The ultimate guide to hiring a growth manager
To say that a company has to grow to survive is completely redundant. So why is finding someone to help you specifically for growth so hard?
Growth marketer, growth manager, growth hacker… are these titles just different names for the same job? 🤷🏻♀️
Which type should you hire, how and when? This article will give you all the info you need to answer this question.
But first, to set the scene, here’s a bit of my back story…
Three years ago I moved back to Australia 🇦🇺 I had spent 11 years in New York and L.A.
In N.Y. I worked on some tech co’s like Adobe, Palm and iRobot. In L.A. I launched a startup called My Yoga Avenue 🧘, a kind of yelp! for yoga teachers and students, and I founded a growth, marketing and PR agency.
I moved to L.A. just as “Silicon Beach” (SB) was emerging as a burgeoning startup scene in about 2011.
L.A. based Snapchat was starting to gain significant traction, and Google had set up in Venice beach — both giving cred to the L.A. tech scene.
The big V.C.’s, angel investors, and law firms that service startups in the valley were opening shop in L.A, validating that the tech scene was big enough to warrant the attention of some valley big guns. At the beginning you could smell the excitement in the air. 👍
At the agency I founded we worked on some great projects. Some of my favourite was working with a great team to launch Michelle Bridges in the U.S. And working with Bill Gross, founder of IdeaLabs, (a true tech luminary who sold his company to Yahoo! in 1996 for $1.6 bill. No biggie.) to help with the go to market strategy and launch of a few of his ventures.
During my time in L.A. we helped at least 30+ startups with the go to market and growth strategies the execution and planning of these strategies and ongoing business growth.
My personal fave? Working with Quincy Jones to help with his music tech startup, Playground Sessions.
When I moved back to Australia three years ago I started speaking to companies about growth and marketing roles.
I couldn’t find many companies who understood how to hire for growth and how to set them up for success. From the meetings I had it appeared they had a misperception of what a growth professional was and what they could do for their company.
I heard this a lot; “we are looking for “hackers” to come in and “grow sh*t”.
In the U.S., for the most part, the growth strategist was second in charge helping to articulate the CEO’s vision and translate that vision into goals. They would help the product and marketing functions work together to be united by and achieve those goals.
This, in my experience, is how a growth strategist is best utilised and how they can deliver the best value to a company.
War stories
Here are some of the things I’ve heard founders or recruiters say in the last three years that left me a little puzzled.
Me to the CMO of a major fintech company:
“So, how do you get along with the product team? Are they open to collaborations and ideas for optimising your campaigns, for retention?”
Marketing person:
“Oh (genuinely bewildered by the question) I don’t even know where the product people sit or what their names are.”
Me (inside voice): Oh f*ck. 😖
**
Founder: “We are looking for someone to come in and just ruthlessly test stuff and, ya know, hack growth.”
Me: “What are the growth goals for the short and long term and how do they contribute to the CEO’s vision and overall company goals? Have you guys achieved P/MF yet?
Founder: “Not sure really — we haven’t entirely articulated our vision yet. As far as P/MF — yeah sure I think we signed up to that already.” 🤦🏻♀️
**
Founder: “We had a growth person come in and do a bunch of programmatic stuff.”
Me: “Great — what was the cost to acquire a customer with that campaign? What channels converted the best for you?”
Founder: “Oh, we didn’t acquire any customers it was just an awareness campaign.” 😬
In this scenario, it’s fine to create an awareness campaign but if you don’t have a plan to move people from awareness to acquisition to retention to referral then what’s the point?
And, you need to have analytics platforms in place to acquire the learnings outcomes that would give you an ROI for such an ‘awareness’ initiative?
For e.g.
- Hotjar could be in place to learn where people bounce and why
- Set up Google analytics to make sure you understand which messages / channels were converting and why (i.e. create a funnel and UTM tracking in GA)
- Set up Intercom so you can liaise with the customers and learn from them first hand
- A/B testing your email welcome sequence or onboarding sequence to see which one leads to the best retention
- A/B test landing pages to see which one converts at the highest rate
- The list goes on
All of these comments show me that the founder didn’t have an overarching growth strategy. The thinking is; “let’s just throw sh*t at the wall and see what sticks.
What does a growth manager do?
Uber, Dropbox, Airbnb, Atlassian and Canva are hungry for growth managers. So what exactly do they do?
“Rather than build companies that are fueled by hype and publicity, growth managers look at data and results. They find ways to rise — sometimes aggressively so, mostly because of the “hunt or be hunted” competition online,” says Neil Patel.
Patel continues, “In essence, growth managers set achievable company growth goals, and then set about making them happen. This can be done by way of data collection tools to determine a baseline for what’s happening on your site. They reach out to customers, look at trends, and ask themselves “how can we build upon this?”
“But it’s not enough to simply grow, nor do you want to hoard data to go through later. Growth managers use the data they’ve collected to create customer personas, improve revenues and minimize costs and expenditures where possible,” adds Patel.
However, finding the intel and data and then thinking of how to use this data to create actions is a full time job. A growth manager is there to sift through qual and quant data, get other departments such as sales, marketing, engineering and product to collaborate and make smart choices every day about how they are going to focus and spend their time and money.
A growth person usually has to know marketing on multiple channels in addition to; product, growth, CX, business strategy, commercialising modelling, bits and pieces of UX and UI, CRO and the list goes on.
Awareness and acquisition, usually where marketers focus, is just one small part of the growth puzzle — they also have to understand retention, referral and revenue (commercialisation strategies) levers and know when to pull them and what tactics to use for each lever.
Why you need a growth person
Growing revenue and profits are core objectives of most companies, and it is the responsibility of every function to contribute to the pursuit of this goal by viewing product development and marketing as integrated functions.
“As part of an entrepreneurial research effort for Harvard Business School, we interviewed more than a dozen Growth Managers at fast-growing startups and explored what they are doing to design a growth function within an organization.” There’s a great article by HBR on why you need a growth professional.
Types of growth professionals
There are many different skillsets and experience levels of growth professionals.
Below is a list of some types of growth professionals. I’d also throw “head of growth” or a “growth strategist” into the mix who is equally skilled in both product and marketing and helps the company understand what stage of growth the company is at (before P/MF, after P/MF, early scale / growth, maturity) and what is required in terms of strategy and tactics given the stage of the business.
If this is for a new venture and resources are lean creating an entire growth team won’t be on the cards. In this instance you could get a head of growth to create a growth strategy with ideas that can be executed using the current skills of the team. Where there are skill gaps — hire contractors or skill up the existing team.
A head of growth, while they might execute too, will;
- Have the experience to understand what really impacts a company’s growth from both a product and marketing perspective ✅
- Be able to look at the company holistically to understand how to create sustainable growth whether it’s partnerships, pivots, customer service or more ✅
- Have the confidence to challenge the company’s most senior managers about the direction of the product, the revenue model, the company USP, the problem the company is aiming to solve ✅
- The communication skills to extract a company vision (or north star metric) from the CEO / founder ✅
- Have the seniority to influence the product roadmap ✅
- Understand how to work with engineers (this one is super important! Many engineers don’t take well to being made to work on endless growth tests unless a growth person has proven their worth in the company.) ✅
Your NSM is about coming up with a goal that is based on the delivery of value to your customer. Read more here.
From my experience, a junior growth hacker (someone quite young with 3-ish years experience) might not have the confidence or experience to extract this information from founders or a CEO and then lead a team to ensure this goal is achieved.
When to hire and who?
I hear founders saying they want to hire a growth hacker — “someone who can roll up their sleeves and hustle”.
It’s baffling to hire someone to execute if there is no growth strategy in place.
What are they executing if there isn’t a solid growth plan? What are they working towards?
In an ideal world a very senior, very experienced growth person would have set the strategy or NSM and worked with the team to create a series of sprints or tests with a very specific timeframe to help the team achieve their NSM goal.
They would have done the following:
- Help the team achieve P/MF before anything (Read this)
- Growth or NSM goal in place
- A plan to achieve NSM and break down into tasks / sprints or tests
- Analyse the skill set that you will need to achieve those tests
- Hire a growth person based on the skills you will need in your plan
Makes sense, noh?
Growth is a team sport
Andrew Chen, ex-Uber head of growth, explains that;
“In the early stages of the growth skillset, there were no teams. There were a number of individuals and startup founders who were putting the necessary ideas, workflows, and tactics together. Some of these folks would refer to themselves as “growth hackers” in a tongue-in-cheek way.”
“As the skillset grew, it was clear that to do anything impactful, especially within the context of larger/complex product, you needed to organize entire groups of people.”
“Thus the growth team emerged, with the philosophy that you don’t want a lone genius with all the levers, and a team of helpers. Instead, you need to create an organization with a broad set of skills.”
Growth is a team sport. Hiring a single growth person and not giving them internal resources (time with engineering team or a budget to hire someone to help execute) is a recipe for failure.
While I worked at Josephmark we were on a mission to improve the retention of an app called Hash. I was working with the product manager, content and the iOS engineer. We developed about 20 ideas that we thought would improve retention.
Each week one of us would execute one test. I couldn’t have done the tests without them as some of the tests required skills I did not posses. We couldn’t hire a whole team but we worked with the expertise of the current team to get the job done.
What is “Growth Culture”?
A company should have a growth culture or be open to moving towards one in order for a growth hire to succeed.
I attended a great talk by the head of growth at Zillow, Nate Moche. He stated that a growth team will thrive if;
- The company gives the team autonomy
- The company does not hold their feet to the flames. By this I mean when the growth team makes some assumptions around growth goals or the outcomes of tests they should not get in trouble if they don’t meet them
- People in the team understand that growth tests will fail more than they will win
It’s good if team members understand that they are also a part of the internal growth team and will be spending a significant amount of their time working to execute growth tests.
If there’s no established growth culture, who can a growth person talk with about P/MF, how are they going to influence the product roadmap and pull together company resources to do growth sprints / tests?
You can tell when there’s no growth culture at a company and in this scenario it’s a bit tougher for a growth person to add value to your company.
Goals
First, you need to have a clear understanding of what goals you’d like to meet in order for your growth person to stand a chance of this being a success. You should have in mind whether or not you’ve achieved P/MF and if so then what is your NSM. You should be able to clearly articulate your vision and what this looks like in terms of growth goals. And, you should be willing to listen to a growth person, or get their input, if they tell you the goals or total addressable market is unrealistic.
I recently finished on a BCGDV venture in the prop tech space. The goals for year one were 10,000 users. About 6 months after we were in market a competitor realised their figures bragging about how after 4 years they had acquired 3,500 users (numbers changed for the sake of privacy). So, naturally, the venture should have a re-think about what’s possible.
Characteristics of a good growth hacker
Grit — #IGAS — I give a sh*t. A GH has to really, really care about the mission and tests to have the perseverance to run the marathon that are growth tests. There’s no “phone it in type” kids in this role. You have to really care about the precise execution of the tests and the patience and determination to get a win. Sometimes I have ten losses in my tests before I see a win.
Creativity — An ideal growth marketer will dance between creativity and analytical. They will write copy like shakespeare wrote sonnets. They will look at data and it will paint such a gorgeous picture in their mind that it’s crystal clear about how to forge forward. They can transform dull, technical language into compelling narratives about how the business is changing lives.
Analytical — needs to understand funnels and data.
This HBR article says it best; “Data is the backbone of the growth function. Teams invest their resources to create the infrastructure that enables analysis of user behavior, scientific experimentation, and targeted promotions.”
Growth Managers are typically responsible for selecting and integrating these products into the company’s analytics framework and working either on their own or in partnership with the analytics team to provide dashboards and testing tools as services across the organisation.
Goal orientated — excited about goals and can excite others
Strong communicator — so important to communicate weekly growth updates to the entire company, tell the team what’s going on and motivate those to get through the grind of the weekly tests that ultimately fail more often than they succeed
Questions to ask a potential growth hire
There’s tons of questions you can ask a growth hire to know if they are a TRUE growth professional. For e.g.
- What is P/MF? What would be some indicators that a company has achieved it?
- Did your last company achieve P/MF — did you contribute to that?
- Have you ever worked on setting a NSM?
- What was your one metric that mattered?
- What impact did you have on the product roadmap and how did that affect growth?
- How did you find working with the product and engineering team in your previous roles?
- What analytics platforms do you favour?
- What are your top 5 growth skills?
- What marketing channels / platforms are you strongest in? (i.e. email marketing, facebook ads, Intercom etc)
Where to find one (in Australia)
If you aren’t located in Australia try to find your countries growth hacking or growth marketing Meet Up group or closed facebook groups.
Did you know that Australia has the second largest growth meet up group in the world with over 4,700 members? See when the next meet up is with the intention of attending and networking to find talent.
This group also has a Growth Hackers Australia closed facebook group — jam packed with some awesome talent. Try posting your job description or query there and you’ll get a good response or guidance on where to find someone.
There’s also some great growth professionals in each of the state startup groups on facebook (Sydney startups, Adelaide startups etc)
Make sure you have the budget
It costs money to execute tests and validate hypothesis. Don’t assume they can create a growth strategy by just ‘hacking sh*t’ without spending any money.
Who they report to / where do they sit in the company structure?
If their skillset is broader than a marketing person, and they understand both marketing and product, and they can prove the ROI on their salary then they should be paid more than the marketers on your team or hired in place of a marketer.
Good luck hiring the right growth person! Fell free to PM me and I can help you with any questions you might have as to how, when, why to hire one.
Alright let’s do this!!
