| Detail | For this role |
|---|---|
| Department | Marketing |
| Level | Senior management |
| Reports to | Chief Executive Officer |
| Direct reports | Growth Manager, Performance Marketing Manager, CRM Manager, Marketing Analyst |
| Experience | 8 to 12 years in growth, product or performance marketing, including 3 years owning a company-level metric |
Head of Growth job description template
Copy this job description, replace the text in square brackets and post it on your careers page or a job portal.
Job title: Head of Growth
Department: Marketing
Reports to: Chief Executive Officer
Location: [City], [office, branch or site]
About the role
A Head of Growth owns the numbers that show a business is growing: new users or customers, activation, retention, referrals and revenue per user. The role is common in consumer apps, D2C brands, fintech, edtech and SaaS startups. Instead of running one channel, the head of growth finds the biggest drop-offs in the funnel, runs experiments across marketing, product and pricing to fix them, and scales what works. They usually report to the CEO or a Chief Business Officer.
Key responsibilities
- Agree one north star metric and its input metrics with the founders, such as monthly transacting users, first orders or paid subscriptions.
- Map the full funnel from first visit or install to repeat use, and size the biggest drop-offs using product analytics.
- Keep a ranked experiment backlog across acquisition, onboarding, pricing, referral and retention, scored on expected impact, confidence and effort.
- Run a weekly growth meeting with product, engineering, design and marketing to read experiment results and commit the next set.
- Set acquisition budgets and payback targets by channel, and shut down channels whose customers do not return enough value.
- Design referral, rewards and win-back programs, with rules that block fraud such as fake accounts and self-referrals.
- Work with the product team on onboarding flows, notifications and in-app prompts that lift activation and repeat use.
- Build cohort, retention and unit economics dashboards with the data team so that every decision rests on shared numbers.
- Record each experiment's hypothesis, result and decision so the company does not repeat tests that already failed.
- Hire and lead growth managers, analysts and channel specialists, giving each of them clear ownership of a metric.
Requirements
- Degree in engineering, economics, statistics or business
- An MBA from a reputed institute is an advantage
- A proven record of owning a growth metric at a consumer or SaaS company
- 8 to 12 years in growth, product or performance marketing, including 3 years owning a company-level metric
KRAs and KPIs for a Head of Growth
Key result areas for the appraisal form, each with a KPI you can measure every month or quarter.
| Key result area | How to measure it |
|---|---|
| North star metric | North star metric growing month on month at or above the rate agreed with the founders |
| Acquisition payback | Customer acquisition cost recovered from gross margin within the agreed number of months |
| Activation | Share of new users completing the key first action within 7 days at or above target |
| Retention | Month 3 retention of new cohorts at or above the target set for the year |
| Experiment velocity | At least 8 experiments shipped and read out each month, each with a documented decision |
| Referral share | Referred users at the planned share of new users, with detected fraud below the agreed limit |
Skills and tools
Tools used day to day: Mixpanel or Amplitude, CleverTap or MoEngage, AppsFlyer or Branch, Google Ads and Meta Ads Manager, SQL with Metabase or Redash, Firebase, Google Sheets.
Reporting line and career path
Next roles: Chief Business Officer, Chief Marketing Officer, Business Head
Interview questions for a Head of Growth
- Pick a consumer app you use. Where is its biggest funnel drop-off, and what would you test first?
- How do you decide whether an experiment result is real or just noise?
- Our paid installs doubled but monthly active users barely moved. What would you investigate?
- Walk me through a referral program you built. How did you stop people gaming it?
- How do you get engineering time for growth experiments when the product roadmap is already full?
- Tell me about an experiment you were sure would win but lost. What did you learn?
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What does a head of growth do?
A head of growth owns the metrics that show whether a business is growing, such as new customers, activation, retention and revenue per user. They find where users drop off, run experiments with product and marketing teams, set acquisition budgets against payback targets and scale the tactics that work.
What is the difference between growth marketing and performance marketing?
Performance marketing buys measurable results such as clicks, leads or installs on paid channels at a target cost. Growth marketing covers the whole customer journey, including activation, retention and referral, and uses product changes and experiments as well as paid media. A head of growth usually oversees both.
What background do you need to become a head of growth?
Most heads of growth come from performance marketing, product management or analytics. Employers look for someone who has owned a metric, run many experiments, knows SQL and product analytics tools, and can explain unit economics such as acquisition cost and payback in plain terms.