Connect-Users-to-Value Journey Staffing
Growth's job is to connect users to your product's value — so staff teams around each stage of the user journey.
- Difficulty
- Moderate
- Time to result
- ~months to results
- Steps
- 4
- Confidence
- 88%
An operating definition and org model for growth. Define growth as connecting users to the value of your product (value that changes as a user matures), then lay out the full user journey and staff dedicated teams — each with its own metric goals and roadmap — against each stage. Guards against growth being seen as cold metric-hacking.
Origin
Cheng's personal framing developed across YouTube, Duolingo, Grammarly, and Chess.com. He contrasts it with growth's reputation as 'pure metrics hacking' and paywall/friction tactics.
Core principles
- 01Value is not static — what a non-user needs to understand differs entirely from what a 3-year habitual user needs.
- 02Map the whole journey: acquisition, activation, engagement, and beyond.
- 03A well-resourced growth team can move each lever; the real work is sequencing and prioritization.
- 04Know when the core product team, not growth, owns a lever — and hand it over.
How to run it
- 1
Adopt the value definition
Frame growth as connecting users to the value of the product, holistically, rather than moving one isolated metric.
Watch out Micro metric-hacking with friction and paywalls can work locally but harms durable companies.
- 2
Lay out the full user journey
Enumerate every stage a user passes through from pre-user awareness to long-term habit.
- 3
Staff a team per stage with its own goals
Assign teams to each element of the journey, each with specific metric goals and roadmaps, then let them run.
Pro tip Each stage's team should reason from that stage's value proposition, then ladder into specific problems and hypotheses.
- 4
Cede levers the core product owns
When a metric is driven by the core product experience itself, hand it to the core product leader instead of duplicating effort.
Watch out At Grammarly, Cheng staffed a growth team on a retention metric, realized the core product team owned it, and moved it — recognize this early.
In the wild
Cheng staffed a growth team to move current-user retention, then realized frequency and quality of daily suggestions — owned by the core product team — was the real driver, so he shifted ownership to the core product leader.
→ Avoided growth getting in the way of the team best positioned to move the metric.
Common mistakes
Reducing growth to metric-hacking
Throwing up paywalls and friction can move a micro-metric but undermines building a durable company.
Growth duplicating core-product work
When the core product experience drives a metric, a parallel growth team just gets in the way.
Is it for you?
Best for
Growth leaders standing up or restructuring a growth org at a scaling consumer company.
Not ideal for
Tiny teams where one person owns the whole funnel and formal stage-staffing is overkill.
From the transcript
“I like to describe growth as the the job is to connect users to the value of your product”
“that value can change for a user over time”
“I staffed up a growth team, tried to work on this metric, and then I realized actually like I'm kind of just getting in the…”
From the episode
How to find hidden growth opportunities in your product
Albert Cheng (Duolingo, Grammarly, Chess.com)