The First Three Hires That Determine Whether Your Growth Team Survives Year One

Most companies build their first growth team backward. They hire for acquisition, optimize funnels, and chase vanity metrics—then wonder why they're shut down within 18 months. The real pattern, according to leaders who've scaled growth at Meta, Instagram, Anthropic, and HubSpot, is far less intuitive: the best growth teams don't start by growing anything at all.

The counterintuitive claim that emerges from examining how 8 top growth leaders actually built their teams is this: your first growth hire should never be a growth marketer. The companies that survive their first year—and eventually drive billions in ARR—staff for curiosity and systems thinking first, channels second. They embed growth in product from day one, not marketing. And they treat their first 12 months as an organizational negotiation, not an optimization sprint.

Growth teams die from turf wars, not lack of talent

When Chris Miller joined HubSpot in 2016, the growth team didn't technically exist. What did exist was a free CRM that leadership hoped would be "disruptive" but had no clear path to monetization. Miller, who came in as an IC product manager with a growth background, noticed something the feature PMs didn't: a small percentage of HubSpot's subscription revenue was self-service, and nobody was working on it.

We approached the team who owned it and we were like, are y'all working on this? And they were like, nah, we're working on a bunch of other stuff. We were like, can we take this? And they were like, sure, if you want it. And so we took it and immediately blew it up.

— Chris Miller, VP Product (Growth & AI) at HubSpot

That "aggressive mentality"—treating every unclaimed problem as growth's problem—is what allowed HubSpot's growth function to expand. But it only worked because Miller had organizational permission to be hungry. The team that fails in year one is the one that shows up with a mandate to "own growth" but no clarity on what they actually control.

Bangaly Kaba, who built growth teams at Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube, has a framework for this. He calls it vision, skills, incentives, resources, and action plan. Miss any one of those five and you don't get change—you get politics.

You need all of those to have change. And then within those buckets, you've got to figure out what are the right levers that you need to pull? What are the things that are missing?

— Bangaly Kaba, Director of Product at YouTube (fmr Head of Growth at Instagram)

The skill most leaders underweight in year one isn't analytical rigor or experiment velocity. It's the ability to navigate what Kaba calls "the environment"—the political landscape that determines whether growth gets the resources, roadmap space, and executive air cover it needs to survive.

The first hire is a translator, not a hustler

Amol Avasare didn't apply for the head of growth role at Anthropic. He cold-emailed Mike Krieger, the chief product officer, with a simple pitch: "You guys badly need a growth team." Krieger responded. Avasare got the job. But what's telling isn't that he sent a good cold email—it's what he said in the email.

I have a copy that I've tested that is very, very high open rate. You need to understand where people are getting outreach. If everyone's getting outreach in one area and you reach out to them there, you're not going to get as high of a response rate. I got his personal email. I know the copy that works. And then it's just keeping it very short on here's who I am, here's why I'd be a good fit and we should chat.

— Amol Avasare, Head of Growth at Anthropic

Avasare is a career growth PM who knows how to optimize an email subject line. But his real competitive advantage at Anthropic wasn't his funnel chops—it was his ability to build a growth function inside a company that had no shared vocabulary for what growth even meant. At the time he joined, Anthropic was the smallest, least-funded player in AI. No Meta-level distribution. No OpenAI first-mover advantage. The growth team's job wasn't to scale what worked. It was to invent a playbook from scratch in a category moving faster than any in history.

The lesson: your first growth hire needs to be someone who can create clarity in ambiguity, not someone who's optimized funnels at scale. Miller at HubSpot had a similar realization. The company's existing PMs were feature-oriented, built for depth. Miller looked at everything through a growth lens—distribution, monetization, self-service loops. That difference in how he saw problems mattered more than what he'd shipped before.

I was less of a feature PM and more of a growth PM in my DNA. I understood that what we were trying to do was product-led growth, but we didn't really have the shared vocabulary to call it that.

— Chris Miller, VP Product (Growth & AI) at HubSpot

The first hire has to speak both languages: product and growth. They need to translate growth opportunities into roadmap priorities that engineering and design teams actually want to build. If they can't do that, they'll spend year one fighting for headcount and losing.

Report to product, not marketing—or prepare for a short tenure

One of the sharpest disagreements among these leaders is where growth should sit organizationally. But the through-line is consistent: if growth reports into marketing in year one, it almost always fails.

At Meta, Naomi Gleit started as employee number 29, eventually leading the company's early growth efforts before becoming Head of Product. Her team sat squarely in product, not marketing. That wasn't an accident. Growth at Facebook was treated as a product discipline from day one—focused on activation, retention, and building loops into the core experience, not running ad campaigns.

I really believe in frameworks for things. That helps drive extreme clarity. I work on a lot of different projects. A lot of times I'm ramping up mid-project. I'm like, where can I learn what I need to learn about this project? I ask 5 different people, get 5 different answers. That is unacceptable.

— Naomi Gleit, Head of Product at Meta

Gleit's obsession with canonical documentation and ruthless clarity is a symptom of a deeper truth: growth lives or dies on whether it can ship product changes. If it's stuck in marketing, it's stuck running campaigns. Campaigns don't compound. Product changes do.

Carolina Samsing, who led growth at HubSpot Latin America and later at Nowports, saw this dynamic play out across markets. At HubSpot, the growth function worked because it was embedded in the product org and had a mandate to experiment with self-service models. At Nowports, a logistics SaaS company in Mexico, the challenge was different: growth had to bridge product, sales, and ops in a market where software buying behavior was immature. But the principle held. Growth couldn't just be a marketing function. It had to own parts of the product experience.

Los skills que se necesitan para hacer una startup y para crecer esa startup son muy distintos a los skills que se necesitan para hacer una escala.

— Carolina Samsing, VP of Growth at Nowports

Translation: the skills you need to start a startup and grow it are very different from the skills you need to scale it. The implication is that growth teams need to evolve their reporting structure as the company matures. In year one, they need to sit close to product to build the foundation. Later, they may need a seat at the executive table independent of both product and marketing. But starting in marketing is almost always a dead end.

When these leaders actually disagree: the "just ship it" vs. "understand first" tension

Not all of these leaders agree on execution philosophy, and the split is revealing. On one side: ship fast, optimize later. On the other: slow down and understand the problem before you build anything.

Elena Verna, Head of Growth at Lovable, is firmly in the "just ship" camp. Lovable went from launch to over $200 million ARR in under a year—one of the fastest ramps in history. Verna's philosophy is that in a market moving this fast, overthinking is fatal.

I usually spend maybe 5% innovating on growth in my previous roles. Right now I'm spending 95% innovating on growth and only 5% on optimization. The only way to create a word of mouth loop is just to blow their socks off. Just ship things you can talk about.

— Elena Verna, Head of Growth at Lovable

Verna's approach at Lovable is to remove every barrier to trying the product—giving away credits, enabling employee advocacy, building in public. Speed is the strategy. The market will tell you what works faster than any amount of user research.

Bangaly Kaba disagrees. He has a framework he calls "understand, identify, execute"—and he's religious about doing the first step properly before moving to the second.

What I call the anti-pattern is someone says, hey, you know what, this would be great to build. Then you go pull data to justify why that would be great to build. I call that identify, justify, execute. First, you have to really understand from first principles what is actually going on.

— Bangaly Kaba, Director of Product at YouTube

Kaba's point is that most teams skip the "understand work"—the deep, unglamorous research into user behavior, market dynamics, and system constraints. They jump straight to solutions. And those solutions fail because they're built on assumptions, not insight.

So who's right? The answer seems to depend on the market. In AI and other exponentially moving categories, Verna's bias toward speed makes sense. You're trying to outrun competitors, capture network effects, and establish a beachhead before the landscape shifts. In more mature markets—social, SaaS, consumer—Kaba's emphasis on understanding pays off. You're optimizing systems that already exist, and premature optimization is expensive.

The mistake is applying the wrong philosophy to your context. If you're building a growth team in a fast-moving category and you spend six months on user research, you've already lost. If you're in a mature market and you ship without understanding the problem, you'll waste eng cycles on the wrong bets.

Hire for the business model, not the growth model

The biggest mistake leaders make when staffing their first growth team is hiring for tactics instead of business model fit. They bring in a performance marketer when they need a product person. Or they hire a virality expert when the real constraint is sales cycle length.

Nicolas Rojas, founder of DAPTA, an AI agent platform for non-technical users, learned this the hard way. He started by building Imagine Apps, a software development agency in Colombia. The agency succeeded because Rojas could compete on efficiency, not just price. But when he spun out DAPTA as a venture-backed product company, he had to completely rethink his team.

Esta vez no quería ser el que implementaba, el que daba consultoría. Esta vez yo quería ser el que hacía una muy buena herramienta, que después le pagabas a alguien más para que te hiciera una consultoría para cómo usar la herramienta.

— Nicolas Rojas, Founder at DAPTA

Translation: "This time I didn't want to be the one implementing, the one doing consulting. This time I wanted to be the one making a really good tool, and then you'd pay someone else to consult you on how to use the tool."

Rojas realized that building a product company required a different kind of growth motion. Agencies scale linearly—more clients, more headcount. Products scale exponentially—same headcount, more users. That distinction changes everything about who you hire and what they optimize for.

At Anthropic, Avasare is dealing with a similar dynamic at a different scale. Anthropic's business model is API access and enterprise deals, not self-service SaaS. That means the growth team's job isn't just activation and retention—it's shortening enterprise sales cycles, automating onboarding, and building features that unlock word-of-mouth in technical communities.

One of the cleverest growth moves we made was this idea of importing memory from ChatGPT. Activation is a really big challenge in AI. We are starting to look at how do we automate growth. Our growth platform team is driving this effort called CASH, which is Cloud accelerates sustainable hypergrowth.

— Amol Avasare, Head of Growth at Anthropic

The takeaway: your first growth hires should map to the actual revenue model, not a generic "growth playbook." If you're enterprise SaaS, hire someone who understands how to compress sales cycles and build self-serve paths for smaller customers. If you're consumer, hire someone who can build retention loops and referral mechanics. If you're marketplace, hire someone who knows how to balance supply and demand.

The year-one survival checklist nobody talks about

The leaders who survive year one all do a handful of things that sound obvious but are rarely executed. First, they create a canonical doc. Gleit is obsessive about this at Meta: one document that everyone on the team knows is the source of truth for a project. No ambiguity. No five different answers to the same question.

There needs to be one canonical doc. Everyone should know exactly where the canonical doc is. That's the one place I can go to get all the information I need about a project, and it will link to all the other docs.

— Naomi Gleit, Head of Product at Meta

Second, they establish a weekly cadence of what Miller calls "radical accountability." At HubSpot, his early growth team adopted a mentality of treating every problem as their problem. That meant constantly asking: who owns this? If the answer is nobody, growth takes it.

Third, they avoid the trap of premature scaling. Samsing saw this across Latin American startups: companies that tried to hire big growth teams before they had product-market fit. The result was always the same—burn rate spiraled, the team got blamed for not hitting impossible targets, and growth became a scapegoat for deeper product problems.

Startups die of overeating, not of starvation.

— Carolina Samsing, VP of Growth at Nowports

That phrase—"startups die of overeating, not starvation"—captures the risk of building a growth team too early. You need enough product-market fit to know what you're growing. Otherwise you're just hiring people to optimize a broken funnel.

What no one tells you: year one is about earning the right to exist

The final lesson is the hardest to operationalize: the first year of a growth team isn't about hitting a number. It's about proving the function deserves to exist.

Miller put it bluntly: when he joined HubSpot, he didn't have a seat at the table. He pushed his way into conversations, sat on the sales floor to understand how other parts of the business worked, and focused on problems that were a level or two above his immediate team's mandate. That hunger—and the results it produced—eventually earned him the seat.

I think I was just willing to take some risks and really push for the things that I believed made sense, even though maybe based on the titles that I had at the time, I wasn't inherently given a seat at the table.

— Chris Miller, VP Product (Growth & AI) at HubSpot

Avasare did something similar at Anthropic. He didn't wait for the company to post a growth PM role. He cold-emailed the CPO, made the case that they needed a growth team, and created the role by demonstrating what it could do. That level of proactivity is what separates the leaders who build durable growth functions from the ones who get hired, run experiments for 18 months, and get reassigned when the numbers don't move.

The meta-lesson is that building a growth team from scratch is as much a political exercise as it is an operational one. You need the right hires, the right reporting structure, and the right early wins. But more than any of that, you need the organizational capital to keep going when the first three experiments fail. Because they will. And if you haven't built trust by then, year two never comes.

The companies that get this right—Meta, HubSpot, Anthropic, Lovable—don't treat growth as a department. They treat it as a capability that touches product, engineering, sales, and marketing. The first year is about embedding that capability into the organization's DNA. Hire translators, not mercenaries. Sit in product, not marketing. And remember: you're not trying to grow the business in month six. You're trying to earn the right to still be there in month eighteen.