How we operate Unify's growth team

Hey there, Austin here 👋

Welcome to The Pipeline—the newsletter to help scale your revenue team’s creativity.

Last week I discussed how we built our growth team in such a competitive market and what qualities we looked for in our growth hires (check it out here).

I got a lot of responses asking to cover how we operate on Unify's growth team. That's what I'm sharing today.

In this guide I share 3 frameworks we used to produce ~$120M of annualized pipeline.

Let's get into it.

📒 GTM Playbook

How we operate Unify’s growth team

Building a growth team is hot today especially as all distribution channels from paid ads to outbound to SEO have gotten more competitive.

The way to differentiate in 2025 is in how your team operates and executes. Having met hundreds of growth teams over the past year, growth teams that operate at the highest levels are still scarce.

Both at Ramp where I was a growth leader and now at Unify, how we've operated has been our biggest strategic advantage.

The 3 frameworks.

At Unify, we have 3 core operating frameworks:

1. Sprints

2. Experiment Specs

3. Prioritization

Here's a deeper dive into each.

1. Sprints

Sprints are an operating cadence borrowed from engineering teams. The best growth teams use them too.

Typically they involve setting clear goals for each team member to accomplish over a 1 or 2 week period of time.

During that period of time, there are regular check ins, and there’s a culture of accountability in getting done what one commits to in a sprint.

Ideally your growth team should operate in weekly sprints, with weekly meetings that include all relevant cross functional stakeholders.

Our growth team meets every Monday morning to kick off the week. We'll chat though high-level metrics and review projects we have planned for the week.

Each team member should own at least 1-2 growth experiments each week. Intuition on scoping and deriving these experiments comes with time and practice.

These sprints will be a balance between shipping new ideas and doubling down on existing ones that have been proven to work.

For example, in the first month of launching an automated outbound motion at Unify, we ran 50+ campaigns, then transitioned to doubling down on the top 10 performers while testing 5+ new ideas each week.

Most teams fail to get sprints off the ground. Getting teams to follow a process every week requires discipline.

2. Experiment Specs

Specs are short documents that outline the scope of a product, feature or experiment. Like sprints, specs are an idea borrowed from the way that product/engineering teams operate. For us they live in Notion.

Specs are a great exercise to provide visibility and create a roadmap for execution, but should be a short no-frills exercise as the goal is to execute and learn as fast as possible.

Transcribing ideas into a spec allows you to flesh out the details and apply a measured approach. All growth work is hypothesis-driven, with a library of specs serving as a database of experiments and learnings.

At Unify, we have 5 sections in our growth specs:

1. Hypothesis: What is the hypothesis that you want to test? Be clear on what metric you want to move.

2. Impact score: This section is where we think through how much value this initiative can drive, over time we seek to get more accurate with our impact estimates.

3. Estimated effort: This section is where we estimate how long it will take us to ship the initiative. Our goal is to maximize impact per day of work because we have a small growth team.

4. Spec: Detail the work that will go into this initiative using any and all resources required. We're explicit about everything that goes into making a project a success.

5. Results: This section should detail the actual results that you saw from the experiment. It can be quick and dirty with screenshots, but make sure to capture any relevant details to communicate to the team why this was a success / failure.

While growth teams may work cross-functionally on certain ideas (revops, engineering, design), they must own these experiments end-to-end.

If you look at this using a RACI (responsible, accountable, consulted, informed) framework, the growth team serves as both responsible and accountable.

3. Prioritization Framework

With dozens of ideas being generated by your team, a framework for prioritization is key. I find that the best growth teams are masterful at prioritization.

At Unify, we prioritize projects based on a ratio of estimated impact to effort. That way, we can do quick iterations, use data-driven decision making, and create the most impact per hour.

We store all this information in Airtable.

Prior to launching each experiment, we define the hypothesis, probability of success, impact metrics, and estimated effort.

Here are a few examples of impact metrics. Customize the values depending on your funnel conversion rates and ACV:

• XX% increase in pipeline / meetings booked / signups

• XX% increase in social media impressions / website visits / etc.

You need dashboards and analytics to track results, incrementality, and output of each experiment based on the relevant impact metrics.

We use Airtable for this as it serves as our “growth team CRM” to make sure we have a source of truth for what experiments we’ve tried, what worked, and what hasn’t.

Final thoughts

Our 3 pillars work together to create a systematic approach to growth.

→ Weekly sprints keep us accountable and moving fast.

→ Experiment specs ensure we're intentional about how we work.

→ Prioritization helps us work on the most important things.

But frameworks alone aren't enough.

From what I've learned growing Ramp and Unify: be creative with how you experiment, measure what sticks, and then double down aggressively on what's working.

To do that, your team has to have the confidence to apply these frameworks and fail. By creating an environment where failure is acceptable (if learned from), your team can apply strategies, take big swings, and find a lot of wins.

Excited for next week's edition to round out our growth team guide.

Happy to answer any questions you may have thus far. Just reply to this email.

WHAT’S NEW AT UNIFY

One of our favorite features at Unify (that we also use): Turning product tours into pipeline.

Truth is, interactive tours are good, but automatically following up with the prospect afterwards is better.

At Unify, you can do this in just a few clicks:

1. Create an audience of the people who entered your tour (we set ours up with Navattic)

2. Create and customize a Play that outbounds them as soon as they complete the demo, and also set up custom alerts/other steps if you'd like.

You can, of course, tailor relevant copy referencing the product demo as well.

Anyone with a product demo on their site should be running this. Shoutout to Navattic for hosting ours.

For a full walkthrough, Garrett shows you exactly how to turn product tours into pipeline here.

And if you want to use Unify to drive more pipeline in 2025, book a demo here.

BEFORE YOU GO…

Thanks for reading, as always.

I hope today's edition was helpful.

Next week, I'll be diving into what tools build a world-class growth tool stack, what we use at Unify, and why.

Happy to answer any upfront questions. Just reply to this email.

Thanks a ton,

Austin

PS: If you want to use Unify to drive more pipeline in 2025, get in touch here.