Quite a few people ask me about the future of growth. The idea of having a team dedicated the growth in usage of a product is still a fairly new construct to organizations. More junior folks or people less involved with growth always ask about the split between marketing and growth. More senior folks always ask about the split between growth and core product. Growth butts heads with both sides.

Why do more senior folks tend to turn to the difference between core product and growth than marketing? For this I’ll take a step beck. Now, I’m a marketer by trade. I have an undergraduate degree in marketing and an MBA with a concentration in marketing. So I consider everything marketing: product, growth, research, and I’ve written about that. I used to see what was happening in tech as marketing’s death by a thousand cuts. I now more so see it as marketing’s definition has gotten so broad and each individual component so complicated that it can by no means be managed by one group in a company.

So if marketing is being split into different, more focused functions, growth teams aren’t really butting heads with the remaining functions that are still called marketing over responsibilities like branding. They are butting heads with the core product team over the allocation of resources and real estate for the product.

So how do growth team and core product teams split those work streams today, and what does the future look like? The best definition I can give to that split for most companies today is that growth teams focus on getting the maximum amount of users to experience the current value of the product or removing the friction that prevents people from experiencing current value, and core product teams focus on increasing the value of the product. So, when products are just forming, there is no growth team, because the product is just beginning to try to create value for users. During the growth phase, introducing more people to the current value of the product becomes more important and plays in parallel with improving the value of that core product. For late stage companies, core product teams need to introduce totally new value into the product so that growth isn’t saturated.

My hope is that in the future, this tradeoff between connecting people to current value, improving current value, and creating totally new value is all managed deftly by one product team. That team can either have product people naturally managing the tradeoffs between these three pillars, or three separate teams that ebb and flow in size depending on the strategic priorities of the organization. All three of these initiatives – connecting people to current value, improving current value, and creating new value – are important to creating a successful company, but at different stages of a company, one or two tend to be more important than another.

We should evolve into product organizations that can detect which of these three functions adds the most value at a particular point in time naturally, fund them appropriately, and socialize the reasons for that into the organization so these different functions don’t butt heads in the future. I believe that is the product team of the future. I now believe this is more likely than marketers evolving to manage branding, research, performance marketing, and product effectively under one organization.

Currently listening to Good Luck And Do Your Best by Gold Panda.