Growth Team Independence

Where growth should sit

George Bonaci, who leads growth at Eric Glyman's company Ramp, argues that growth should be as independent as possible and report to a founder, rather than being buried inside product or marketing.¹ His reasoning runs through the mandate. The growth team's job is to figure out how to grow the business, and that job is broader than either marketing or product. To pursue whatever is highest-leverage, the team needs latitude to work across the whole organization, which it cannot have as a sub-function of any single department. Bonaci cites this as a concrete reason he values Ramp, where the growth team reports to one of the co-founders.

He allows that the structural options vary by company. Reporting to a founder is his preference, giving maximal independence and cross-org reach. A Chief Growth Officer provides a dedicated executive owner. A SWAT-team model creates a roaming growth org that parachutes between parts of the business. His summary is conditional rather than absolute: "ultimately it depends on the business, but they should be as independent as possible."¹

Independence without antagonism

The reporting line is only half of it. Bonaci pairs the structural claim with a cultural one about how an independent growth team should operate across functions. Its job, he says, "is not to make anyone happy, it's to make the business successful."¹ For a stretch the team may work very closely with product, or with product marketing, or another function, but it should be clear that it brings a distinct skill set and point of view aimed at the same shared goal, not a competing one.

The detail he emphasizes is that communicating how growth thinks matters more than the specifics of what it is doing. Alignment on the way of thinking, in his account, is what keeps a cross-functional partnership from turning into a turf fight. Independence is meant to enable reach, not to license antagonism.

Why the reporting line matters

The underlying claim is that reporting line determines scope. A growth team inside marketing optimizes marketing; inside product, it optimizes product; reporting to a founder, it can chase the highest-leverage lever anywhere. Only the last structure is consistent with seeking alpha in growth and with the cross-functional nature of a growth portfolio of bets, both of which assume the team can go wherever the return is. It is the org-design expression of growth as an owner-operated growth lever, and at Ramp it sits alongside the company's single-threaded team design as the horizontal that roams across the verticals.

The tension it carries

That roaming license is also the source of the friction. A founder-reporting growth team with a mandate to do whatever is highest-leverage can collide with the autonomy of the product-owning teams it reaches into; the independence that enables the alpha can also step on owners' toes. Bonaci's stated mitigation, the "complementary, same goal" framing, is a posture rather than a mechanism, and it leaves the boundary to be negotiated case by case.¹ The structure also does not scale indefinitely: reporting to a founder depends on finite founder attention, which is precisely why the Chief Growth Officer and SWAT-team alternatives exist for companies that have outgrown it.