How to Hire a Head of Growth

Growth Leadership vs Marketing Leadership

The distinction between a Head of Growth and a CMO or VP Marketing is not about seniority — it is about orientation. Marketing leadership is typically oriented toward brand, positioning, content, and demand generation: creating the surface area that attracts potential customers and building the narrative that differentiates the company in the market. Growth leadership is oriented toward the metric — finding and exploiting the specific levers that move the user or revenue number in the near term.

A Head of Growth at a product-led company typically sits closer to the product function than the marketing function — they work alongside PMs and engineers to run product experiments, optimise onboarding flows, and build the data infrastructure that makes experimentation possible. A Head of Growth at a sales-led company typically owns the top of the funnel with more of a marketing orientation — pipeline generation, conversion rate optimisation, and ABM programs that serve the sales team.

Evaluating Head of Growth Candidates

Experiment track record. Ask candidates to describe a growth experiment they ran that failed significantly and what they learned from it. The quality of their failure narrative reveals their experimental discipline — specifically whether they built in learning mechanisms upfront or only diagnosed failures retrospectively.

Attribution fluency. Growth leaders who cannot describe how they attribute revenue to specific growth activities are operating without the analytical infrastructure that separates real growth leadership from activity management. Ask for specific examples of attribution models they have built or used, and how those models influenced investment decisions.

Full-funnel vs top-of-funnel. The most valuable growth leaders understand the full user journey — from acquisition through activation, engagement, and retention — because optimising one part of the funnel at the expense of others is a common source of growth leadership failure. A Head of Growth who improved new user acquisition but increased churn is not a good growth leader; they are a good acquisition marketer who was given too narrow a mandate.