Dispatch: Hiring a Head of Growth

San Francisco · February 28, 2025

The CEO calls me into her office on a Tuesday afternoon. This is unusual — we normally talk in the kitchen, or over Slack, or in the accidental conversations that happen when two people who work too much cross paths in the hallway at 7 p.m. Her office, with the door closed, means something formal.

"I want to hire a head of growth," she says.

I stare at her for a moment. "I'm the head of growth."

"You're the growth team. There's a difference. I want someone senior. VP level. Someone who's done this at a company that's been through the $5M-to-$20M ARR phase. You'd report to them."

The air in the room changes. I've been running growth at this company for two and a half years. I took us from $400K to $2.9M in MRR. I hired the team, built the playbook, ran the experiments. And now the CEO wants to bring in someone above me — someone who's "done this before" at a bigger company, with a bigger title and presumably a bigger salary.

"Okay," I say, because what else do you say? "What's the profile?"

We use a recruiting firm that specializes in growth roles. They charge 25% of first-year salary, which at the VP level means $50,000-$62,000 in fees. The CEO also posts the role on LinkedIn, where it gets 347 applications in the first week. Everybody wants to be a head of growth. Nobody agrees on what the job actually is.

The recruiting firm sends us twelve candidates. I review all twelve profiles and immediately eliminate six. Three of them are "growth marketers" who've been retitled to "head of growth" — they're good at running campaigns but have never touched product, pricing, or retention. Two are strategy consultants who want to transition to operating roles — they can build beautiful decks but have never owned a P&L. One is a VP of Sales who thinks growth is a rebranding of sales. It's not.

The remaining six are promising. They've all run growth at B2B SaaS companies. They've all seen some version of the $5M-to-$20M journey. They all speak the language: PLG, activation funnels, cohort retention, net revenue expansion, north star metrics.

We interview all six. I'm on the panel for every interview, which is either a sign of trust or a test of my emotional maturity. Probably both.

Everybody wants to be a head of growth. Nobody agrees on what the job actually is.

Candidate A. Twelve years of experience. Ran growth at a company that went from $8M to $45M ARR before being acquired. Knows every growth framework. Uses phrases like "growth loops" and "flywheel effects" with the fluency of someone who's lived them. Problem: when I ask what she'd do in her first 90 days, she gives me a generic playbook. "Audit the funnel, identify bottlenecks, run experiments." That's not a strategy. That's a template.

Candidate B. Eight years of experience. Built the growth team at a startup that failed. This is interesting to me — people who've been through failure have a different kind of knowledge. When I ask about it, he's honest: "We scaled acquisition too fast without fixing retention. We were pouring water into a leaky bucket. By the time we fixed the bucket, the investors had lost patience." He understands the mistake, which means he won't make it again. He's my favorite so far.

Candidate C. Fifteen years of experience, mostly at larger companies. He built the growth org at a public SaaS company from 4 people to 40. His experience is legitimate, but it's also a different universe. When I describe our team — four people, no dedicated analysts, shared engineering resources — he nods politely, but I can tell he's calculating how many people he'd need to hire. We can't afford his org chart.

Candidate D. Nine years, strong product-led growth background. She built the PLG motion at a company I admire. When I ask about activation metrics, she gives me specific numbers from her previous role — "We went from 23% to 47% day-7 activation by rebuilding the first-run experience" — and then asks about ours. I tell her we're at 31%. She doesn't flinch. "That's fixable in one quarter," she says, and I believe her because she explains exactly how.

Candidate E. Ex-big-company, impressive pedigree. He name-drops constantly. Every answer includes "when I was at [well-known company]..." He's smart, but he's also the kind of person who defines himself by where he's been, not what he's done. At a 40-person startup, your pedigree means nothing. Your output means everything.

Candidate F. Wildcard. Seven years of experience, no traditional growth background. She was a data scientist who moved into product and then into growth. She can't talk about marketing channels the way the others can, but she understands experimentation at a level that's almost academic. She built a Bayesian experiment framework at her last company that reduced the time to statistical significance by 40%. I don't know if she can lead a team, but she can think about growth in ways that none of the other candidates can.

We narrow it to two finalists: Candidate B (the one who's been through failure) and Candidate D (the PLG specialist). The CEO likes both. I like both. The decision comes down to a question that has no clean answer: do we need someone who's been through hard times, or someone who can execute a specific playbook?

We choose D. The CEO's reasoning: "We know what we need to do — fix activation, improve retention, build the PLG motion. We need someone who can execute it, not someone who'll spend three months auditing." She's probably right. But I think about B sometimes, and I wonder if his failure experience would have been more valuable in the moments — and they will come — when the plan stops working.

D starts in three weeks. Her title: VP of Growth. Base salary: $210,000 plus equity. She'll inherit my team and my playbook and she'll probably change both, which is exactly what a new leader should do.

The first week is awkward. She's running the meetings I used to run. She's asking questions about decisions I made. She's reviewing experiments I designed. Every question feels like a judgment, even when it's not.

"Why did you structure the onboarding flow this way?" she asks on day three, looking at our activation funnel.

"Because that's what we had engineering resources for," I say. It sounds defensive, which it is.

She nods. "What would you do differently with unlimited resources?"

This is a better question, and I realize she's not criticizing — she's learning. She wants to understand the constraints so she can identify which ones are real and which ones we've internalized unnecessarily. It's the kind of question a good leader asks, and I feel a small knot in my chest loosen.

By week two, she's made three changes. She's reorganized the team so that one growth marketer focuses exclusively on activation and one focuses on retention. She's set up a weekly experiment review that's more structured than what I had — each experiment gets a formal write-up with hypothesis, methodology, results, and next steps. And she's started a "customer of the week" practice where the team interviews one customer every week to hear how they actually use the product.

All three changes are good. None of them are things I thought of. This is the humbling part of having a boss: discovering the things you were too close to see.

This is the humbling part of having a boss: discovering the things you were too close to see.

It's been six weeks. The VP of Growth — I'll call her Ana — has presented her 90-day plan to the leadership team. It's organized, ambitious, and based on data I collected but never connected the way she does. She's projecting that with the activation improvements and retention fixes she's identified, we can get to $3.5M MRR by year-end. That's 21% growth from our current $2.9M.

The CEO seems more confident in growth meetings than she has in months. Ana brings a clarity of purpose that I was too deep in the weeds to provide. She can look at our funnel and say "here, here, and here" with a certainty that comes from having done it before at a similar company.

My role has changed. I'm no longer the growth lead; I'm a senior growth person reporting to a VP. I run experiments, manage channels, analyze data. The strategic decisions happen above me now. It's a demotion in everything but title — they kept my title and gave her a bigger one — and I'm still processing how I feel about it.

What I know: the company is better off with Ana. The growth function is more structured, more strategic, more scalable. She's doing things I wouldn't have done and they're working.

What I also know: I took this company from $400K to $2.9M MRR, and the reward for doing that was having someone hired above me. That's not bitterness — or maybe it is, a little — it's an observation about how companies work. You build the plane while flying it, and then they hire a pilot.

I'll stay. For now. I'm learning from Ana, which means the role still has value for me. But I've started thinking about what comes next — whether that's a growth lead role at a smaller company where I can run the show, or whether it's building something of my own.

The CEO told me, during one of our kitchen conversations, "You're the foundation this company's growth is built on. Ana is the architect. We need both."

It's a nice thing to say. I'm not sure I believe it yet. But I wrote it down, and I come back to it on the days when reporting to someone half a decade younger than me feels like a step backward instead of what it might actually be: the natural order of a company growing past one person's ability to lead it alone.