How to Build a Growth Culture in Your Company

Growth as a Strategic Function, Not a Tactic

The biggest mistake companies make with growth is treating it as a collection of tactics — running ads, A/B testing buttons, optimizing landing pages. The speakers in this session argue that real growth is a strategic function that touches every part of the organization.

Working at two of France's biggest unicorns, they've seen firsthand what happens when growth is elevated from "the team that runs ads" to "the function that drives company strategy."

What Growth Culture Actually Looks Like

Experimentation as a Default

In a growth-cultured company, every decision starts with a hypothesis. Not "let's redesign the pricing page" but "we believe that showing annual pricing first will increase conversion by 15% because users anchor on the lower monthly equivalent." The culture values learning over shipping.

Data Literacy Across Teams

Growth culture means everyone — from sales to product to customer success — can read a dashboard, understand a funnel, and make data-informed decisions. This doesn't happen by accident. It requires investment in tooling, training, and shared metrics.

Cross-Functional Collaboration

Growth teams that sit in a silo fail. The most impactful growth work happens at the intersection of product, marketing, sales, and engineering. Growth culture means tearing down walls between these functions.

How to Start Building Growth Culture

1. Get executive sponsorship. Growth culture starts at the top. If the CEO doesn't understand and champion growth thinking, it won't stick.
2. Hire a growth leader, not just a growth hacker. You need someone who can articulate strategy, not just run experiments.
3. Create shared metrics. When marketing, product, and sales all own the same North Star metric, collaboration happens naturally.
4. Make experimentation safe. Failed experiments should be celebrated (within reason). If people are punished for experiments that don't work, they'll stop experimenting.
5. Invest in data infrastructure. You can't have a data-driven culture without data. Budget for analytics before you budget for ads.

Common Mistakes

• Hiring too junior too early. Your first growth hire should be someone who's done it before — not an intern who read about growth hacking.
• Confusing growth with marketing. Growth includes marketing, but also product, engineering, data, and sometimes sales. Don't box it in.
• Expecting results in weeks. Growth culture takes months to build. The compounding effects take even longer to show.
• Copying playbooks blindly. What worked at Notion won't work at your B2B SaaS targeting French SMBs. Context matters more than tactics.

Key Takeaways

1. Growth is a mindset, not a department. The goal is to make growth thinking pervasive across the org.
2. Start with the right hire. A senior growth leader who can influence executives is worth 10 growth hackers.
3. Invest in infrastructure first. Data, tooling, and shared metrics create the foundation for everything else.
4. Be patient. Growth culture compounds. The first 6 months feel slow. The next 6 months feel transformative.

Based on a Growth.Talent LinkedIn Live session (52 minutes) hosted by Jeremy Goillot, featuring growth leaders from French unicorns.