Have you considered hiring a head of growth?

The use of the term "Growth" for the role hurts more than helps IMHO. I always tell people that growth doesn't come from the growth team, if it did, why would you need anyone else at the company? Just make the entire company growth people.

Growth people are there to help you understand why you are growing/not growing and to provide clarity on what paths forward look the most promising. This is a valuable role that many companies struggle to wrap their heads around.

But too many companies are hiring growth people to write the right blog post or set up an affiliate scheme that will turbo charge their metrics and... it just doesn't work like that, if it did, then it's just marketing with buzzwords.

Early stage, your company is likely either going to be in a state of it being super obvious what works (Product Market Fit) or not at all obvious what's going to work (pre-Product Market Fit). It's a bit after that state where it starts getting confusing what should work or not that it becomes valuable to bring Growth people in to help set up a rigorous and data driven framework to understand how to grow. Hiring people before this point is just asking for miracle workers.

Honestly, hiring a "head of growth" sounds like more trouble than it's worth.

Massive incentive to bullshit you (and a title that would attract this type of person), difficult to measure success/value and even if they do actually grow your business you've taken all intuitive understanding of how your business works and embodied it within someone who can leave whenever they feel like it.

Unless the founder plans to hit the eject button within the short term, I don't see why you'd do this.

It seems to me that hiring a head of growth would be entirely counter-productive. You're taking something that - if you really do care about it - should be a responsbility shared amongst almost the whole company, and centralizing it.

As well as that, the description of a head of growth sounds a little crazy. What should a head of growth be good at? Oh they should be a great marketer, good at product development, they need leadership skills, they need to be highly creative but they also need to be highly technical. Ok, and which companies really need a head of growth? Oh literally everyone.

I have a theory - the reason why the characteristics of the head of growth describe basically a tonne of different jobs, is for exactly the reason I stated before. The responsbilities you're putting on this one person are actually a tonne of different jobs across the organisation that should all be responsible for growth. Naturally when you're a small start up you have to wear many hats, but an important part of growth is understanding how you split responsbilities as you increase head count.

Isn't the common problem these days too much growth and not enough profit/endurance? Anybody can grow a company 500% a year if they're willing to lose a billion dollars a quarter doing it.

Another perspective. We help low income schools in Indonesia to digitise their paper-based data and start to adopt digital tools.

Onboarding these schools is incredibly complex - due to the number of people (principles, admins, teachers) that are involved and varying levels of digital literacy. With a mixture of offline & online steps in "the funnel".

We use growth techniques (basic techniques as outlined well here [0]) to optimise this process and now our team of <30 non-technical folk onboard hundreds of schools a month.

Everyone innately understands this process of optimising onboarding towards a north-star, but now its at the stage where we need tooling and better organisation. So we will likely setup a dedicated growth team to help take some of the "spreadsheet maths" burden away from our on-the-ground teams.

Similar to "Agile", growth is one of those trendy areas thats chock full of nonsense, but at its core are some good rules of thumb that can serve you well.

[0] https://blog.ycombinator.com/how-to-get-users-and-grow-with-...

Not really what the article terms for head of growth... But here's my experience.

Fortune 50 company, we promoted GM to "chief growth officer".

In reality it was just the c suite shuffling their deck of leadership roles with a new spin...

The amount of dotted lines in the new structure practically didn't work.

Role didn't last long, 6 months into only like 10% of annual goals, it was eliminated (and the chief growth officer shuffled into another executive position).

I sense negative images on the term "growth". Yes, "growth" often employs methods that are borderline scam. It's exactly what they are hired to do: enlarge and fix funnel at all stages. There's nothing inherently wrong with what "growth" team does. Think of them as aggressive salespeople - as long as product team delivers, you will see fundamental business growth. If you product team can't keep up, well, that's not sustainable.

We did try hiring a head of growth. Didn't work out. Depends on the stage. In an early stage, the whole company is about growth. The entire team is responsible for growth. hiring a head of growth is a myth and doesn't solve growth problems. It's far better to invest in infrastructure and building muscle in the entire team around growth

Rather than hiring a "head of growth" cant we just employ the same strategies ourselves?

Is there some guide, school or certification for this? And if not - how do you know what skills are needed to hire?

I would consider it the day I want to sacrifice long term success and reputation in favor of a few quarters of revenue miracles.

Why don't they just call it head of sales? Since, you know, that's what it is.