POV – You joined a startup as a growth team lead

Congrats! This is a very fun job with lots of aha moments for you and your team ahead. But that startup never had a growth team before and other teams have no idea what’s that. Soon you’ll start creating pull requests in their repos and be ready for some eyebrows raised. There might be skepticism about your team that doesn’t own any domain but messes around and writes hacky code.
How do you build trust with them?
Here are the learnings from my growth team lead journey.

Adapt to existing culture.
Follow the style guide, pull request templates, do tech designs. Follow Jira workflow and release process.

Consult with the responsible team before adding code to their domain.
Invite them to your feature kickoffs, ask their expert opinion on how to add new functionality.

Be transparent with them.
Your team works in a fail fast manner.
Explain to team leads reviewing your code that you do experiments. And not all experiments will show good results. If yes – you will double down and fix that hacky change, or otherwise remove it altogether.

Do some quick wins.
Start with low hanging fruit – easy to implement and quick to run experiments. That is important both to celebrate small victories with your team and show other teams that you don’t just mess around but deliver value.

Spread the news about the impact you made.
At the all hands meeting demo results of your work or post it in relevant slack channels.

Hold your horses while fixing other teams’ code.
As you touch different parts of the system you will notice there’s room for improvement. If you see some serious issues – share it right away to a responsible team lead. But smaller issues can wait. Take notes though.

These are some random thoughts.
But after all it’s you now the growth team lead.

What will you do to build trust?