Building high-performing teams: lessons from Dropbox, Canva, and Webflow

Executive overview

Most growth teams fail not from lack of effort but from missing the foundational pieces: unclear ownership, no go-to-market strategy from day one, and execution that copies best practices rather than starting from their own data.

Melissa Tan draws on nearly a decade across Dropbox, Canva, Grammarly, Miro, and Webflow to lay out what actually makes teams perform — from how to hire, to how to structure cross-functional collaboration, to how to develop people who follow you from company to company.

The best growth teams combine a results-oriented culture with genuine investment in individual development — these are not in tension.

What Dropbox got right and wrong

• Hired for first-principles thinking over experience — led to unconventional go-to-market innovation
• Made hiring a company-wide responsibility; everyone trained to sell the role and close candidates
• Delayed sales and enterprise motion too long while B2B competition caught up
• Started growth experiments too late; early attempts copied best practices rather than using Dropbox's own data
• Growth felt like "a layer on top of product" rather than embedded from the start

When to go product-led vs. sales-led

• Product-led works when onboarding is intuitive, learning curve is low, and there's a viral component
• Early product-led signals: enterprise customers self-serve and then knock on the door asking for SSO and enterprise features
• Sales-led makes sense when the product requires customisation or when the buying decision sits with legal or finance
• Many companies now move in both directions — starting product-led and adding sales, or vice versa
• Figure out how consumer and B2B journeys connect as early as possible

Ingredients of a high-performing team

• Clear goals tied to measurable outcomes, broken into individual levers each person owns
• A mission — the "why" behind the metrics — that gives context to daily work
• Results-oriented culture: everyone knows what success looks like for them personally
• Team-first mindset: sharing learnings and context across members, not competing internally
• Ownership mentality: carve out meaty scope per person, then reinforce through culture and example
• Fun — intentionally infuse it; high-pressure environments erode it quickly

Developing people

• Hire for growth mindset first: people who want feedback and take it well
• Ramp: clarify what success looks like in the first 90 days; help them secure early wins
• Give direct feedback early — state your intention, offer support, keep feedback about the work not the person
• Have a lifelong relationship orientation — stay in touch, help with career decisions long after they leave the team
• Use tools like Loom to give team members visibility with senior leaders without requiring calendar access
• Radical Candor principle: care deeply and challenge directly — these are complementary, not opposing

How to interview PMs

• Prioritise first-principles thinking over credentials: use live problem-solving, ask why repeatedly, dig into their reasoning
• Test for growth mindset by giving feedback during the process and observing how they incorporate it
• Sequence: hiring manager screen with live problem-solving → competency interviews with the team → presentation round
• Before the final presentation, run a prep call — share context, give feedback on their draft
• Candidates who ignore prep-call feedback are a strong signal of fit problems
• Give candidates one week and cap slides (e.g. 30 max); emphasise substance over polish
• Ask candidates to present on the actual role problem, not past work — it tests how much they've absorbed

Building a growth team from scratch

• Before product-market fit: the whole founding team should be thinking about growth, not a dedicated hire
• First growth hire is typically an acquisition generalist — think portfolio manager testing channels, not a channel expert
• Look for analytical + creative attributes, not deep channel expertise; expertise matters more at scale
• Early focus areas: acquisition (one hire), activation (user testing is enough, no A/B testing yet), pricing from day one
• Pricing mistakes are expensive to fix at scale — grandfather problems, legacy pricing migrations
• Consider a part-time advisor to guide an early-career hire; structure it as a quarterly trial first

Flying formation: how growth works with other teams

• Growth should be infused into the company, not a layer on top
• Use a DACI framework (Driver, Accountable, Contributor, Informed) to clarify roles on cross-functional work
• The Accountable role — final decision-maker — is the most common source of confusion; assign it explicitly
• Define operating rhythms: shared metrics reviews, initiative updates, and quarterly planning cadences
• Growth team's unique asset: closest to the user; use that to feed product roadmap, not just run experiments
• Revenue ownership varies — can sit in marketing, finance (early stage), or product growth; product growth is most common at scale

Common growth mistakes

• No go-to-market blueprint: product-market fit arrives, but there's no plan for how consumer and B2B motions connect
• Copying growth playbooks from other companies without validating against your own data and user behaviour
• Over-experimenting on low-impact areas, or under-experimenting because volume feels too small to move the needle
• Changing too many variables in one experiment — when it fails, you can't learn why
• Starting growth as a separate function rather than embedding it in product thinking from the start