Essay · 10 min read

Growth vs Marketing vs Product

Brian Balfour · brianbalfour.com Free Advanced

Balfour ran growth at HubSpot and later founded Reforge, and this is still the cleanest statement of why a growth team needs engineers and data people inside it rather than queued behind the product roadmap. If you are trying to explain to a founder why renaming the marketing team will not work, send them this.

• Marketing owns only awareness and acquisition; growth owns a whole-funnel metric like DAU.
• Where engineering sits apart, technology work for marketing is almost always deprioritized.
• Chamath's three parts: build core value, get users to it quickly, get them back to it often.
• Balfour's own path: two years coding, three in product management, three in user acquisition.