Tesla Motors Inc (NASDAQ:TSLA) is building a new growth team in time for the Tesla Model 3 launch. Growth teams are usually put in place so that they can help with scaling the business. Their day to day running of business involves making up scenarios and simulations in order to help them find the best way to expand the business.
The art of growth teams has long been upheld in the tech industry. Facebook had a growth team that helped massively as the company reached for more and more users each day leading to a very big user base. Über also had a growth team for its taxi service, but it was on the same scale with that of Facebook.
Tesla Model 3 launch success
Given the success of the previous growth teams at the different companies, it makes sense therefore for Tesla to also get one of their own growth teams just in time for the Model 3 launch. The company has pinpointed the car as one of the products that will help it expand globally, together with Tesla Energy products. Reports indicate that the company has already begun to build a growth team from ground zero. Tesla is also taking a page out of the success stories of Facebook and Über, literally, by hiring from the two companies.
The electric car maker hired former Facebook’s Growth Product Manager, Praveen Arichandran, as the new Director of Growth Programs. He has degrees in economics and computer engineering from the University of Waterloo. His LinkedIn profile shows that he started his career at AMD. From there he went to BMO for a short time, and eventually joined Facebook in 2011. He held numerous roles in the company’s growth team, and he joined Tesla earlier this year in January.
The new Tesla growth team was under the wraps until the company only started listing that they were looking for people in the field in jobs listings. Another of the people to first jump on the Tesla bandwagon was Sisun Lee, a former colleague’s of Arichandran at Facebook. Lee joined Über about the same time that Arichandran joined Tesla, but now they have teamed up together again at Tesla for the Model 3 launch. Lee joins as Staff Product Manager on the Tesla growth team, according to his LinkedIn profile. At Facebook, the two worked together on the internet.org project.
The new growth team has plenty of data and information to move around with since 400,000 orders of the Model 3 have been made since its unveiling. The data will no doubt be useful for the team to find the best way for the company to grow and expand the user base, a base that more than quadrupled with the Model 3 launch.
Tesla President, Jon McNeil recently confirmed that of the Model 3 customers who were ordering the new car, 93 percent of them are new. He was talking on a conference call discussing Tesla first quarter financial results. The figure shows that only 7 percent are current owners of a Tesla car right now, and the number of Tesla owners at the moment stands at around 100,000.
The bigger challenge for the company at the moment might be manufacturing since the company plans to jump from 50,000 vehicles in 2015 to 500,000 in 2018. The company is expected to make some manufacturing executive hires in the following weeks as the new growth teams continue to handle the expansion of the user base
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