growth as a focus on connecting more users with product value as opposed to increasing the core value of the product itself.I would strongly advise against practicing growth design before you have product/market fit. Making it easier to realize the product’s value would be pointless if you didn’t yet have a value proposition worth realizing. Don’t sign on the line of any growth design offer if the product/market fit precondition is unmet. Back away.

About GitLabGitLab is an open source DevOps lifecycle management platform. The business model is either SaaS or self-managed hosted instances with tiers of free and paid users. GitLab had proven its product/market with a set of fervent early adopters, but the challenge now was to drive adoption at scale. GitLab’s leadership team saw the opportunity and made a sizable initial investment in a team to build and rev up the product-led growth engine. Through it all, we’ve kept an iterative mindset, and aligned our expectations for the long-haul. It will take time to get your experimentation infrastructure whether you're a team of one, or like GitLab, a 21 person multidisciplinary product team. 

Uncovering constraints, investing in capacity

• Balance context and growth experience. We converted long-serving designers or engineers to bring context to the practice while offering them a chance to learn a new skill. We hired senior product managers with extensive growth experience to supplement the GitLab in-house team.

• Choose infrastructure before hiring. The lesson I learned here is that your headcount needs to match your ability to run experiments. Stagger hires as you build out the experimentation tooling. It’s frustrating to have amazing people blocked by an inefficient process. 

• Sorry, no privacy exemptions. The growth playbook was written by consumer Internet companies who have numbed their users to cookies and other data tracking tools used for segmentation, experimentation, and product analytics. However, at GitLab and many B2B companies, our contract with our users doesn’t mesh with this outsourced approach. This means we have to roll our own code to ship variants and experiment dashboards.

• Pay the data tax. Get ready to talk a lot about data you have vs data you want. Ideally, your team will have support from data engineering. If that isn’t the case for you, the Growth team members should be prepared to spend a lot of time on analysis tasks. Instrumentation could be a whole newsletter onto itself. You cannot target an experiment to improve an objective if the data for that objective doesn’t exist or isn’t easily accessed.

More on baselining your UX, going beyond experiments, and finding the right #growthgoals...

About the Author

Jacki Bauer is a Product Design Manager at GitLab where she leads the Growth and Fulfillment teams. She is a plant and dog parent and loves to cook food and craft cocktails. 

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