Growth Teams should stay in a Founder Mode.

Okay okay, I know there was a ton of controversy about 'Founder Mode'… but hear me out.

Cool product alert: Loops! Casual product analytics that surface concrete insights from your data—not more dashboards. Join growth leaders—Monday.com, AB inBev, ClickUp, Postman and others—and try Loops on your own data today.

---

This post was was co-written with Yue Zhao. Yue is an executive coach who helps women and minority leaders accelerate their careers and reach the C-suite. You can find her at www.yuezhao.coach. Previously, Yue was the CPO and CTO at Fuzzy Pet Health, PM manager at Meta, and the first PM at Thumbtack.

---

What's This "Founder Mode"?

Founder Mode is a mindset where teams operate with urgency and a scrappy, all-hands-on-deck approach, as if they were still in the early stages of a startup. In this mode, hands-on creation is prioritized over managerial duties. This means founders/execs/managers are directly involved in building, problem-solving, and making swift decisions. In fact, it’s generally framed as the opposite of the Manager Mode that most company leaders operate in, where the focus shifts to organizing teams, planning, and overseeing operations.

Founder Mode is pretty much the opposite of business-as-usual: instead, you're skipping over hierarchies, chatting directly with every product manager, engineer, designer, and/or analyst—chasing after those wild, "what if we tried this?" ideas. It's recently come up because of Brian Chesky’s new approach at Airbnb, but it was also how Steve Jobs steered Apple and how Elon Musk juggles, well, everything.

Founder Mode isn’t applicable to all companies or teams (you can’t run infrastructure or customer support that way). However, in a world where markets flip overnight and new tech pops up faster than you can say 'annual recurring revenue,' having some teams in your company stay in Founder Mode isn’t just a nice-to-have anymore; it’s essential.

Founder Mode in Growth

Founder Mode isn't just for founders anymore—and there’s one team that should be in Founder Mode, all-day, everyday: growth team.

Unfortunately, not everyone gets this. Oftentimes, startups bring in a VP of Growth and assemble a growth team when they're ready to scale a product that has momentum. They’ve got Product-Market Fit, they’ve got a bunch of fans… Time to scale up a stable, Manager-Mode-friendly growth operation, right? 

Wrong. 

I firmly believe growth teams need to stick with that scrappy, founder mode to really crush it.

When growth teams switch to autopilot and rely too heavily on scaling activities, which usually lead to smaller-scale optimizations, they hit a performance plateau. Yes, other teams—sales, customer service, marketing, engineering—might be shifting into scaling mode, setting up processes, and all that jazz. But growth teams? They need to stay nimble, keep those lines of communication open across all levels, and keep fostering that out-of-the-box thinking.

What’s going on here?

What gives? Why is this approach so essential for growth teams? 

The key to all of this is growth's need for constant innovation.

Let’s start with Product: no company can find Product-Market Fit in Manager Mode. Founder Mode is critical for finding that initial traction. Manager Mode, by contrast, is how most scaling businesses operate. At that stage, the focus shifts from innovation and differentiation to scalability and automation. Companies in Manager Mode aim for slow, steady, incremental gains.

If you work in Growth, you can’t escape this reality—while your colleagues in Marketing or Sales are probably cruising in the stabilizing comfort of Manager Mode, Growth teams can’t. Even the Product team typically only needs to innovate and find new horizons every 5 years or so, allowing them to enjoy Manager Mode for extended periods. In contrast, Growth teams have to innovate quarterly. Your company relies on you to continuously drive the innovations that fuel ongoing growth, so you can’t operate like everyone else.