Product or marketing: where a growth team should report

Map the growth model first, then put the team where the biggest lever sits. For most product-led companies that is product, next to core product rather than inside it, and once paid spend and product levers both matter, under one growth leader.

• Pick the problem before the reporting line. Brian Balfour would map the growth model, choose the one or two problems that move the business, list the skills they need, and only then ask where the team reports. Run that way, he says, almost every high-impact problem needs product and engineering. Where growth comes from paid and other channels with no product loop, he would let a marketing-led team own it for now, with dedicated engineers.
• Growth is a product team. Casey Winters would staff growth like any product team, with its own PM, engineering, design and data, because the levers are SEO, conversion, onboarding, virality and notifications, and marketing teams rarely get onto the product roadmap. Before product-market fit, he would not build a growth team at all.
• Put acquisition and activation under one leader. Archie Abrams runs growth marketing and growth product under one leader at Shopify. When the two report to different functions, he says, each optimizes its own rate, and the easy way to raise signup-to-activation is to make signup harder. He pushed back on Casey's idea of channel marketing staying in marketing and running in lockstep, since that breaks when budgets get set. Casey agreed and called his own suggestion too soft.
• Sit next to core product, not inside it. At Shopify, Archie keeps growth beside core: growth ships faster against numbers, and core holds long-term principles such as a "no wizards" rule for onboarding. Brian agrees, and says the friction turns into politics when nobody can see what growth is doing. Looking back at HubSpot, he would spend about 10x more time communicating the charter, roadmap and wins.
• Name who owns the handoff to sales. Hila Qu notes that B2B adds a third org. At GitLab, growth sat in product and built a PQL system. She says thousands of PQLs mean nothing if account executives don't pick them up, so she would write ownership of that moment into the growth charter. While growth and marketing still report to different leaders, she would change marketing's KPI from sign-ups to activated sign-ups. Lauryn Motamedi, whose self-serve growth teams at Airtable owned everything up to the sales touch, would keep sales out of growth and give growth self-serve revenue as a whole business to grow.
• Revisit the answer when the lever moves. Brian's last turn sets out four questions: is there retention, is the growth model clear, where is the biggest lever, and where are the seams. Casey adds that scope can shrink as well as grow: once most of Pinterest's actives were outside the U.S., ads monetization went to a different group, which he calls the right call. Lauryn, speaking last, would still keep free-to-paid conversion inside growth for a self-serve business, and would start a dedicated product growth team once natural growth stops explaining itself.