Growth Hires – everything you need to know

A recent piece by Lenny Rachisky, a product leader, highlights the growth of the Growth role and how, in this market, it’s the most popular role to hire in the product organization. Unlike Product Management and Engineering roles, it hasn’t slowed down.

Because so many companies– approximately thousands per month are hiring these roles, I thought it would be useful to summarize in one place how to hire for these roles, what success looks like, and, in case you’re not ready to hire, what your alternatives are to drive growth for your business.

What is a product growth role?

The study Lenny did covered several roles–Product manager, Engineer, Design, Growth, User research, Data Science, Sales, Marketing, Product owner, and Scrum master – why is only one called growth? After all, isn’t hiring focused on growing your company regardless of the role?

Growth roles in product are specifically focused on features and programs that acquire and activate users. Sometimes, smart companies will also task growth product managers with retention (which is key to growth–see Andrew Chen of a16z here on why high churn startups always fail). However as I’ve discussed elsewhere, you have to break GTM problems into smaller pieces–and there’s no world in which acquiring users and retention are the exact same motion.

Who needs a growth role?

Growth should not be the first thing you hire for–perhaps counterintuitively. First, you need a product with product market fit, that users get value from and continue using (and paying for).

It’s informative to look at who hired the most growth roles in the last quarter, per Lenny’s post: HubSpot, Salesforce, TikTok, Velera, Amazon, Enpal, Headway, Pocket FM, Uber, Accenture, Atlassian, Compass, MongoDB, AI Digital, Google, CrowdStrike, AECOM, Adobe, Airwallex, Askable, Grab, Media.Monks, Traba, and Walmart (in descending order).

What do all these companies have in common? They have mature products with high retention. If I can get a user to try HubSpot, chances are the rest of the team/product can retain them.

What does a Product Growth person work on?

Growth in product can mean a couple of different things depending on your company. For a self-serve sales motion, it can mean pure “product-led growth”. This is where your team is building loops to get more users from each one who joins (more on this in a moment). For an enterprise motion, it might mean growth within an account to accelerate upsells and cross-sells. And there’s quite a bit of space in between. In short, growth people are running specific projects or experiments to increase your growth rate–and only that. They are not building cool features just for the sake of cool features. Here are some examples.

On the product-led growth (PLG) side of the spectrum, think of Slack. Every person who joins Slack has to invite co-workers for it to be useful. Growth people are figuring out and building features that help with this, everything from the invite flow (both sides–inviter and invitee) to Slack Connect, which lets you connect with outside companies.

Other classic PLG examples include event invite applications or signature applications. If you create an event in lu.ma, you’ll invite a lot of people to it. Who now know about Lu.ma. If they then create an event, and use Lu.ma, voila–growth! If you use Hellosign, by definition you are sending either signature requests or signed documents to someone else. They now know about hellosign, and if an email and activation campaign gets them to sign up–that’s growth.

On the enterprise side, it gets somewhat more complicated. Integrating with an API partner such as Salesforce or Hubspot might be one example, where that integration might provide a little product enhancement but really creates a front door in the Salesforce or Hubspot ecosystem where people can find and try your product. Some companies that do sell to enterprises grew through PLG, such as Github or Slack, but these are really the exception–typically, growth at an enterprise company would either work on going down market or on activating and expanding within accounts that the sales team brings on.

What does a growth person actually do all day?

Growth people are product managers, and like other product managers in a high-functioning organization, they take ownership of both product strategy and implementation. That means they figure out which of the things they could work on would lead to the biggest impact at the lowest cost (or whatever the decision criteria are) and then go implement it.

Usually, a good PLG leader will focus on one or two high-impact, low-investment projects while building one larger bet that takes longer to pay off.

Specifically, this could mean working on the invitation or new user signup flows, which are usually quick wins. Working with designers and user experience testing, the growth person would figure out ways to optimize the flow and get 10-100% more out of it. Of course, they would measure the metrics as they currently stand, know what “good” looks like in the market, and measure the results of the project against the starting metric and the market norms.

A bigger project might be integrating with SSO providers or Google oAuth APIs (sign in with Google) or other sign in providers. This might require rearchitecting or refactoring a more complex system, and not be a quick win, but could be expected to increase signups by a meaningful number.

When should I hire a growth person?

You should only hire a growth person once you have product market fit, and know that if you put more users into your application they will be monetized and retained. The worst thing you can do is spend money acquiring more users into a “leaky bucket” where they fall out, and you don’t get any return on the investment. You’ll invest more in getting users into the funnel, to hit your forecasts, and then they’ll churn and you’ll lose more and more money. This loop is how companies go under.

Instead, wait til after PMF. Do things that don’t scale or don’t require an entire person to manage until you’re sure that you have PMF and that PLG or a flavor of PLG is right for you. Then (and only then) hire a growth person.

What should I expect from the growth person I hired?

Growth is cultural. Your first growth hire should help, fundamentally, shift your culture towards being more focused on growth and profitability. They are the voice that reminds your team that just building cool features because they are cool is the kind of behavior that can lead to ruin. You as a CEO need to emphasize why you hired this person and ensure that the team respects them and embraces the mission of growth.

A growth hire needs to complete projects within their first 30, 60 and 90 days that they can use to both have an impact and build their credibility. Ideally, these first projects have the potential for significant and obvious impact. Usually, when you hire your first growth person there is plenty to work on that fits this category.

What makes a growth person different than a regular product manager?

Growth product managers are like other product managers in that they look at problems holistically, think strategically and have high ownership and attention to detail. The key difference is that they are more focused on business metrics like revenue, user growth, and (commonly) profitability than more technically-focused PMs who might care more about the craft of building “great” product. Any PM leader should have an awareness of (if not ownership of) the P&L of their business, however, a growth person is going to focus more on metrics like customer acquisition cost (CAC), CAC-payback (how long it takes to make your CAC back from a new customer), and customer lifetime value (CLV) than your typical PM–because that’s what they’re hired for!

A growth person is also going to touch other surface areas that your typical PM may be more deferential on. For example, if you have a sales team or SMB motion you should fully expect your growth PM to engage closely with them and possibly offer direction to the leadership of that team. Growth people also work in email, alerts and messaging in depth–frequently this is a quick win where sending better activation emails or different calls to action can increase growth rates. Of course, any PM should think about and work in these areas but growth people are likely to focus here first–and to spend more time here.

How does someone get into growth?

Some growth PMs arrive in the role from more of a marketing or sales role, in which case you can expect them to be less technical on back end and coding aspects. They would still be very, very fluent in growth-related technical things like Google SEO and SEM, mobile app store SEO and functionality, the mechanics of social apps and signups, etc. Obviously this kind of person is not going to moonlight product managing your platform, they will focus on growth, but they are an asset because they should bring new knowledge to your team.

Contrast that with a PM who started as a PM and migrated to growth–these people might know less about the inner workings of app stores and Google, but should retain their strong basis in understanding engineering and their credibility with engineering teams that have made them successful thus far. They should still understand growth platforms, and be able to advise you on where to focus first, but they may not have the same level of detailed knowledge of all of those channels as someone who came through marketing.

What if I’m not ready to hire for growth?

A growth PM is expensive–just like any other product manager, with experienced hires costing north of $150k per year (and up to $250k+ for a senior leader). This is a big investment–after all, PLG isn’t “Free” if it costs you $12,500/mo in salary (or much more fully loaded!). Another risk is if you do not have enough engineers or other resources to dedicate to your new growth hire, then they will just cost you money and get frustrated while not delivering anything. Like any PM, a growth PM needs a team of at least a part-time designer and multiple engineers to get work done.

If you feel like there are areas where you would benefit from PLG but not enough to justify the cost, you have two options. You can look inside, or hire outside part-time.

The inside option can be a good one if you have experienced PMs on your team already. Prioritize growth for a few sprints, and empower them to put down other projects and focus on growth-related projects only, leveraging the teams they already manage or work with. This way you can prove that hiring for growth in the future might be worthwhile.

The outside option is better if you don’t have any experience on your team with PLG. Be honest with yourself–reading this article or watching a YouTube does not prepare someone to do PLG professionally! There are firms like CROMetrics that focus exclusively on certain PLG aspects (in their case, conversion rate optimization). There are individuals who contract part-time at a fraction of the cost of a full-time hire. And there are firms (like Silverwood.ai) that provide entire teams to both conceive of and implement PLG projects.

By working with an insider to try a few growth projects, or bringing in outside experts to do growth projects, you can get growth before you’re ready for that full time growth hire–and prove that there will be a return on the investment in that hire.

What should I look for in a growth hire?

We’ve covered a lot of what growth hires do, but not how to hire one. Obviously, you want someone who can prove they have done the things we’ve talked about already. We recommend a hiring process that focuses on calibration, aptitude over presentation, and fact over story. That means a process that looks like this:

1. Meet with 1-3 “Great” growth leaders. These are people your investors or advisors can introduce you to. While you might get to hire one, these are not “candidates”. These are people you use to know what “great” looks like for when you start interviewing candidates.

2. Calibrate what you are looking for and circulate/share LinkedIn profiles of people who would be ideal candidates. More experience always comes at a cost–be realistic about what you can afford and what you need.

3. Interview at least 3 candidates. This means building a pipeline which probably means having someone running your hiring (we can help here, also!)

4. Require homework. Some people like projects based on their business; I find these to be tricky because you always know more than the candidate, and it also can feel like free consulting to a candidate. Having someone present on something else–some other product of their choosing–can level the playing field and give you a view on their judgement (did they choose something easy? hard? too hard?)

5. Check references. Always check references they give you AND ones they don’t give you, respecting confidentiality with their current job. Almost anyone will take a 15 min reference call if you cold-email or in-mail message them, and this can really save you from mishires.

6. Hire slow, fire fast. Establish a 30/60/90 as discussed above. If the person hasn’t delivered an obvious win within 90 days, it didn’t work out and you should let them go. Whether it’s them or you (or your team or culture), it didn’t work out and you’re wasting money. Growth people are very impact-driven–that’s why they do this work. 90 days is too long.

Summing up growth hires

Growth hires are increasingly popular. They deliver value for more mature products that know their user economics and have product market fit. Growth hires focus their time on, as you’d expect, growing your business. They can also have a big impact on your culture, being a constant living reminder that you are running a business and businesses need to grow. If you’re ready for one, we provided some suggestions on how to hire successfully. If you might be, but aren’t sure, don’t hesitate to reach out at [email protected] as this is an area where we can help, or help you find the right person.