Article · 20 min read

How to hire your first growth team

Elena Verna and Andrea Wang · Lenny's Newsletter Freemium Advanced

Built from interviews with 12 growth leaders, and it argues hard against the thing most founders want to do, which is hire a Head of Growth as a shortcut. Hire the builder, match them to your bottleneck.

  • Product-market fit comes first; hiring growth before it burns capital.
  • Make the first growth hire a builder (acquisition or activation PM), not a growth leader.
  • A growth leader needs 6 to 12 months just to learn your specific problems.
  • 90 percent of the time acquisition is the first goal a new growth team takes on.
Open on lennysnewsletter.com ↗

It answers 2 questions

  1. Who do I hire first for PLG, and what should the team look like once it is ten people?
  2. Who should own activation: product, growth, or customer success?

Read with it

  1. The funnel audit method Hila describes here is the single most useful thing to run in your first month on a PLG team, and... Lenny's Podcast Podcast · 70 min listen The ultimate guide to adding a PLG motion | Hila Qu (Reforge, GitLab) Lenny Rachitsky
  2. Product leaders from Razorpay, Byju's, Swiggy, Flipkart and ShareChat on data-driven onboarding and growth team structure.... MoEngage Article · 10 min read Product-led Growth: Learnings From #GROWTH Product Summit 2020 Pulkit Jain
  3. Hila Qu built PLG at GitLab and scaled Acorns, and this is the rare free piece that maps the sales-led funnel against the... Lenny's Newsletter Article · 20 min read Five steps to starting your product-led growth motion Hila Qu
  4. Goes past the single aha metric to a three stage model (setup, aha, habit) with Apollo.io and Appcues case studies, plus the... Product Growth Article · 25 min read How to Measure Onboarding: Advanced Topics in Activation Metrics Aakash Gupta and Ramli John
  5. The answer draws a line between the user activating and a whole account activating, and Rocketlane's founder has built a... SaaS Sessions Podcast · 41 min S9E1 - Elevating Customer Onboarding for Revenue Growth ft. Sri Ganesan, CEO of Rocketlane Srikrishnan Ganesan with Sunil Neurgaonkar
eChai Partner Brands The partnership →