When a company moves from early traction to sustainable growth, it must transition from scrappy experimentation to something more deliberate. Scaling isn’t just about doing more of what worked before – it’s about building the systems and structures that allow growth to continue at pace, without burning out people or breaking the business. This typically involves three critical investments: dedicated growth teams, formalised processes, and scalable data and experimentation infrastructure.
Building Dedicated Growth Teams
In the early days, growth is often everyone’s job – a mix of founders, marketers, and product people running fast, informal experiments. But scaling requires focus. Companies that scale successfully often build cross-functional growth teams that blend product, engineering, marketing, and data. These teams are tasked with discovering and driving new levers of growth across acquisition, activation, retention, and monetisation.
Take Pinterest, for example. Their early product team realised that user activation was a bottleneck, so they spun up a dedicated growth team to test everything from onboarding flows to email triggers. That team became central to Pinterest’s rapid user growth and remains a core function today.
Formalising Growth Processes
Ad hoc experimentation only gets you so far. To scale, growth efforts must be systematised. This means establishing structured testing processes, prioritisation frameworks like ICE or RICE, and regular cadences for reporting and retrospectives. It also means developing clear interfaces between teams so that ideas, results, and responsibilities don’t fall through the cracks.
Brian Balfour, former VP of Growth at HubSpot, puts it well:
“Growth is a system. It’s not a set of hacks, tactics, or secrets. A system that works for your product, your users, and your business model.”
Formalising the growth process doesn’t mean stifling creativity – it ensures ideas are properly evaluated, resourced, and measured so they have a real impact.
Investing in Scalable Infrastructure
The third pillar is infrastructure. As growth experiments multiply, so does the need for data, tooling, and measurement. Companies that scale invest early in clean data pipelines, centralised dashboards, A/B testing platforms, and customer segmentation tools.
Consider how Airbnb built out its internal experimentation platform, enabling teams to run thousands of tests a year with consistent metrics and governance. This kind of infrastructure unlocks speed and confidence – two essential ingredients for compounding growth.
It’s also about making data accessible. If engineers need SQL skills to answer simple questions, your growth flywheel is going to stall. Scalable growth means enabling every team to explore data, test ideas, and measure outcomes independently.
Scaling growth is not about hustle – it’s about building systems. By establishing dedicated teams, formalising your growth process, and investing in infrastructure, you create the conditions for sustainable, repeatable success. The companies that win at scale are the ones that take this seriously and build for the long term.