Watch out for the Heads of Growth! : Changing Career Paths in your late 30's

So I am very excited because I am finally pulling the trigger and moving into a different career. After 20 years in a fulfilling Sales career I have decided to move onto, not only the Online and Digital Marketing Space but more importantly the "Growth" Space.Okay before I explain what a ‘Head of Growth’ or 'Growth' does, it’s important to understand what a growth team is responsible for in a company.
The essence of a growth team is captured below:
Andy Johns | VP Growth, Wealthfront: “Finance owns the flow of cash in and out of a company. Growth owns the flow of customers in and out of a product.”It’s worthwhile noting that the flow of customers in and out of a product also includes the retention of customers in a product.
So it’s more than just the entire customer acquisition process.
Also, depending on where the company is at the growth team is focused on improving a single metric, the North Star Metric (or metric that matters).
This metric needs to capture the core product value and whatever that’s mission-critical to the business at the time.
i.e. For Airbnb, it could be nights booked or for Uber, it could be rides taken.
If the above is what a growth team does, then a ‘Head of Growth’ is responsible for the end to end process of customer acquisition and retention, focusing around improving the north star metric.
As the company grows larger, it’s likely that the growth team would expand into teams focusing on specific stages of the funnel.
i.e. a team on acquisition, activation, retention, etc.



Then the ‘Head of Growth’ could transition into a VP Growth with multiple Growth Leads looking after each stage of the funnel.
Below is a recent sample of what a ‘Head of Growth’ job description would look:

This is what an early-stage company would look for in a ‘Head of Growth’.
The company’ hasn’t existed long enough to work on retaining customers yet.
Below is what a later stage company would look for in a ‘Head of Growth’:
It’s very different right?
Yes there are still aspects of customer acquisition, but there are elements of building a team, building a system and customer retention.
Ultimately, the role ‘Head of Growth’ inevitable evolve with the company.
I am pretty excited to be ushering this into whichever company I land at but more importantly I think that this position is long overdue and I feel that we are all ready for it. I mean its almost 2020 for god's sake down with the boundaries, titles, and egos.
I think that there will be more and more titles with growth integrated into them because it has been such oversight for so many years. Companies are going to want more people focusing on the entire funnel from awareness to retention.
We should all be focused on 'Growth' as a whole, not just growing our department or wing of the company or position at the company.
Written by
Rett Sloat 10/24/2019
Growth | Sales | Marketing

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