The waters are never calm when scaling a startup. In fact, they are typically quite choppy. However, by making the correct hire in the head of growth position, you can navigate to shore much more smoothly.
The individual you’re looking for will create and execute growth strategies, manage marketing initiatives and, ultimately, drive revenue. My more informal take on this role is that it’s someone who deeply understands growth fundamentals, has significant expertise in one to two growth pillars and knows how to build an effective team.
I’ll walk you through when and how to hire your head of growth, their archetypes, how this role stands apart from other marketing executive positions, and what to expect from this hire during their first few quarters.
Head of growth archetypes
In my decade of growth marketing, I’ve seen quite a few growth leaders who began at various startups, all possessing varying levels of experience. To make it easier, I’ve grouped these candidates into three major categories, or archetypes:
- Generalists: Experience across numerous growth pillars.
- Specialists: Deep expertise in one pillar.
- Tertiaries: Data, finance/VC, VC or product background.
While I’ve seen members of each category become successful as heads of growth, I strongly advise hiring from either category one or category two for seed to Series B startups.
When building a growth function from zero, it’s vital to have someone who can drive the execution for your early channels and campaigns. When it comes to category three, I’ve only witnessed success after a growth team was already in place, with their efforts centered around optimizing efforts across data analytics and product.
Outside of these three major archetypes, there are two important flavors that are consistent across the groups:
- B2B or B2C
- Mobile or web
These two flavors can make or break the success of your growth efforts, as their type of marketing is so distinct. Someone coming from an extensive background of web acquisition at a B2B company like Rippling would not be well-suited to run growth at a B2C consumer startup such as Spotify.
Most growth marketers will heavily index in B2B or B2C, as their careers typically stay on that path. However, it’s quite common to see growth marketers who have experience in both mobile and web acquisition, and it’s absolutely acceptable to hire them.
You’ll occasionally find a unicorn who’s a generalist and has experience in B2B, B2C, mobile and web. If you do, recruit them immediately.
How to interview
I’m fortunate to have been on both sides of the interview table for head of growth positions, largely at tech B2C startups, so I have a good sense of what makes for amazing interviewees.
Below are example questions to ask and a few case studies I’ve seen work well:
Interview questions:
- What are the most important growth metrics for our startup to track?
- How would you measure success in our growth efforts?
- We’re having issues in our funnel — how would you analyze and optimize?
- What do you think our largest growth levers are and why?
- Knowing our current structure, who are your first growth hires?
- Can you explain how you’d launch our growth experimentation engine?
Case study:
- Budget allocation.
- Plan for scaling a growth pillar.
These questions are meant to help you gain an understanding of how your new potential hire thinks holistically about growth marketing. It’s less important to get into the weeds of how they would optimize a certain campaign, as that’s better served for a growth analyst or growth manager interview. The sample questions I provided should help you gain insight into how this individual thinks about metrics, experimentation, growth success and building a team around themselves.
When I worked at Postmates, we would assign a budget allocation take-home to most hires we brought onto the growth team, including our head of growth hires. I’ve personally completed this assignment dozens of times, which involves a raw sheet of dummy data under headers like Spend, Campaign, Channel, and Conversions. From there, you perform a couple of tasks or answer questions, such as:
- Optimize our current spend across campaigns.
- We’re increasing the budget 2x next month. Create a sample budget plan.
- Which channels do you think correspond to channels 1–5?
- Create a summary of performance for upper management.
I remember vividly questioning why we were giving this assignment to such a high-level hire, but I later realized it makes sense to understand their logic with data and metrics. Since this role is highly analytical and the bulk of decisions are made based on data, this assignment is extremely powerful at all levels of growth interviewing.
A second potential case study to present is an action plan for launching a net-new growth pillar at your startup, whether it’s currently live or not. Below is the example prompt that was used during my interview process at Coinbase:
- Create a growth plan for launching paid search at Coinbase.
This question will shed light on strategic thinking outside of purely quantitative abilities — for example, those measured by the budget allocation test. What you should measure here is the way that this interviewee lays out a growth experimentation plan for a new channel, aspects such as hypothesis creation, structure of growth testing and best guesses on which outcomes can be gauged by this case study.
If you’re not sure when you should start interviewing your first growth hire who could potentially become a head of growth, I’ve provided a more detailed guide here.
100/20 rule
If you’re expecting your head of growth to come in and start implementing on your most important pillar, they need to possess the correct executional knowledge.
Therefore, I highly recommend using the 100/20 rule for new hires. This means that the individual being hired has a deep understanding (100%) in one pillar and general understanding (20%) in the other growth pillars important for your startup. What’s the difference between the 100% and 20%?
100: Head of growth can set this growth pillar up from scratch, optimize it and scale it with industry best practices.
20: Head of growth knows what it takes to build these growth pillars and how to utilize those pieces of the puzzle they bring with them to execute, including partners, hires and tools.
If you hire a CMO or VP of marketing with 10 to 15 years of experience, they will typically possess a 20% capability on all pillars, as they’ve been out of executing campaigns for a long time.
What to expect in year one
Once you have found your perfect match for your head of growth, assuming they’re your first growth hire, below is the output that you should expect from them in their first year:
90 days
Just as with any other hire, their first 90 days will typically be spent ramping to your startup’s SOPs and processes. This time should also be spent auditing your growth tech stack and all your past growth efforts, and performing immediate optimizations with low-hanging fruit and launching one new growth pillar.
180 days
Now that the ramping has been completed, months three to six should be spent building a team around either optimizing a current growth pillar or helping to support your next big growth pillar. I’ve seen this commonly done with the use of consultants and agencies who are specialized in the latest best practices for specific pillars (i.e., life cycle, paid social, etc.) that need to be scaled.
It’s also vital for an exhaustive growth experimentation plan to be created at this time, ideally with various tests conducted per week. Other frameworks that should have been created by the six-month mark include a budget allocation sheet that helps allocate paid acquisition funds methodically and growth briefs that outline all upcoming tests (including hypothesis, KPI, results) as they’re launched.
365 days
If your head of growth has done their job properly, this is the time that another new hire should be brought into the mix for your growth team, usually a growth analyst or growth manager. The most efficient way to execute this is to take agency efforts in-house for the new hire to take the reins.
With a year of testing and data wrapped up, it should provide insight into what the next large-scale efforts will be. For example, at Postmates, as we grew out our mobile app acquisition efforts, we knew that our next big hires had to be mobile-oriented to take our efforts to the next level across Google UAC, Snapchat and other paid channels.
Your subsequent years of growth efforts will be guided by the combination of information gained in your first year from auditing, implementation and very exhaustive testing.
Congratulations on beginning the search for such a key hire in your startup journey, and given that it’s such a key hire, I encourage you to pick the flavor of head of growth who works well with your startup, as individuals’ skill sets can vary dramatically among them!
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