Every company I have worked in or with has tried, at some point, to solve growth the same way. Draw a box on the org chart. Label it Growth. Hire someone talented to sit in it. Wait.
It rarely works. And the more I have watched it play out, the more convinced I am that the problem is not the person in the box. It is the box.
Growth is not a department. It is an outcome, and it gets produced or blocked at the seams between departments. A subscription business grows where marketing’s promise meets the product’s first-week experience. A media brand grows where editorial instinct meets audience data meets how the sales side packages it all. Nobody owns those seams. That is why the org chart keeps losing.
Growth is not a department. It is an outcome, and it gets produced or blocked at the seams between departments.
What happens when growth is one team’s job
I have seen the same three things happen almost every time:
- Everyone else hands off the responsibility. The moment a growth team exists, growth is their problem. Every other leader goes back to protecting their own numbers.
- The growth team owns targets without owning levers. They can see that retention is the issue, but retention lives in someone else’s backlog. So they work the levers they do control, usually at the top of the funnel, and activity gets mistaken for progress.
- The most interesting problems go unclaimed. The biggest opportunities almost always sit at intersections nobody was hired to watch.
What works instead
The teams I have seen grow well do not treat growth as a place. They treat it as an agreement, with two parts.
A shared goal. It has to be small and real. One or two numbers that several leaders own together, with real consequences attached. Not a dashboard of twenty where everyone can find one that flatters them. When two leaders are accountable for the same number, the conversation between them changes. They stop negotiating and start solving.
Clear decision rights. This is the less glamorous half, and the more important one. Most cross-functional efforts do not die from bad ideas. They die from ambiguity about who decides. Who can change the onboarding flow? Who can approve a pricing test? Who can pull tech time against a marketing hypothesis? If the answer is “let’s align,” things will move at the speed of the most cautious person in the room.
The fix is simple, and it works: write it down. For each lever that matters to growth, agree on three things:
- One person who makes the call
- Who gets consulted before it’s made
- How fast the decision happens
It feels bureaucratic for about a week. Then it feels like speed.
The team you actually need
None of this means you should never dedicate people to growth. You often should. But their job changes. They are the connective tissue. They run the experiments, keep the shared number in front of leadership, and push the decisions that would otherwise drift.
The best growth operators I have worked with spend most of their time in other people’s meetings. They are curious about every function and possessive of none.
Two questions before you reorganize
If your growth efforts feel stuck, resist the urge to redraw the org chart. Ask these first:
- Do the leaders closest to the customer share a goal with real consequences?
- For the levers that matter most, can everyone in the room name the decider without hesitating?
If the answer is no, you have an ownership problem, not a growth problem. The good news is you can fix it without touching the org chart.
I have seen this from a few different seats over the years, and I am still learning. I would rather hear thought out points of view than hard answers, so I will ask: where have you seen growth actually live in your organization?