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Don't hire a growth team early
The CEO's job
At that size, growth should not be delegated. Many companies hire a growth team at around 50 employees, which is silly. The flip from growing the company being the entire job to having a team that works on it comes far later than most people expect.
Once it does, the CEO's time shifts to strategy and what comes next: the next product line, taking things to the next level, maybe partnerships and sales.
How Meta organizes growth
Meta shows how small a growth function can stay. Across nearly 100,000 employees, fewer than 1% work in growth, with a few hundred in the central team and under 100 more spread across the products.
The central team builds the foundations everyone uses, such as SEO, optimizing the ad tech for the paid channels, and email infrastructure. Each product, from Instagram to Reality Labs, then has its own product manager and a small growth team for product-specific work. Small, talent-dense teams get a lot done in this field.
How did growth teams become a job?
Facebook's growth team formed in the late 2000s under Chamath Palihapitiya and became a model for the industry. In 2010, entrepreneur Sean Ellis popularized the phrase growth hacker in a blog post, describing someone whose entire focus is growth. Dedicated growth roles then spread through Silicon Valley startups over the following decade.
Why do small teams get more done?
Fred Brooks wrote in The Mythical Man-Month in 1975 that adding people to a late software project makes it later. One reason is communication: the number of possible pairs of people grows with the square of the team size. A team of 10 has 45 pairs, and a team of 100 has 4,950.
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