The Growth Lead Role
What is a Growth Lead? Learn about the role, responsibilities, and how to build a successful growth function.
What is a Growth Lead?
A Growth Lead is responsible for driving systematic business growth through cross-functional experimentation. Unlike traditional marketing roles, the Growth Lead works across silos—connecting product, marketing, sales, and customer success to identify and solve growth bottlenecks.
The role emerged from Silicon Valley startups like Facebook, Airbnb, and Uber, where rapid growth required a dedicated person to coordinate experiments across the entire customer journey—from awareness to retention.
In the Strategic Growth Hacking framework, the Growth Lead is the owner of the experimentation process. They ensure the team follows the four-phase cycle (Analysis → Hypothesis → Prioritization → Testing) and communicates learnings across the organization.
Core responsibilities
1. Define and track OKRs
Set clear objectives and key results that align with business goals. The Growth Lead ensures everyone understands what success looks like and tracks progress weekly.
2. Identify bottlenecks
Analyze the customer journey (using frameworks like AAARRR) to find where growth is blocked. This requires looking at data, talking to customers, and collaborating with team leads.
3. Run the experimentation process
Own the weekly or bi-weekly testing cycle. Ensure hypotheses are documented, experiments are executed, and learnings are captured and shared.
4. Communicate across the organization
Growth work can feel "vague" to others. The Growth Lead overcommunicates—sharing weekly updates, test results, and learnings with the entire company to build trust and get input.
5. Build a testing culture
The ultimate goal is to spread experimentation mindset throughout the organization. Self-guided teams that continuously improve based on data are incredibly valuable as the company scales.
Key skills
Analytical thinking
Comfortable with data, metrics, and making decisions based on evidence rather than opinions.
Cross-functional collaboration
Ability to work with product, marketing, sales, and engineering without direct authority.
Communication
Clearly explain complex experiments and learnings to diverse stakeholders.
Execution speed
Bias toward action. Ship experiments quickly rather than seeking perfection.
Customer understanding
Deep empathy for users and their problems. Regularly talks to customers.
T-shaped expertise
Broad knowledge across marketing channels with deep expertise in at least one area.
Organizational fit
Where should the Growth Lead sit in the organization? Based on my experience at companies like Freska, Yousician, and Paxful, as well as working with hundreds of startups:
Ideal: Own department reporting to CEO
Growth needs mandate to work across all functions. Reporting to the CEO ensures the Growth Lead can prioritize company-wide impact over departmental politics.
Alternative: Part of product or strategy
If a separate department isn't possible, positioning growth within product or strategy keeps it close to user problems and business objectives.
Avoid: Buried in marketing
When growth is "just marketing," it loses the cross-functional mandate. Marketing-only growth hacking often devolves into performance marketing tactics without strategic impact.
Common mistakes
- xFocusing only on acquisition
Growth includes the entire funnel. Ignoring activation, retention, and referral leaves money on the table.
- xWorking in isolation
Growth hacking requires buy-in from other teams. A Growth Lead who doesn't communicate becomes a blocker rather than an enabler.
- xTesting without clear objectives
Random experiments waste resources. Every test should connect to OKRs and business goals.
- xExpecting immediate results
Systematic growth takes time. The first weeks are often spent learning the process and finding internal bottlenecks.
- xNot finishing experiments
Half-done tests teach nothing. Fear of failure often prevents teams from seeing experiments through to completion.
Getting started
Whether you're stepping into a Growth Lead role or building the function from scratch, here's how to begin:
- Define your main OKR — What's the one metric that matters most right now?
- Map your AAARRR funnel — Identify where you're losing customers.
- Pick one bottleneck — Don't try to fix everything at once.
- Run your first experiment — Use the Growth Dashboard to document it.
- Share the results — Whether it worked or not, communicate what you learned.
Need help building your growth function?
I've helped hundreds of startups establish effective growth practices. Let's discuss how Strategic Growth Hacking can work for your team.