Is Your Company Ready? Culture and Antibodies
A growth team only works with real buy-in: leadership understands its distinct mission, and Product and Marketing leaders support it. A top-down CEO mandate alone isn't enough.
Culture matters as much as structure. You need comfort with rapid testing (Uber tested in a single city or a 1% sample) and tolerance for big UX changes when properly tested. Apple and Snap famously resisted A/B testing for years; that's a real constraint.
Expect organizational antibodies. Incentives reward big flashy projects with codenames over iterative wins. Teams that currently own scattered growth work resist consolidation. Engagement work overlaps with core product and creates turf fights.
The worst case: leadership doesn't get it, the culture is risk-averse, and the 'growth team' has no dedicated staff and must convince other teams to build its ideas. Don't start there.
“If you build it, they may not come, it turns out.”
Key idea
Growth teams fail organizationally before they fail technically. Secure buy-in, dedicated headcount, and permission to experiment, or don't bother.