What to Look for When Hiring a Head of Growth

And how to avoid "traps" in the process.

For any startup out there, I would say that the Head of Growth role is probably one of the most unique, comprehensive, and at the same time, confusing to hire for. Things get even more complicated when we are looking for a leader.

Questions always arise like:

• Why do I need this growth role? How is that different from my current product/marketing leaders?

• Whom do I need to hire? What profile am I looking for, especially if it's our first growth role?

• What is the responsibility of the growth team? Where should it sit in the org?

These are some of the main questions leaders/founders of startups usually have.

In this content, I'm going to focus more on the question of getting your first senior growth role within your organization, what to look for, and what to avoid.

Let's dive in.

Understanding the Role of a Growth Leader

Before you start putting the JD out there or getting recommendations for a Growth Leader, there are a few important questions you need to get right beforehand.

1. How this role fit into your org?

The answer is not straightforward, as different companies have different structures for their teams and line managers. I've seen a growth leader reporting to: CMO, CPO, COO, CEO, CRO, even CBO (Chief Branding Officer – don't do this).

Usually, if the growth team is a separate team with its own support/resources, COO, CEO, or CRO work best. However, if there is not a separate team or this is your first lead hire, it can report to a CPO or CMO type of leader.

2. What are the differences between Growth, Product and Marketing Leaders?

One of the most common and popular questions I usually get as a growth leader is: "How is your work different from current product or marketing teams, considering that your work touches a bit of both worlds?"

To illustrate this as simply as possible, I will provide a very high-level data snapshot, comparing these three senior roles. I'm sure you will notice the difference.

What Are Good Signals To Look For?

So, let's say you are convinced that you need a Head of Growth and you know where to fit them in your organization for maximum impact.

The core question remains:

• Who I`m looking for?

• What skills does this leader need to possess?

... which I will try to answer based on my experience as a growth leader.

1. To be a generalist

I believe that a growth leader who is more of a generalist than a specialist tends to bring more long-term value to any organization due to the following points:

• Generalists can see the bigger picture → when your expertise spans across multiple domains and touches many more data points in your organization, it's easier to stick for the long run and prioritize more effective strategies.

• Generalists have interdisciplinary knowledge → you cannot lead growth if your domain expertise is only focused on specific skills (Product, Sales, or Marketing) and thats the area you are stuck in the last X years.

• Generalists can collaborate effectively across the organization with various levels of seniority and domain experts.

• With knowledge in various fields, a generalist can bring diverse perspectives to problem-solving, often leading to more innovative and effective solutions. That`s why i`m big advocate to first-principle thinking.

• Understanding different facets of the business allows a generalist to have a more holistic view of the customer journey, essential for developing strategies that enhance customer experience and retention.

• A generalist approach allows for a broad understanding of different data sources and metrics across functions. This is crucial in making informed decisions that drive growth.

2. Empathy towards user experiences and challenges

This might sound trivial, but it is not as straightforward for growth leaders. By presumption, they need to scale different levers of the business, without getting too much into customer interactions. That's a product team's main work, right? Wrong!

As much as growth leaders need to take care to scale their numbers, part of it requires being able to speak with customers and figure out problems. Don't forget that “retention & engagement” is a core lever for the growth team. So, how would you know, for example, if customers don't onboard and activate? Yes, quantitative data or surveys can show you a lot, but going the extra mile and really diving deep into the users' minds is so valuable.

Again, this is not a must for all growth leaders, but if you are looking for a senior leader, I would add it to the wishlist.

3. Comprehensive understanding of Growth Motions ( Model )

This point includes everything from understanding, defining, building, and scaling the growth model of a company.

One of my favorite ones are:

1. From early days of Facebook and built by Chamath Palhapatiya

Source: Aakash Newsletter

2. A bit more comprehensive one from Elena Verna

Source: Lenny Newsletter

Basically, when you think about the growth model, think about the qualitative and quantitative way of answering a very important question:

“How does your product grows today”?

But why is this important? Well, once you have a clearly defined growth model, it can guide your product feature development, prioritize efforts, team focus, and company goals. In some instances, it can guide as well the hiring process, if, for example, you see an area where you want to double down.

So, as a leader in growth, the person should have some sort of frameworks developed and can clearly articulate the individual growth levers that build up the growth model.

4. Being able to find, test, and scale new acquisition channels

As you will see from this point, the role of a growth leader and knowledge does not limit mainly to product activities but also requires a good understanding of marketing channel levels.

It's clear that every channel has its saturation point and relying only on your best channel at the moment is not the way to think about scaling your new user base, especially if you are going to lead your company's growth efforts. We are talking about everything from SEO to SEM to Email Marketing to TikTok and even Q&A platforms like Reddit/Quora.

That's why it's a necessary part of this leader's portfolio to possess, in order to always be a step ahead in the acquisition efforts and understand which channels can be linear and which can be made into a loop.

If a new platform is on the horizon, but still not adopted by many, go test it and embed it in your acquisition strategy if the numbers pay out.

5. Solid understanding in building and scaling experimentation programs

I would say that experimentation at its core is the strongest skill a growth leader should possess. Basically, the majority of the work that the growth team will do is around creating hypotheses and testing them.

But at its core, you are looking for someone who can:

• Develop an end-to-end experimentation program (plan > build > test > iterate).

• Accurately understand where to experiment and where not to.

• Be able to organize the testing schedule involving product, design, engineering, and data.

• Have good knowledge of statistical terminology and how to apply them.

• Have strong experiment outcome understanding and business reporting.

What to Avoid When Looking to Hire a Growth Leader?

1. Bad advertising & hiring process

The first point I would start with is the advertising process, which is more internal issue but very common within startups especially. This is where it starts to get messy. When companies define that they need a Head of Growth in most of the job advertising i`ve seen, they usually write the JD in a way that sounds either:

• Marketing / brand related

  → If your primary scope is to run paid digital campaigns, scale content production, or draft PR proposals, etc., you are definitely not looking for the Head of Growth role, but rather a Head of Performance, Head of Content/PR.

• Business development related

  → Here, many companies confuse the word “growth” and associate it with overall business growth, which is not incorrect. But, when you advertise key skills around sales, project management, etc., again, that’s not your Head of Growth.

• Mixture of skills, thats sounds like you need an entire team

  → Probably the one that always puzzles me the most. I know that the expectations from a senior growth leader are quite high, but still, they cannot match an entire team. So, if you are looking for a designer, marketer, data analyst, etc. skills in a single JD, you are DEFINITELY not looking for a Head of Growth.

2. Too much experience in one domain

I would avoid someone who is well experienced in a single domain of knowledge (Marketing, Product, even Data). The reason is, from the above, you can see that a growth leader needs to be able to figure out and scale the growth levers across the product, which is more towards a generalist type of profile you are looking for.

In my experience, for example, I’ve started with digital marketing, moved to data, got exposure in product management, and this gives me a holistic view across multiple areas, which I can contribute to and lead a team alongside.

3. Not a hypothesis oriented

At its core, a growth role is very much oriented around generating hypotheses, testing them, and implementing them for a compounding effect. Going one level deeper, being able to generate hypotheses, you have to have good data analytics skills in order to interpret user behavior data and metrics the right way.

4. No exposure to cross-functional dynamics

That’s a big must for every growth leader to have because no matter if you have your own growth team or are working with cross-functional resources, you need to:

• Collaborate effectively with other senior leaders, especially if you are utilizing their resources. Growth teams don’t live in a silo.

• Get buy-in from all teams when you are presenting your growth strategy or a specific area you want to work on. Don’t forget you touch the user journey, user experience as much as the core product team, for example. You cannot be on your own.

• Even if you have your own team, you need to be able to organize, for example, the “experimentation schedule”, which involves at least four teams.

5. No business acumen at all

This is something I learned the hard way early in my career when I landed my first senior growth role. I was too domain-focused, thinking that it would be enough to just move my metrics and secure my team. Unfortunately, it didn’t unfold the way I wanted, because whatever you do, it always impacts the company's overall performance, and another team along the way.

So, avoid getting someone who:

• Doesn’t understand the P&L of a business or a vertical (where we lose, how we make money, etc.).

• Cannot contribute to basic financial forecasting (tools, team members, etc.).

In conclusion, the right Growth Leader is a versatile generalist who aligns strategy with execution, driving meaningful impact across all facets of your startup. Their role is not just to fit in, but to transform and propel your organization forward.

So, next time when you to start or thinking to hire a growth leader, I hope the content above will guide you better through the process.