Why Multi-disciplinary Growth Teams are a Necessity for Business

Best-in-class innovators have integrated the principles of design sprints, rapid prototyping, minimum viable product (MVP) testing, and data-driven decision making in their innovation process. Moreover, they recognize the power of multidisciplinary growth teams.

In an era of rapid change and multiple technological forces, innovation processes have to be agile. Traditional sequential development cycles often fall short. Not only in terms of their time to market but also in terms of their success rates. Best-in-class innovators have integrated the principles of design sprints, rapid prototyping, minimum viable product (MVP) testing, and data-driven decision making in their innovation process. Moreover, they recognize the power of multidisciplinary growth teams.

Growth teams are comprised of employees who constantly look for ways to innovate. The ideal structure is multidisciplinary; the employees come from various departments. In this age of Digital Transformation, a growth team should be at least comprised of the following persons:

1. The growth lead. She is a leader who is responsible for the bigger picture. She heads the other team members and is aware of disruptive trends.
2. The product manager. He oversees how the product and its features are brought to life. Furthermore, he ensures relationships and integration with other disciplines in the organization such as sales and operations.
3. The developer. He knows everything about existing technologies, but also likes to experiment and invent new solutions.
4. The marketing specialist. This person knows where your target group is situated, which pain you solve for them and with which message you can make all those people aware of the fact that you offer the answer. As Ellis and Brown write, “The cross-pollination of expertise between engineering and marketing can be particularly fruitful in generating ideas for hacks to try.”
5. The product designer. Her assignment is to design products that offer an excellent user experience.
6. The data scientist. Delving into the data, he offers fresh, new insights and recognizes new opportunities.

Remember that every company has their own issues to solve, so the specific makeup of growth teams varies from company to company.

The poster children of innovation (LinkedIn, Yelp, Facebook, Evernote, Hubspot, etc.) all deploy teams such as these. Legacy companies, like Walmart and IBM, also didn’t want to miss the boat and formed teams as well.

Growth teams really play a huge role in an innovation strategy. Take for example, Canva. Their terrific growth team created a process by which they improved the user activation rate by 10% on a recurring basis. This resulted in tens of thousands of new active users every month.

I am not a fan of the “50,000,000 Elvis fans can’t be wrong” argument. So, instead of the knockdown argument, “everyone has a growth team today,” I will explain why I think this way of innovating can be very advantageous for your organization. Below I describe in detail 6 reasons to form a growth team:

1. In order to truly innovate, you should involve the complete organization. The different members of the growth team each represent their own part of the organization and can act as “ambassadors” for innovation among their co-workers.
2. Multidisciplinary growth teams outperform the traditional functional silos that are still dominant in many organizations. The different perspectives of the various experts complement each other and result in fantastic new ideas!
3. They are a necessity in this digital age. One of their goals is to anticipate the many changes that the Digital Transformation brings, which affects all disciplines.
4. Multidisciplinary growth teams are efficient because key figures within the organization are immediately aware of new developments.
5. They also shorten the turnaround time which leads to higher revenue.
6. Finally, growth teams save costs because not every team has to reinvent the wheel.

Did I convince you to form a growth team? If so, you also can take a look at other areas of innovation in your organization. Our brand-new Innovation Readiness Benchmark is designed to identify the key improvement areas your organization needs to address. Click here to test the innovation power of your organization!