How To Structure Your Team for Today’s Customer Engagement Needs

Companies are actively adapting their teams to build and maintain strong consumer engagement and increase long-term customer satisfaction. The siloed work environment is being abandoned for more effective cross-team collaboration. By encouraging teams to work together, you are ensuring your organization’s teams are modern and agile.

The Product Is the Center of Growth

The notion of individual teams working together to share knowledge and data relates to the McKinsey notion of being an agile organization. The agile philosophy relates to how organizations view their product—the product is now a part of the DNA of how organizations operate. When ideating growth hacking strategies, the product is at the forefront of how marketers want to differentiate themselves from their competitors.

Industry thought leaders agree that the product and an organization’s growth go hand in hand. Many leading startups utilize their growth teams to build fast and efficient feedback loops into the product. For a ridesharing brands, that might mean prioritizing the simplicity and ease with which current users are referring friends or signing up to drive for the platform, in order to allow for feedback loops that can grow their business in exponential ways.

And while every industry is different, these approaches can often work across verticals. Social networks are notorious for tying their product to their growth strategy—for instance, by making it simple and seamless for users to email their contacts an invitation to connect, if they are not already a part of the platform.

Don’t Be Afraid to Fail

Growth campaigns may cause adverse customer reactions when the “hacking” is too pronounced. While some social networks have been able to amplify their number of users by sending invitations to a user’s contacts—unless a given user opted out of this feature—some users were annoyed by this automated function, potentially running the risk that they might leave the network.

That said, marketers should be comfortable with experimentation, as failure is a part of experimentation. By experimenting with subject lines, copy, images, and other aspects of your campaigns through A/B testing, you’re accepting that one iteration of your campaign will “fail” in relation to the other. While it’s important for brands to ensure that they’re providing thoughtful, human experiences to their customers, it’s also important not to rest on your laurels; finding a balance means prioritizing the customer experience without shortchanging experimentation.

Data Is in Abundance

One key driver in how companies decide to structure their teams is the need to be data-driven. With the surplus of consumer data and data management tools, companies can now track the success of their campaigns better than ever, but only if they have the right tools and teams in place. When it comes to Business Intelligence (BI), marketers can rely both on tools or other teams. Reporting tools can help non-technical marketers easily manage data and track campaign spending and common metrics such as ROI across both digital and non-digital campaigns. Marketers can also work in tandem with a BI team to join different data sets and forge better cross-team partnerships—allowing data to be captured more efficiently.

Data Breeds Creativity

Data is like the north star for marketers. Data first tells you if your campaign was a success or not, based on the key KPIs of your organization. Using the results from your campaign,your team can then ideate new creative strategies to increase performance against your KPIs. Data allows marketers to challenge the status quo. With the data to back you up, your team can experiment with new campaigns based on customer behavior captured.

Find the Growth Approach That Works Best for Your Organization

Teams that follow growth strategies usually fall somewhere in the spectrum between functionally organized or following the independent model. The functional model assigns leaders to different product functions, such as onboarding and signups. The leader of each function is in charge of what initiatives are used to promote that function’s growth. The independent model is usually practiced in one of two ways: Either organized by shared metrics or organized by similar workflows.

At Braze, our engineering team follows a matrix model that includes our product management, design, user research, and engineering teams. Product marketing is being integrated into this model as well. These teams share KPIs regarding the Braze product. With this approach to growth, teams are more aligned and cross-team transparency is encouraged.

The growth model your organization chooses depends on your business and what industry you are in. Nonetheless, having a growth team that brings a diverse set of skills to a problem is the underlying factor for what teams and roles you choose to utilize.

Encourage Cross-Team Communication

Organizations looking to build a growth team have multiple models to choose from. No matter which you choose, the pods within your teams should be able to communicate openly when working together. Outside of your growth team, organizations should promote a workplace where people in different roles feel comfortable enough to bounce ideas off of each other. These connections fuel new, creative ideas. If you’re ready to tackle restructuring your team, listen to what some of our LTR 2019 panelists had to say about bringing teams closer together.