You don’t have enough time to be responsible for growth forever.

At some point, you need to delegate this to your growth team.

But when, how many, and who to hire?

Here’s the growth team framework by Y-combinator and TOP growth experts you can follow:

1. When to hire?

– Only when you have proven sustainable retention. No retention = no Product/Market Fit = too early for growth hacking

2. The most common makeup of an initial, Year 1 Growth Team?

1 Growth-focused PM + 2-3 Growth Engineers + 1-2 Growth Data Scientists

3. What traits to look for?

3.1. The Ideal Growth PM Candidate

+ Data-oriented, curious (must-have)

+ Prior growth experience (must-have)

+ Former startup founder (nice-to-have)

+ Existing PM (nice-to-have)

3.2. The Ideal Growth Engineer Candidate

+ Proactive, curious about coming up with their own hypotheses to test

+ Doesn’t cry over lost code

+ OK doing things that don’t scale

+ Great communicator

3.3. The Ideal Data Scientist Candidate

+ Fluency with experimental design and interpretation

+ Coding Ability

+ Great Communication Skills