Most DTC brands don't have a team problem. They have a structure problem.
They hire because something broke. Ads got expensive, so they hired a media buyer. Email slipped, so they hired an agency. The site was slow, so they hired a dev. Every hire made sense at the time.
Two years later they have eight people, nobody owns the number, and the founder is still the one deciding what everyone works on.
I had to learn this one fast: if you want to make the right call for the business, you have to take the people out of the equation.
That's hard. You like your team. You hired them. Some of them have been with you since day one. So when you sit down to figure out what the team should look like, you start with who you already have and build around them. That's how you end up with a bunch of "doers" and no one actually growing your business.
So here's what I do instead. I call it the 3x3 growth org. Nine boxes, plus one box on top that most brands are missing.
Start with the goal, not the people
Before you think about who's on your team, forget who's on your team.
Start with what the company is trying to achieve. Then the strategy that gets you there. Then who owns each piece. Goal, strategy, people. In that order.
And "goal" means three things:
What do you want to achieve?
How fast?
What's your risk tolerance?
Those answers set how much OPEX you can spend on a team. A founder building a lifestyle business and a founder trying to double in a year should not have the same org chart.
The three functions
Every DTC growth strategy comes down to three functions.
Acquisition. How you get new customers. Paid media, organic social, influencers, partnerships.
Conversion. How you turn traffic into orders. Your site, CRO, landing pages, offers, marketplaces like Amazon.
Retention. How you get them to come back. Email and SMS, post-purchase, subscriptions, loyalty.
They overlap. Product and creative touch all three. If acquisition brings in customers retention can't keep, that's not two problems. It's one.
The nine boxes
Put those three functions across the top. Then three roles down the side:
Strategy. Deciding what to do and why. What are we testing, where's the budget going, what's the offer.
Creative. Making the thing. The ads, the emails, the landing pages.
Execution. Getting it live. Launching campaigns, building flows, shipping site changes.
Three functions, three roles, nine boxes. Every piece of work on your growth team lives in one of them.
The box on top
This is the one most brands are missing.
Above the nine boxes, you need one person who owns the KPIs and sets targets across every channel.
They take the company goal and break it down. How much revenue from Shopify vs Amazon. New vs repeat. What aMER needs to be. What first-order profit you'll accept. How all of it shifts month to month based on what's launching.
Then they hand each function a clear target. "Spend this much on Meta this month, here's the creative and landing page behind it." The channel owner either says yes, or comes back with what they'd need to hit it.
Without this person, every channel invents its own definition of "grow." Your media buyer optimizes for ROAS. Your email agency optimizes for open rates. Your designer optimizes for how pretty the ad looks. Everyone's working hard, and nobody's number adds up to the company's number.
With this person, every goal ladders up to the same place.
Why isn't the founder doing it? Two reasons. Founders are really busy. And setting targets well is an art and a science.
The title doesn't matter. Growth operator, head of growth, director of ecom. What matters is that one person owns the number.
What this looks like in real life
Take a ~$10M brand (I use Harvey Chow, our fictional dog brand). Their team: the founder, an ecom manager, a freelance media buyer, an email agency, a part-time designer and a Shopify dev on retainer.
Map them:
Media buyer → acquisition execution
Email agency → retention creative + execution
Dev → conversion execution
Designer → acquisition creative + conversion creative
Ecom manager → all three strategy boxes, plus conversion creative and execution
That's five boxes for one person. And the box on top? Nobody. So the founder sets targets in their head, on weekends, when they have time.
This is the most common pattern I see. Lots of doers. No strategist. No one owning the number.
The one rule
One person can own strategy across multiple boxes. That's actually ideal. One brain looking at acquisition, retention and conversion together.
It breaks when that same person is also doing the creative and the execution. Strategy is always the first thing to slip, because execution is urgent and strategy never feels urgent.
Empty boxes are allowed
You don't need all nine boxes filled.
An empty box can be a decision. You looked at it and chose not to staff it yet. Just say it out loud: "We don't have budget for a dedicated CRO person. Our ecom manager covers it alongside retention. It won't get 100%, and that's a tradeoff we're choosing."
And if your team feels a little messy right now, that's not a bad sign. If everything were perfectly built out at your size, you'd probably be overspending on OPEX.
What I'd fix first
Fill the box on top. One person on targets and strategy across all three functions. Could be the ecom manager if they have the experience and you take execution off their plate. Could be a new hire or a fractional growth operator.
Push execution down to the people and tools built for it. AI can take a lot of the uploads, merchandising and small site changes.
Spend OPEX on strategy first. The person deciding what to do is worth more to you than another person doing what they're told.
Try it tonight
Grab a piece of paper, draw the grid, and put your team's names in the boxes. You'll see your next hire in about five minutes.
Or use my free template → 3x3 growth org template
I walk through the full build, including the Harvey Chow before and after, in the video at the top of this post.
Who's in the box on top at your company?
Sarah Carusona, DTC growth operator and founder of BA Commerce. I've run 7, 8 and 9-figure P&Ls and work with $5-50M DTC brands.
