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My eyes start to burn.

Dry and hot, like an allergy attack rolling in. It happens in one very specific situation: someone is giving me feedback I don’t want to hear, and part of me has already decided they’re wrong.

If you lead a growth team, you know the triggers.

The exec who questions your strategy in front of everyone. The CEO who asks you to “look into” why a number dipped, in a tone that says they’ve already drawn their own conclusion. The board member with a “quick question” that derails everything. Your heart picks up. You’ve got the rebuttal loaded before they’ve finished the sentence.

For years I thought the goal was to control that reaction. Get calmer. Keep a straighter face. Become the kind of person who doesn’t flinch.

I had it backwards.

I got into this with Rex Gelb on the podcast this week, and it’s probably my favorite 5 minutes of the whole conversation.

Rex has spent hundreds of millions of dollars on ads. He runs a paid media agency called Summit Chase and builds the performance marketing team at Cursor. He’s scaled teams from “just me” to dozens of people.

And along the way, he’s been on the receiving end of a lot of feedback.

And he described his own version of the burning eyes feeling. For him, it’s his blood pressure. He can feel it climb. Somewhere along the way he stopped treating that feeling like a problem and started treating it like information.

Watch the full conversation here:

When Rex feels his blood pressure rise, he runs the same play every time. Shut up. Listen. Say thanks for the feedback. Then come back 24 hours later.

Instead of trying to win the moment, or defend his point of view, he gets himself out of it.

After he sleeps on it, he usually still thinks he was right about part of it. But there’s almost always a piece they got right too. The trouble is you can’t tell which piece is which in the moment while your blood is up. Because when you’re in the moment, you’re 99% sure you’re right about all of it.

Rex told a specific story that stuck with me.

Before working at HubSpot, he came from a hardcore direct-response world where the only thing that mattered was return on ad spend. So when he started running ads at HubSpot, he assumed it would be the same playbook.

He ran a paid ad campaign with a headline he described as not illegal, not unethical, but maybe pushing it a little bit.

And that headline crushed. He was smashing his goals.

But later, his boss looked under the hood of the campaign, found that headline, and called a “we need to talk” sit-down.

The feedback was simple: we can’t do that here.

That feedback is hard to take because the ad worked… really well! The numbers were great. And he was still getting pulled aside and told to stop. But the note wasn’t really about that one headline. Rex was learning that HubSpot cared about brand in a way his old employers never had. Where he came from, the only scoreboard was return on ad spend.

At HubSpot, the wrong headline could become a screenshot on TechCrunch with the company’s name on it.

So he had a choice. The fast, decisive move was to dig in and explain why he was right. Instead, he took the note and retooled how he ran ads to fit the culture of how this company made decisions. And he got better for it. By the time he left HubSpot, he was the one giving the presentations on what they do (and don’t do) in ads. The feedback he could have fought became something he taught everyone else.

Most of us learn these lessons the hard way.

Being right isn’t the whole game. If the way you operate is out of step with how your company makes decisions, you can be completely correct and not be effective. The win comes from slowing down long enough to hear what you’re being told, not from proving your point on the spot.

And you can’t slow down while your heart’s pounding and your blood pressure’s climbing.

When your first move is to fire back, the person across from you stops hearing your point. As Rex put it, their read shifts to “okay, so he’s not hearing me,” and then to “okay, so I can’t work with this guy.”

Even when you turn out to be right, fighting in the moment marks you as hard to work with.

The room remembers how you reacted long after it forgets whether you were right. And being hard to work with is its own ceiling: it caps people who are otherwise excellent at the job, and they rarely find out that’s the reason.

It’s not just live conversations, either. Rex gets the same feeling from email. A message lands that makes his blood boil, the tell kicks in, and he types out the furious reply he wants to send. Then he doesn’t send it. His rule, in his own words: “Rex, don’t hit send when you feel like that.”

So here’s the takeaway I keep coming back to, and the thing I’m still practicing. The feeling is the cue.

Your body flags the feedback worth sitting with before your ego will let you near it. Most people spend years trying to suppress that physical reaction. It might be the most reliable early-warning system you’ve got. Learn your tell. Then build one rule around it: when it fires, you don’t respond today.

So now, when my eyes start to burn, I try to remember it’s not an allergy. It’s the signal to close my mouth and open my calendar for tomorrow.

The full episode with Rex is live now. We also got into how he scaled himself out of being the bottleneck on his own team (and had to do it twice), and the strange little mind game he uses to make tough money calls. If you’re sitting in any of that right now, it’s worth the listen.

And if reading your own tell is the kind of thing you’re working on this year, that’s a lot of what I do with the leaders I coach: the unglamorous skills nobody teaches.
Learn more here.

It’s a really cool story that went mega-viral across Twitter and Linkedin.

And it split the growth community into two camps.

Camp one: this is a glimpse of the future, and AI is about to replace whole marketing and growth departments.

Camp two: cool story, but not a big deal. Early-stage teams have always run lean. This is just the next version of the tools we've always used to do the job.

After coaching 90+ growth leaders over the past 5 years (directors, VPs, heads of growth) and being a 2x head of growth myself - here's where I land.

The time and resources it takes to do world-class growth work dramatically decreased.

Stuff that used to take 30 minutes takes 30 seconds. Work that used to need an engineer doesn’t. Work that used to need a designer doesn’t. The data request that used to mean a ticket and a 2-week wait now happens in a couple of prompts.

When the cost of execution drops like that, the things that make you valuable change too. Some skills get commoditized. Others get a lot more valuable.

I see 5 shifts happening right now.

Let’s get into it.

Shift 1: Judgement over output

Growth marketers are obsessed with improving conversion rates. That’s how we measure our impact, and that’s an important outcome of the work that we do.

The way you move those conversion numbers… is by trying a lot of stuff.

Because most of the experiments we run won’t work. Maybe 1 out of every 3 is a winner, so you have to take a lot of shots to find the wins.

So we prioritize output.

The campaigns, the landing pages, the creatives, the CRO tweaks. We need a high volume of it, because volume is how you find the handful of things that actually move the needle.

And over time, that volume becomes the thing we point to.

It’s the stuff that ends up in our self-evals. How many campaigns we launched. How many landing pages we tested. How many creatives we shipped. How many pages we optimized.To push the volume even harder, many teams set goals around the number of experiments shipped.

There’s a good intention behind that.

But like many OKRs, people gamed it. They shipped a pile of tiny, low-stakes tests to hit the number. Activity went up. Business impact didn’t.

I did this too.

When I was scaling my first team, I didn’t always know the highest-impact work, so I prioritized speed and volume. Button copy. Color changes. Headline swaps. I danced around the big, scary, hard-to-execute bets, because I didn’t want to spend the political capital to fight for the resources.

Here’s what changed. Anyone getting savvy with these tools can ship hundreds of experiments a quarter now. Volume stopped being a differentiator.

So the growth marketer who still points to that volume as proof they’re valuable is the one at risk in this new world. Their resume reads like everyone else’s, a long list of stuff they tried, because everyone can do that now.

The growth marketer who pulls ahead can point to a small number of bets that actually mattered. They can tell you why they picked those bets, and what it did for the business.

The most valuable skill in growth right now is figuring out what’s worth testing, and why.

Instead of asking “could we test this,” they’re asking “should we test this.”

Shift 2: Curiosity over caution

A lot of the growth marketers I talk to spent the last 18 months keeping AI at arm’s length.

For understandable reasons.

For a while, the hype was way ahead of what the tools could actually do.

And we couldn’t keep up with the pace of new tools and still hit the goals right in front of us. And if we’re being real, a lot of our community was nervous. The rhetoric said AI was coming for our jobs, so why would you welcome it in with open arms?

That was me for a while too.

The first wave of AI marketing tools wasn’t impressive. They were fast, but lacking quality. We didn’t have the MCPs and integrations we have now. So I dabbled. But I wasn’t sold yet.

Same with most of my clients.

They had top-down OKRs to use more AI, but weren’t sure where to apply it. A lot of them used AI to get to the same place a different way, without finding any real leverage. That’s changed.

I’m watching some of my clients pull ahead of their peers, with the same budget and the same constraints as everyone else.

The difference is they’re more curious.

One client, “Alex” the head of growth at a B2C startup - had goals from his execs to use more AI. He told me AI used to feel like the boogeyman.

Something spooky he didn’t fully understand and wanted to keep at a distance.

Then a few months ago he leaned in. Hooked up all his MCPs, started playing with Claude Code. Built his first couple of agents. Here’s roughly what he told me on a recent call:

“Dude, I’m going crazy with AI. I’m having so much fun. Claude Code has been the ultimate cheat code. I’ve hooked all my disconnected tools and data into one hive mind. It feels like I have the world at my fingertips. It’s even improved my mental health, because for a long time this felt like the boogeyman, and leaning in changed my outlook on the future.”

A senior growth leader telling me his mental health at work got better because he stopped fighting AI and started building with it.

The growth marketer waiting for someone else to figure out the playbook, the right tool, the validated framework, is at risk today. Every day you wait is a day of reps you’re not getting.

The growth marketer pulling ahead is already in the lab.

They’re building. Connecting things. Learning by doing, even though it’s messy and confusing. Curiosity is becoming one of the most defensible skills you have.

Shift 3: Surface area over specialty

The real story here is how much one growth marketer can do on their own now. (This is basically the Anthropic story.)

Another client, “Francis”, the head of growth at a big, popular consumer AI startup. He lost his dedicated growth engineer, who got pulled back to core product work.

So Francis leaned in and figured out if he could do it himself.

He connected his MCPs to Snowflake and the company’s codebase, all wired into Claude Code. Now when he wants to test something, Claude knows which data to pull, runs the analysis, calculates significance, and writes the code to ship the experiment live.

Last month he ran a test that drove a 17% lift in revenue from the test cohort. He shipped it solo. Claude did what used to be 3 people’s jobs.

And the part worth highlighting: the hypothesis, the design, the read on the data, all of that came from Francis. Claude helped him ship it.

I see the same thing in my own work.

A few years ago, a custom dashboard meant a ticket to the data analyst, a 2-week wait, and a couple of meetings about formatting. Now it’s 3 minutes and a couple of prompts. I’ve got 10x more dashboards than I did 2 years ago, because I can do it myself.

The growth marketer who was valuable because they specialized in one thing (the Google Ads person, the lifecycle email person, the CRO person, etc) is in a tougher spot now.

The growth marketer getting more valuable can absorb the adjacent work, because the surface area one person can cover just expanded. One person owns the experiment design, the data pull, the code, and the read.

I’m even seeing a few directors and VPs with no direct reports who set the strategy and own most of the execution.

Strategy is the real work. Execution is the part AI helps with.

(I’ve watched a few people flip this and hand the strategy to the AI while they go do the execution. In my experience that hasn’t worked nearly as well, yet.)

Shift 4: Business problem first

This is the question I’m getting from heads of growth on almost every call right now: who on my team is actually safe, and who isn’t?

I’m seeing a pattern. The people most at risk walk into every room with a tactic instead of a business problem. Their starting point is “what should we ship?” or “I can do more with AI now, so what should we do?” The better starting point is “what does the business actually need here?”

When execution was the hard part, you could be a tactical, campaign-first thinker and still look productive, because everything took forever to build and the slow execution cycle covered for the missing strategy.

Now anyone can ship in 20 minutes.

Back to Alex. His team executes like crazy, thinking in sprint cycles and feature releases, rarely stepping back to ask what the most important work even is and how it ties to the company’s goals. That’s the muscle to build.

The growth marketer who fully understands the business problems, then works backward into the projects is worth a lot more than they were a year ago.

The growth marketer who walks in with a tactic looking for a reason to ship it is now competing with a $20-a-month subscription.

The value is knowing which campaign to run to move the business.

Shift 5: Learning over shipping

The first 4 shifts are about you as an individual. This one’s about how you run the team. And it’s what separates the growth leaders the rest of the org can’t live without from the ones who could be replaced tomorrow.

AI changed how we ship, and in the process it exposed what a growth team actually produces.

We care about wins and growth rate, obviously. But the way we get there is by learning what works and what doesn’t.

The learning is the real product.

Here’s why that matters. A growth team usually works at optimization. The company already went 0 to 1. There’s a working growth model and a few channels that convert. Your job is breaking through the conversion plateaus to get to the next level.

Most of the time we don’t actually know what’ll work.

We have hunches. Segmentation, maybe. Or the copy. Or a friction point in the UX. We call them hypotheses, but a lot of time, we won’t know until we try.

If you’re at huge volume, you can spray and pray. The rest of us can’t.

So the job gets specific. What are we testing? Why? What do we expect to learn? And who else in the company benefits from that learning?

That last question is the one most teams skip. I skipped it. I was so locked onto my team’s number that I treated everything else as someone else’s problem. Product shipped things that contradicted what we’d learned in activation. Sales used copy on calls that we’d already proven didn’t convert on landing pages and paid ads.

We left a pile of free wins on the table, because I ran the team like a shipping factory instead of a learning and enablement function.

Done well, it’s a process with 4 steps:

1. Ideation. Build a backlog of strong ideas that could move the KPI.

2. Prioritization. Use a framework to pick the right bet, not the loudest or most senior person’s pick.

3. Experiment design. Write down what you hope to learn, how you’ll know if it worked, when you’ll move on if it doesn’t, and who else should see the result.

4. Wins/losses tracker. Capture what worked, what didn’t, and why, so it compounds over time and doesn’t walk out the door when someone leaves.

We used to do all of this by hand. Now AI does most of it. The hard part is the discipline to actually follow the process once it’s in place.

And once you learn something valuable, every team that touches the customer needs to know too.

Product needs to know what’s working in activation. Sales needs to know which messaging converts. CS needs to know which signals point to expansion or churn risk.

If you keep your learnings inside your team’s four walls you’ll waste most of their value.

The growth leader who runs their team like an execution factory, head down, clawing toward the number, hoarding the learnings, gets stuck. They look productive. They are productive. But the rest of the org doesn’t actually need them there.

The growth leader who runs the team like a learning and enablement function is the one the org can’t live without. Product depends on them. Sales gets better because of them. CS improves. Execs prioritize their work, because it makes everyone smarter.

The learnings, and how you spread them, are the product. Campaigns and wins are the byproduct.

I broke the whole thing down on YouTube where I post stuff like this every week for people who work on and around growth teams.

And if you’re looking for some more support, there are 2 ways I can help:

The Head of Growth Guide. The full system I implement with my coaching clients. It’s the playbook I wish I’d had when I was head of growth myself. [LINK]

1:1 coaching. If you’re working through something specific and want a thinking partner who’s been in the seat, I take on a small number of clients at a time.

Exactly five years ago (this week), I left my job, sent this text to my professional coach, and went full-time on my business.

The emoji was a nice touch. But the truth is, I was shitting my pants.

At the time, our son was 6 months old. My wife hadn’t re-entered the workforce yet. We were still in the middle of the COVID craziness, which mean we no support system, and no friends around. My entire life was happening on Zoom. And I was responsible for all of our income, plus the benefits, plus the insurance, plus whatever else a 6-month-old needs (which, it turns out, is a lot).

The stakes were high.

What was actually going on

By 2021, I’d spent 12 years in tech and the last few had really worn me down.

I worked at HubSpot in the early days, which was an incredible experience but a hard one. Then I left for a tiny company that gave me an offer I couldn’t refuse, almost a 50% raise, and it was the worst decision I ever made. I left the HubSpot rocket ship right before the IPO. I worked at the other company for just 6 months. It isn’t even on my LinkedIn. Then I went to another startup that ran out of money and laid me off a couple months in. Then I worked at Wistia and had a great four-year run, until the last year, when my boss left, the company went in a new direction and my team and I weren’t part of it.

After three tough experiences in a row, I started to wonder if maybe tech just wasn’t for me anymore.

I joined a new startup, Postscript, and I think I brought all that emotional baggage with me. I did some good work there. But I mostly spent my days bracing for impact, waiting for the next reorg or layoff or bad meeting. Always trying to ignore the “oh, here we go again” voices in my head.

And this was all happening while we had a newborn waking up multiple times a night, during the height of the pandemic.

I was stressed and anxious all the time.

Eventually, I got into mindfulness as a way to cope. I read 10% Happier (which as an anxious Jewish person really resonated with me), which led me to The Power of Now.

I eventually started a daily meditation practice.

That helped a little.

I hired a coach because I thought I was broken

On paper, I had made it.

I’d hit the titles and the seniority I’d spent a decade chasing. Director of Growth, then Head of Growth - at some badass tech startups.

But the titles didn’t make me feel good or fulfilled.

I wasn’t happy. And I figured something must be wrong with me, so I hired a coach to help me get my mojo back.

What she told me changed everything.

She said high achievers often fall into a low-grade depression after they hit their goals, because they discover the goals didn’t make them happier. They’re the same person, just with nothing left to chase. That resonated with me.

Then she gave me an assignment that, looking back, was the origin of this entire business. She called it an energy audit.

For two weeks, I logged what I did each day and how it made me feel.

One thing stood out immediately.

I was most energized when I was helping other people succeed, way more than when I was helping the business hit its number. But the single most energizing thing on the list was when people who had my job at other companies reached out to pick my brain. People leading growth teams. I didn’t have all the answers, but I’d been lucky to work places that gave me a long leash to experiment, so I’d share what worked, what flopped, the mistakes I made. I’d hang up those calls buzzing.

She encouraged me to try coaching as a side gig.

My mom has been an executive coach longer than she’s been my mom - so I knew what it looked and sounded like to coach people.

I took on a few clients on the side (my employer knew, it wasn’t a secret), and it was the best part of my weeks.

The conversation at home

You’d probably guess my wife was super nervous and I had to convince her that I should quit my high-paying tech job to take a huge gamble on something that was making a few hundred bucks a month.

But it was the opposite.

I was the one saying this idea is crazy. We have a baby. I carry the benefits. What if it doesn’t work? And she was the one saying “I believe in you. Give it four months. If it doesn’t work, you’ll get another job so fast anyways.”

So out loud, we agreed I’d give it four months.

But privately, I made a different deal with myself.

I was going to make this work or die trying. Not literally die, but you know what I mean. My actual backup plan, if I couldn’t pay for diapers, was to make an anonymized Fiverr profile and take on work way beneath my experience level until I figured it out.

That was the whole contingency plan.

A fake name on Fiverr.

Some people describe leaving a job as a leap of faith. For me it was more like a cannonball.

Burning the boats

On the day I left, I had two or three coaching clients, each paying me a few hundred bucks a month.

That was proof of concept. But definitely wasn’t a business that could sustain (at the time) a family of 3.

So I did something that took a lot of chutzpah.

I emailed my entire network, my peers, my former colleagues, my friends, and said: I’m starting this thing, and I don’t think I can be successful doing it alone. If you’re getting this email, you’re part of my community and I need your support.

I gave them three ways to help, including just sending good vibes.

I posted about it on Linkedin too.

There was no going back after that.

Because once I told everyone I knew, failing meant explaining to all of them, at every dinner and every catch-up text for years, that it didn’t work out.

The moment I knew

The early days were strange. I remember sitting at my desk some mornings realizing that for the first time in my career there was no boss, no roadmap, no paycheck arriving regardless. If I didn’t do anything, I didn’t get paid. Okay. So... what should I do?

In retrospect, I got lucky on timing.

This was 2021, when the SaaS market was frothy, and companies started reaching out asking me to advise them. I took on three or four advising gigs in the first four months, and they paid well. The coaching business grew alongside them.

I remember the exact moment my brain flipped.

It was after the second advising “yes”, which by itself covered about half my old full-time income. I thought: if I can get two, I can get a couple more. And if I can get a couple more, this is going to work.

And if this works, I’m going to do this for as long as I humanly can.

Five years later

This business has forced me to grow in ways I never could have predicted.

I’ve had to market myself on LinkedIn, which still feels cringy today, and run sales calls after spending an entire career in product-led growth specifically so I’d never have to talk to sales.

I’ve taken big swings that flopped and big swings that worked.

And I’ve had to learn to stay even keel through the revenue rollercoaster, because when you’re in a valley it feels permanent, and when you’re at a peak you get a little too confident.

Surrounding myself with other solopreneurs has also been a huge help.

In May 2021, my anxiety was an 8 out of 10. Today it’s a 2. That’s a life-changing difference.

Most days I work 10 to 5:30ish. I hang out with my family in the morning, drop the kids at daycare and pre-K, hit the gym, and fill my cup before the first call. I take two or three client calls a day. And I spend a bunch of time marketing the business.

Around 5:30 the kids get home and I’m done, out in the driveway playing basketball while they ride scooters in circles around me. I don’t work Fridays. I golf, or sit in the sauna, or snowboard in the winter. I coached my son’s soccer team this year.

Most importantly, I have space to think. And I know there’s no version of my old in-house life where that exists, because I’d be too busy prepping for the next quarterly number.

A year after I sent that first text, I sent my coach a follow-up note. I told her I was having a blast, making more money working fewer hours for myself than I ever did in-house, and that I was deeply thankful for her help getting me there.

After five years, I’ve worked with more than 95 directors, VPs, and heads of growth. I’ve hosted over a thousand calls.

And at this point, my business become my own longest employer - by a year.

When I started, the question keeping me up at night was whether I could make this work. Five years and a thousand calls later, I’ve proven to myself that I can. Now there’s a new worry creeping in:

If I stay on my own too long, do I become unhireable?

At some point, employers look at someone who’s been independent for years and wonder if they can still fit inside a company. I don’t know if I’m approaching that point. And “what if I become unhireable” feels like a stupid reason to leave a life I love and go back to a job.

But I’d be lying if I said I never think about it.

Anyways, I still feel like I don’t know what I’m doing most days.

But I’ve stopped bracing for impact.

A lot of what makes someone strong in a senior growth interview is the same thing that makes them effective in the seat: getting your ideas adopted by execs.

If “that’s a good idea, but...” is the most common feedback you’re getting, I’m running a free 45-minute workshop on Thursday, June 4. Right Ideas, No Buy-In: A Growth Leader’s Guide to Managing Your Execs.

→ Save your seat

A client of mine had been in four final rounds for Director of Growth roles.

But she hadn’t received any offers.

She’s a badass marketer with a track record of being an A player. Strong on paper. Very impressive in the room. And by the time she shared what was going on with me, understandably frustrated.

She’s an expert in growth systems, process, and playbooks. So I figured she blew the interviewers away in the early rounds when they were evaluating growth acumen.

But I suspected they were looking for something she wasn’t showing them in the final round.

I told her on a call: “Director of Growth is a player-coach role. I bet you’re acing the player part of every interview. I wonder if you’re highlighting your coach skills enough.”

Here’s what I’ve noticed after coaching 90+ growth leaders through dozens of interview rounds (and sitting on the other side of the table as a 2x Head of Growth myself). The questions in a senior growth interview are pretty stable. They’ve been the same six or seven questions for years (with the addition of some AI flavors of those questions). But some of the evaluation is happening under the surface of what’s being asked directly.

In this post, I’ll walk you through three of the most commonly misread ones, because once you see the patterns, you’ll know how to navigate. Or you can watch the youtube video below for a deeper-dive.

1. “Walk me through a project you’re really proud of.”

The literal question is about a project. But the real question is, which environment brings out your best work?

My friend Adam Fishman frames this as three archetypes. Builders go zero to one. Optimizers break through plateaus. Scalers take an already-working growth model and layer new growth loops on top of it.

These things aren’t binary. Most growth leaders are some combination of all three personas. But one of these is your strength. And companies usually know which one they need, even when they can’t quite name it.

When they ask for a “career-defining project,” they’re listening for the environment that made that win possible. Was it total ambiguity, and you constructed your own signal? Was it a stalled growth model, and you diagnosed your way through the plateau? Was it a working machine, and you bolted new loops on top?

The mismatch is what kills most placements. I see it constantly. A scaler joins a Series A startup that actually needs a builder. A builder takes a job at a Series C scale-up that needs an optimizer. Six months in, both sides realize it isn’t working. Neither side saw it coming, because the interview conversation was about results, not environment that produced the results.

So if you’re prepping for an interview right now, the highest-leverage move is to figure out which stage the company is actually in before you walk in. Then pick the project from your background that happened in the same environment.

Most candidates lead with their most impressive results. The candidate who lands the job leads with the story that proves they’ve done their best work in the environment the company is hiring for.

2. “Walk me through how you ran your growth team.”

The literal question is about your team. The real question is, do you have an operating system, or are you winging it?

This is the question my client was missing. And it’s one of the highest-signal questions in the whole interview.

The reason most candidates blow past it is simple. By the time you’re interviewing for a senior growth role, you can talk tactics in your sleep. You know activation loops. You know paid acquisition. You can riff on anything tactical.

But very few growth leaders can describe a coherent operating system to someone who doesn’t live and breathe this work. The rhythm. The cadence. How you set goals, how you prioritize, how you run experiments, how you decide what to track. How decisions get made when you’re not in the room.

A weak answer sounds like: “We had a Monday standup. We used Trello. We communicated on Slack.”

A strong answer sounds like: “Every Monday we reviewed the experiment backlog, prioritized by ICE, assigned an owner. Every other Friday we ran a retro on what shipped and what actually moved the needle. Quarterly we reset goals and tied each one to a single business outcome. Every doc had a DRI and a clear deadline.”

Specificity is what separates someone who’s run a team from someone who’s been on one.

If you don’t have a clear answer to this question, that’s the work to do before your next interview.

After our call, my client went and created an artifact that we called her growth operations manual. Two pages. Decision-making principles, meeting cadence, prioritization framework, KPI ownership across teams. She started weaving it into her interviews.

3. “What resources do you need to be successful in this role?”

The literal question is about people, dollars, and tooling. The real question is, are you current with AI workflows and MCPs, or are you operating from a 2022 playbook?

This one has shifted more than any other question in the past 18 months, and most candidates haven’t updated their answer.

The old answer was about your dream team. Two growth marketers, a PM, a designer, an analyst, and $XXX of budget. That answer might land you the job at a well-funded Series C. It’ll get you politely passed on by almost early startup/scaleup that’s hiring right now.

The companies bringing on growth leaders today are looking for resourcefulness first.

They want to know what you’ve shipped under constraint. They want to know how you actually use AI in your workflow. Whether you’ve used Claude or Cursor to compress a three-week build into a two-day one. Whether you’ve replaced a recurring report with a workflow. Whether you have a point of view on what your team needs to look like in 2026, not 2022.

A great answer sounds like: “I’ve been using Claude Code for our experiment analysis. Saved us about 6 hours a week and freed up our analyst for higher-leverage work. The ideal team for me right now is leaner than it would’ve been two years ago. One growth marketer, one PM, and occasional engineering support as we roll out test winners to prod.”

That answer signals that you understand the current tooling and workflows.

Many of the questions being asked are a proxy for something deeper.

The interviewers are checking whether you fit the stage, whether you have systems, whether you’re current, whether you can hold ground on cross-functional ownership. The words coming out of their mouths are just the way they get there.

If you’re prepping for one of these conversations, here’s the move.

For each question you expect, write down what they’re really asking underneath. Then write the answer to that question, not the literal one. You’ll be in the top 10% of candidates immediately.

One last thing.

The interview cuts both ways. The same questions that tell them whether you fit also tell you whether the role fits for you. If they want a builder and you’re a scaler, this isn’t the right seat.

Better to figure that out in week 2 of interviewing than in month 4 on the job.

Scale your business with Navattic: One of the most impactful growth projects I’ve ever run was building an interactive demo and putting it on the website - I did it at Wistia and Postscript, and both times it drove higher quality signups and more conversions. Navattic publishes a free annual report breaking down data from 40k+ interactive demos. If you’re thinking about adding one to your funnel, start here

My first big strategy presentation did not go the way I hoped.

I sat down in a small conference room with the entire executive team sitting close to me. I skipped breakfast because I was too nervous. About a 3 minutes in, it was clear things were going badly.

I had my first-ever panic attack in that room.

I’d walked in thinking I had an effective strategy. In retrospect, I just had a list of cool ideas I’d always wanted to do, in the order I wanted to do them. There was no connective tissue. Unclear KPIs. And no clear picture of what “good” looked like.

Nobody said the words that day. But the message was loud and clear: I wasn’t ready for the next level.

I thought about that meeting a lot while interviewing on the podcast.

Because she had her own version of that moment.

She thought she was about to get the promotion.

Until her manager pulled her aside one afternoon and asked if she could stay after work. She’d been pushing for the director role for months. The work was there. The numbers were there. The strategy she’d written for the consumer side of the business was being used company-wide.

She walked into the conference room. He sat her down.

“You’re not getting the promotion.”

“Not yet?”

“No. You’re not getting it.”

She kicked him out of the room. Said she needed a minute. She didn’t want to get emotional in front of him.

Jenny was a senior PM at Spot Hero, the parking app when this happened. About 300 people worked there at the time. She was the most senior PM on the consumer side, gunning for director of consumer product. She had an MBA. A longer tenure than most. And her manager had previously told her exactly what she needed to do to get promoted.

One of those things: own the consumer strategy for the next fiscal year.

It was October. Annual planning was already underway. So she got moving fast.

She and her closest thought partner, the director of design, booked a meeting room at their local library, brought a giant stack of Post-it notes, and built the strategy over 2 days. They mapped the funnel. They found the leaks. They figured out where growth was going to come from.

But they missed something important…

There were 2 other PMs on the consumer team.

And when Jenny came back from her library offsite with the strategy already written, one said something Jenny couldn’t shake:

“I can’t believe you went and did this without me.”

Jenny told me she didn’t fully understand what she’d done wrong until months later. The thinking in the strategy was clear. What she missed was the bigger job.

In her words:

“I interpreted this as an audition of my strategic capabilities. Instead of an audition of my leadership capabilities.”

She thought she had to prove she could write a good strategy. She didn’t realize she had to prove she could rally the team behind one.

That mistake didn’t cost her a project. It cost her the promotion.

When her manager finally sat her down a few months later, he told her she wasn’t getting director because of her leadership style. She wasn’t viewed as inclusive. People felt she didn’t listen. She interrupted in meetings. Nothing was a single fireable offense. It was the accumulation.

(What she did next is the part I love.)

She didn’t leave. She was 6 months pregnant, which made job hunting tricky. So she had to figure out how to fix this in the seat she was already in.

She built what she called an advisory council. A few of her biggest supporters and, more importantly, a few of the people she suspected were her toughest critics. She sat them down and said: “Here’s the feedback I’ve been getting. If you see me doing any of this, kick me under the table. Don’t wait. I need to know in the moment.”

She made director eventually. And today she coaches product teams through transformations like the one she had to do on herself.

This story is unique to Jenny. But I see a version of her library-offsite mistake in almost every coaching engagement I run.

A senior growth leader has the right read on the business. They build a smart plan. They bring it to the exec team or their peers, and it stalls. Or worse, it gets approved on paper and nobody actually moves.

When that happens, the natural reaction is: “They don’t get it. They’re not as close to the work as I am.”

Sometimes that’s true.

More often, the work to get the idea adopted hasn’t happened yet. The listening tour, the small-group workshops, the 1:1 pre-wiring, the moments where the people who’ll be affected feel like they helped shape it. Calling that “soft skills” undersells it. At this level, that work is the job.

Jenny said one thing in our conversation that I keep coming back to:

“I needed to figure out how to get better at leadership without authority before getting given the authority.”

That’s the whole game.

One more thing.

The exact tension Jenny ran into, having the right idea and struggling to get it adopted, is what I’m hearing from senior growth leaders every single week. So I’m running a free 45-minute workshop on Thursday, June 4 called Right Ideas, No Buy-in: A growth leader’s guide to managing up.

We’ll cover the 5 mistakes I see senior growth leaders make every week (the biggest one comes up in almost every coaching call), and the 5 moves that actually get your ideas adopted, with real examples from clients running these plays right now.

If “good idea, but...” is the most common piece of executive feedback you’re getting, this one’s for you.

→ Save your seat

Grow faster with Navattic: One of my most impactful growth projects was using interactive demos to drive higher quality signups and more conversions. Navattic publishes a free annual report breaking down data from 40k+ interactive demos. If you’re thinking about adding one to your funnel, start here

A few years ago, I launched a referral program that should have worked.

It had moonshot potential for the business.

And I know I’m biased, but I think the program was pretty solid. We had great offer mechanics. Design and engineering did an awesome job creating a really cool interactive user experience. It looked sweet. And the program launch went about as smoothly as you could possibly hope.

But it didn’t work. At least not in the way that we hoped.

It increased user acquisition. But the numbers were small. Incremental. Not step change growth for the business.

The thing about working in growth is that the first version of something is usually never going to be the most impactful version of it. It’s all about collecting learnings, iterating, and seeing if you can break through your conversion plateaus over time. That’s the game.

And in a referral program, there’s no higher-leverage thing to iterate on than the offer.

IE - what does someone get for referring a friend? What does the friend get for showing up? You can’t guess your way to the most impactful solutions. You test, you watch what people respond to, and you try again.

But I never got the chance.

The engineer I needed was on loan from the core product team. To get them back, I had to go chat with the core product team, make the case all over again, and scope the next iteration super tight so they could have something they could execute quickly. Then add it to their backlog to be prioritized a few sprint cycles down the road.

But by the time I did that, the core product team was already heads down in other long-term feature work.

I didn’t have dedicated resources.

So it took a long time to get another crack at iterating on the program to make it better.

The program ended up okay.

But I still think about how much more it could have been.

For years, I assumed the failure was my fault. That I had bad instincts. Or the wrong strategy. Maybe I’d missed something obvious that a smarter growth operator would have caught.

But since then, I’ve coached more than 90+ other growth operators, and many of them tell me some version of this story. Their numbers aren’t moving. They start to wonder if they’re focused on the wrong things, if someone smarter would be solving it differently.

Most of the time, they had the right ideas. They just couldn’t execute on them. The root cause of that, many times, was team structure.

You can’t win in growth by playing it safe.

Even the best strategy in the world won’t get you there if you’re playing it safe. To play big, you have to try a lot of stuff. To try a lot of stuff, you need a team structure that lets you. Strategy is the most important thing. Team structure is right behind it. It’s what actually decides how the work gets done.

Here’s what I mean.

A growth team needs 5 functions to run. A growth PM who owns the in-product roadmap. A growth marketer who runs the levers outside the product. Engineers who can actually ship to the product and the site. A designer who can move at the pace of testing. Someone on the data side who measures the right things and highlights the insights.

You don’t always need 5 people.

At an early-stage company, 2 generalists can cover most of it. Especially right now, with this wave of AI tools, we’re able to cover more surface area than ever.

Most growth teams depend on all 5 of those “jobs to be done.”

But typically, your growth lead isn’t the direct manager for each of the contributors. The growth team has a roadmap, but the people who execute it report to someone else.

That’s the core tension. And it’s why the team structure matters more than most leaders realize.

There are 2 ways to resolve it.

The first is the shared resources model.

You have a growth strategy, but you borrow the people. The engineer who builds your test has other 1-2 stakeholders. The designer has 3. The data person is prioritizing tickets from the whole company.

That’s the model I had at Postscript. On paper, it’s workable. In practice, it forces a specific kind of behavior, and that behavior is what kills your numbers.

When you only get 3 or 4 at-bats per quarter, you can’t afford to ship something that might miss. So you over-scope. You over-validate. You only push the bets you’re sure about. The 1-in-10 swing with 10x upside never gets greenlit, because you can’t risk burning a engineering ticket on something that might fail.

The cost shows up downstream.

Fewer reps. Fewer learnings. Smaller swings. Less impact. The actual problem is the system isn’t giving them enough chances to find the version that works.

The second is the dedicated model.

The growth team has its own engineers, its own designer, its own PM. Some resources still get pooled (BI usually does), but the core of the team belongs to growth. You get 30 at-bats per quarter instead of 4. You can take a few moonshots.

You can ship the weird idea on a Tuesday and see what happens.

That’s the model I had at Wistia, and it’s the one I push almost every coaching client toward. We started lean. Me as the PM, 2 engineers, part of a designer, part of an analyst. Not a huge team. But they were ours. Most of the work that actually moved the numbers came from experiments I never would have green-lit in a shared model. The 1-in-10 bets. The ideas that felt embarrassing to scope.

Iteration is the whole game in growth. Dedicated resources help you iterate more.

Most growth leaders don’t get to pick their model. They get assigned one from their execs. The job is figuring out how to earn your way from shared into dedicated.

If you’re early in the role, the shared model is fine for now.

Use it to get small wins on the board. Leverage AI and low-code tools wherever possible. Make sure leadership can see you driving real outcomes. But if you’ve been in the seat for 2 or 3 quarters and you have wins to point to, push hard for dedicated.

The longer you stay comfortable in the shared model, the harder it becomes to switch.

Here’s how I’d run that conversation.

Don’t walk in asking for headcount. Headcount is what executives say no to. Walk in with a specific part of the growth model that hasn’t moved in 2 quarters. Activation. Onboarding. Referrals. Whatever it is.

Show them the at-bat math. Right now, with shared resources, you’re getting maybe 4 shots at this problem per quarter. With a dedicated engineer and designer, you’re getting 30. More reps means finding the winning version faster.

Finding the winning version faster means the number moves sooner.

Then flip it. What’s it costing the business to stay in the current model? Every quarter that part of the funnel isn’t moving is a quarter of compounding losses. Put a real number on it, even a rough one. Executives respond to what’s being left on the table.

That’s the case. Here’s the part of the model that’s broken. Here’s why we can’t fix it from where I’m sitting. Here’s what staying stuck is costing us. Here’s what would change with dedicated resources.

If I’d known to frame the referral program conversation that way at Postscript, I think the whole story plays out differently. I didn’t. I do now.

That’s the playbook:

1. When growth isn’t working, don’t immediately rework your strategy. Check the structure too.

2. You can’t win in growth by playing it safe. And the wrong team structure forces you to.

3. The shared model is fine to start. The dedicated model is what you should be earning toward.

4. When you make the case, lead with the part of the growth model that’s broken and what’s being left on the table. Headcount is what executives say no to.

I think about that referral program a lot. Not because of the failure itself. I still think it was a good bet. But the structure was wrong. And for a long time, I blamed the wrong thing.

-Andrew

ps I filmed a 12-minute video walking through both team structures, the tradeoffs, and exactly how to make the case to your execs (including the conversation script I wish I’d had).

pps If you're struggling to have the impact and influence that you want and you can't tell whether it's strategy, structure, or something else, that's exactly the kind of thing I work through with coaching clients. I've got 2 spots opening up in May. Get started here

“Andrew, I stay ready so I won’t have to get ready.”

She’d just told me she’d taken three interviews in the past month. But she isn’t looking for a new job. She actually likes her current gig. Her CEO likes her. The team’s hitting its numbers. By every measure, things are working.

But she’d been burned once before.

Stayed at a previous company too long, watched the fit slowly disappear, and didn’t see it coming until it had cost her months of momentum and a real chunk of her confidence. Now she stays in motion. Always ready.

If you’ve been a Director, Head of Growth, or VP for more than 18 months, this is probably you. Or it’s about to be.

Most growth leaders think about their career as a ladder. You get promotions and work your way up, one rung at a time. And if you take a step down (say from VP to Director or from managing a big team back to IC), that’s a sign of failure.

The most successful startup leaders view their careers as a sequence of windows.

Periods of time where their specific skill set is a near-perfect match for what a company needs right now. Windows open. They step in. Execute like hell, hit some level of success, and at some point the window starts to close. When it does, they recognize it, and go find the next one.

That frame shift, from ladder to windows, changes how you think about loyalty, timing, and risk. It’s the thing I keep coming back to with every senior growth leader I coach.

I filmed an entire YouTube video going deep on this (it’s embedded below if you want to watch). But here’s the short summary of what the top leaders do better than their peers.

1. Constantly audit the fit.

Fit isn’t whether you like your team or product. It’s a specific question: is my skill set what this company needs right now?

Four components of fit:

• Skill-strategy fit. Do they need what you actually have experience doing?

• Scope fit. Do they need an IC, a player-coach, or someone to run a big team?

• Stage fit. Are they looking for a 0-to-1 builder, someone to optimize an existing growth model, or an innovator to layer in new loops (shoutout to for this growth profiles framework).

• Cultural fit. Do they make decisions by debate, by seniority, by data, or by storytelling, and is that how you operate?

Most leaders evaluate fit when they join. The best ones re-evaluate it on an ongoing basis.

I learned this myself.

I joined a company that needed a player-coach to help them use data to optimize their current growth model. Someone to question how things had always been done and help them break through plateaus. For a while, the fit was nearly perfect for me.

Then a few years later, the executive team changed.

Then the company strategy shifted. The culture moved away from testing and data - toward brand and polish. It was the right call for them but not the right fit for me.

By the time I ran the audit on myself, it was clear my window had already closed.

Things move fast right now. Companies are pivoting quickly. Executive teams are turning over. And markets are changing lightning quick. Those four fits are constantly in flight.

If you’re not paying attention, you’ll miss the moment your window starts closing.

2. Leave the party early.

I never hear really successful growth leaders regret leaving a job/company too soon.

But I hear many regret staying at a company for too long when it’s clearly no longer the right fit.

A client (I’ll call Katie) is a great example of this. She had been extremely successful in the past. Multiple promotions, raises, President’s Club. By every measure, an A-player at her last job.

Then the four fits started to shift.

There was major leadership turnover. Then a new strategy. And new cultural values. But she didn’t know the signs to look out for.

She told herself, “I’ve been an A-player here. I can get back to it.”

It didn’t get better. And it started to affect her confidence. The environment had shifted, and her skill set was suddenly wrong for it. The fit was gone, and she could feel it before she could name it.

That experience is why she now says, “I stay ready so I don’t have to get ready.” She interviews even when she’s not looking. She doesn’t want to be caught flat-footed again.

The leaders who advance fastest move when the early signals show up: a strategy change, a culture drift, a scope reduction. They don’t wait for the breakdown to be obvious to everyone in the building.

3. Never stop being in market.

You’ve heard the surface version of this advice: keep your resume updated, stay active on LinkedIn, network even when you’re happy.

It’s not wrong, but it misses the point.

Another client, “James”, is always in market. He networks constantly, does client work on the side of his full-time gig, and hosts a conference in his space. He had a great job at a well-known tech company. He wasn’t one foot out the door.

He’d already learned what most growth leaders learn the hard way: no fit lasts forever. So he was constantly laying the groundwork for when the window closed.

Recently it did. The company went through major changes. James decided it was no longer the right fit for him and stepped almost seamlessly into scaling a consulting practice. No frantic LinkedIn update. No reaching out to people he hadn’t talked to in two years. The groundwork was already there.

Staying in market is your career 401(k). Small deposits over time, compounding into a real asset. By the time you need it, it’s already there waiting.

4. Don’t figure it out alone.

The question of “am I still in the right place” is almost impossible to answer accurately when you’re in the thick of it.

Is it the company? Is it me? Is this a hard stretch everyone goes through, or a real signal that something has changed?

I had another client recently working under a technical founder who was meddling and micromanaging. I could see it impacting them on our calls. The spark, the energy, the thing that made him really good, had dimmed. He wasn’t pushing as hard. He wasn’t initiating the tough conversations he needed to be having. I don’t think he fully realized it was happening.

A lot of our early work together was just detangling one question: is this a fit problem, or a hard season? Those two things feel identical from the inside.

The leaders who navigate these moments fastest have someone in their corner who can help them see clearly.

That’s the model

1. Audit the fit constantly. Skill, scope, stage, and culture. All four shift.

2. Leave the party early. Move on the early signals, not the obvious breakdown.

3. Stay in market always. Treat it like your career 401(k). Small deposits, compounding.

4. Don’t figure it out alone. You can’t see clearly from inside the situation.

The full version is in the video below. The four-layer fit audit, the early warning signs Katie missed, the way James thinks about staying in market. It’s the most honest thing I’ve made about how careers actually work at this level.

Scale your business with Navattic: One of the most impactful growth projects I’ve ever run was building an interactive demo and putting it on the website - I did it at Wistia and Postscript, and both times it drove higher quality signups and more conversions. Navattic publishes a free annual report breaking down data from 40k+ interactive demos. If you’re thinking about adding one to your funnel, start here

Years ago, I was a few months into a new role and felt completely lost.

I’d made it to the title/ level I’d been chasing for years. But somehow I felt more confused and unfulfilled when I got there.

Being in a new role, there were so many things I felt like I was learning on the fly. A lot of my previous playbooks that had helped me be successful, both my growth playbooks and my playbooks for adding value as a member of a team, didn’t seem to apply in this new environment.

It was messing with my head a little bit

I was starting to worry that I wasn’t as good as I thought I was. And if I wasn’t good, it made me confused about why I had been successful in the past. My mind was twisted into a pretzel, and I was feeling all kinds of imposter syndrome.

So I hired a professional coach to help me figure it out.

A few months into our work together, she asked me if there was anyone I looked up to professionally. I told her about my old boss, “James”.

James worked incredibly hard. Was very direct, but kind. He’d push you hard and you’d run through walls for him. He was also a dad who seemed to have a good work-life integration. He was the first executive that I really admired.

But the thing I admired most… James had to make a lot of tough calls in his role, and he always seemed to make the right calls.

My coach immediately challenged that statement:

“Andrew, how did James know those were the right decisions when he made them?”

I thought about it. He didn’t. Obviously he didn’t. He made the best decisions he could with the information he had.

(and if you’ve ever worked with a coach, you can imagine the mindfuckery it took to get me to that conclusion.)

Then she said something that rewired how I think about my value as a professional:

“Your job as a leader isn’t to know the answer. It’s to figure out the answer.”

She kept going.

“Nobody knows all the answers. And if you did, you’d be in a role that extremely boring and beneath you. More importantly, when you know the answer, you can solve a small number of problems. When you can figure out the answer, you can solve an infinite number of problems. Your value is that you’re the right person to solve these problems. Focus on that.”

A lot of my imposter syndrome walked out the door that afternoon.

And that reframe has served me ever since, but nowhere more than in the first few months of a new role.

You show up expecting to get wins on the board fast. You open your bag of playbooks from the last company. And a few weeks in, you realize something uncomfortable: the context is completely different. The playbooks that made you successful don’t plug in one-to-one.

That’s the moment many of my coaching clients start panicking. They start wondering if the company hired the wrong person.

They didn’t.

They hired you because you’re the one who can figure it out. The playbooks are a bonus, not the job.

I actually had a chance to chat about this exact tension with Barron Ernst on the podcast recently. Barron’s a multi-time Head of Product with a background in growth, product, and marketing. Total badass. Like my old boss James, a pretty cool dude.

He told me about the time he was hired to launch a streaming service in Sub-Saharan Africa. Flew halfway across the world, armed with every Silicon Valley playbook he picked up over the years. He’d been hired as the expert.

A few weeks in, a teammate asked him if he’d heard of “the movie guy.”

Turned out most people in the neighborhood got their shows from one local guy with good bandwidth who torrented episodes, burned them to DVDs, and walked them door to door.

That was the real competition. A guy with a DVD burner.

None of Barron’s playbooks were built for that market. He spent the next few weeks wondering if they’d hired the wrong person.

He eventually made the reframe.

He wasn’t there to apply the old playbooks. He was there to figure out what the new playbooks needed to be. Showmax became the dominant streaming service in Sub-Saharan Africa.

The first 6 months were brutal. But he figured it out. Because that’s what he was actually hired to do.

If that story resonates, you’ll love the full conversation. Link below.

And if you’re in the messy middle of this yourself - in a new role where your old playbooks not fitting, wondering if they picked the wrong person - reach out. It’s one of the most common things I work on with clients.

He threw his laptop across the room.

It landed in a trash can. And then, because this is the part that makes the story, he had to walk over and wipe the yogurt off it.

That story comes from Noah Levin. Former CPO, and part of the early team that built Amazon Fresh. By any measure, an impressive high-functioning leader. And in that moment, which he now describes as a turning point, completely derailed by a frustrating meeting where he was too invested.

He told me this story recently, laughing. He laughs about it now because of how much he's grown since.

I hear versions of that story more than you’d think.

Not always involving laptops and trash cans. But the same underlying thing:

A growth leader so invested in their work that a bad moment totally destabilizes them. A bad performance review feels like a verdict on who they are, not feedback they can use. Their sense of self gets so tangled up with the dashboard that every number becomes a judgement of their worth.

Caring is part of the job.

And you can’t do good work without genuinely giving a damn. But at some point, caring too much can be a bug, not a feature. That’s when it gets costly.

The leaders I've watched struggle most can't separate who they are from how the numbers look.

Every miss becomes evidence. And once it does, they start playing defense. They stop running experiments that might fail. They hedge. They position. And their best thinking gets spent on protecting themselves instead of building something special.

Someone eventually pulled Noah aside after the yogurt incident and gave him a word he’d never applied to his career: equanimity.

It’s an old concept (the Stoics were obsessed with it). Caring deeply about the work, without letting the outcome own your sense of self.

When Noah got it, he stopped needing every meeting to go his way in order to feel okay. He could take a hard piece of feedback, sit with it, and actually use it. He could have a down quarter and still trust his own judgment about what to do next.

He kept growing. He thinks this is why.

I’ve watched this play out across dozens of growth leaders I’ve coached. The ones who last, who keep getting better as the stakes get higher, have figured out some version of this. They care deeply.

And they’ve built enough distance between their identity and their results to stay clear-headed when things get hard.

Most people only figure that out after a moment they’d rather forget.

Noah went deep on this in our conversation this week, how he built it, what shifted, what still trips him up. Link below.

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Philip Ruffini is a former coaching client and Head of Growth who took Hire Overseas from $0 to $6M in 12 months.

He talks to 5-10 founders a week about what's actually moving the needle right now. And next week, he's running a free live session on the top growth channels for 2026: what's working, what's not, and where he'd put his bets.

If you're trying to figure out how to grow in 2026, you’ll love this. → Register here

Go deeper

Noah and I went deep on equanimity, identity, and how the best leaders stay grounded when the pressure gets real. Watch the full conversation here.

One more thing

Applications to the Growth Council close this Friday!

It’s a small, private group for Directors, VPs, and Heads of Growth who are done navigating this stuff alone. 2 calls a month, real challenges, honest feedback from people who actually understand your job.

If that sounds like what you’ve been looking for: → Apply here

And after doing this for a while, I’ve started to notice something…

Almost every person I work with is struggling with the same internal dialogue.

They won’t say it in a team meeting. They won’t post it on LinkedIn. And they definitely don’t want their boss to hear. But in a one-on-one coaching call, once the pleasantries are out of the way, it surfaces.

Am I actually any good at this? Or is it just really hard right now?

If you’ve felt that, you’re not alone. I’ve never coached a growth leader who didn’t ask some version of it. Not once. Not even the ones with incredible LinkedIn profiles and multiple promotions and teams that love them.

This week, I made a video about the five patterns I’ve seen separate good leaders, from great ones. I'll embed it below. But I wanted to give you more context here on the stuff that didn't fit on camera - the client stories behind the patterns, and what actually changed for them.

Here are the 5 patterns:

1. They translate their brilliance into a system (instead of being the system themselves)

Most growth leaders get promoted because they were incredible individual contributors. Fast, instinctive, able to figure anything out.

But when they step into a leadership role, those same instincts start working against them.

I’m working with someone right now, I’ll call him Marcus, who is genuinely excellent at product-led growth marketing. But he’s newer to leading/ managing a team of people who are also excellent at it.

He kept getting pulled into everything. His team couldn’t make decisions without him involved. He was course-correcting project work at 11pm. And most of his one-on-ones had turned into working sessions vs prioritization support and career coaching.

His performance review was the wake-up call.

His exec team told him he was still the star of his team, and that for him to scale, he needed to create stars around him.

Together we built him a growth operations manual.

A set of decision-making frameworks. Clear definitions of what “good” execution looks like. Standard operating processes. Communication structures. Everything that lived in Marcus’s head, translated into an artifact his team could actually use when he wasn’t in the room.

He told me afterward that it was the first time the game slowed down for him. Like suddenly he could see the whole board.

If you’re not sure where to start with this, pick one system that would give your team the most leverage right now. How they make decisions. How they run experiments. How they communicate cross-functionally. Write down why it matters, what good looks like, and the steps to get there. That’s the start.

2. They treat visibility as a core part of the job (not a distraction from it)

Regardless of how many times you think you've told everybody, nobody knows what you're working on and why.

I was working with a growth leader at a tech company in the nonprofit space. Sharp, experienced, doing objectively the right things. But their CEO pulled them aside and said the team looked like they were prioritizing activity over output. Lots of busyness, with no clear connection to outcomes.

They were blindsided. They felt like they were hitting their key results.

But when we dug in, it was clear the work wasn’t the problem. The work was actually really good. The problem was that nobody above them could see the logic behind it.

They hadn’t made the strategy visible.

It looked like a duck treading water - calm on the surface, chaotic underneath.

What changed wasn’t the work. It was 3 things they started doing consistently:

1. Marketing their strategy (here’s what we’re going after and why)

2. Marketing their progress (weekly updates on what’s shipping)

3. Marketing their results (a monthly recap that closes the loop).

They did the same work. But had a different perception.

The reframe that stuck: managing up is marketing.

3. They speak two languages (growth fluent and exec fluent)

There’s a whole vocabulary inside the growth world.

Growth loops, activation rates, retention cohorts, PQLs, experimentation frameworks. When you’re talking to your team, that language is fine.

But when you take it into a room full of executives who've never done your job, it lands like a foreign language.

I learned this the hard way in my first growth leadership role.

I put together a slide deck walking through all of our activation initiatives. And by slide 3, I was underwater in questions.

“What’s the ROI?”
”What resources do we need”
“How does this connect to revenue?”
“Why are we prioritizing this over X?”

I never made it to my summary slide, which was, of course, the slide that should have been first.

The best growth leaders treat executive communication like a marketer treats audience segmentation. You wouldn’t send the same message to every customer segment. Don’t communicate your strategy the same way to your team and your CEO.

And write the executive summary first. Always.

4. They do it scared (that’s what looking confident feels like)

“Work on your confidence” is the kind of advice that sounds right but isn’t helpful.

I’m working with someone right now who looks, from the outside, like they bat a thousand percent. They have an incredible track record. Both in companies they’ve worked at and individual performance at those companies.

But they’ve been working for a new founder who chips away at their ideas, micromanages their decisions, and disrupts projects at the 11th hour.

Over time, that environment did something to them.

When I first got on a call with this person, I thought: how could I possibly help them? I should be asking for their help.

But slowly, that low-level working scared had eroded something real.

Our goal wasn’t “stop being scared.” That’s not how it works. Our goal was: feel the scared, and do it anyway.

2 tools I’ve found that actually move the needle:

The first is what I call a trophy file:

Every day, write down 3 wins. A thank-you from a colleague. Something you shipped that you feel good about. A decision you made that was right. It sounds small because it is small.

But it interrupts the automatic pattern most of our brains default to (scanning for what’s wrong) and starts building the muscle for noticing what’s going well. Do it for 30 days. It won’t fix everything. It makes things 10-15% better, and that compounds.

The second is an alter ego:

Kobe had the Black Mamba. Beyoncé has Sasha Fierce. Your highest-performing self has a posture and a way of showing up that you can practice stepping into before high-stakes moments. Figure out what it looks like for you. Then use it.

The world’s best don’t wait for the confidence to arrive. They do it anyways.

5. They know when their moment has passed (and leave before it takes something from them)

This is the one I didn’t expect to keep seeing, but it shows up constantly.

The growth leaders who feel the best and perform the best aren’t always the ones who stayed the longest. They’re often the ones who left at the right time. And the leaders who struggle most, who come to me with the most battered sense of self-worth? A lot of them stayed in the wrong role for too long.

There’s a concept I’ve started calling moment fit.

It’s the alignment between your skill set, your passions, and the specific moment a company is in.

The best growth leaders know how to read that alignment, and they know when it’s shifted.

Once a year, ask yourself: what’s the environment where I do my best work? Be specific. Company size, stage, growth problems, decision-making culture. Am I in that environment right now? If the answer is no, that’s worth sitting with.

And one more thing on this: the leaders who navigate transitions best are usually the ones who’ve been building their personal brand the whole time. Not because they’re chasing followers or hedging.

They recognize that fit is for a small window of time. And when it shifts, they don’t want to be starting from zero.

So, are you bad at this, or is it just really hard right now?

Probably both, honestly.

But the leaders who outperform haven’t figured out how to make it easy. They’re prioritizing the hard work: building the systems, the visibility, the communication, the resilience, and the self-awareness to keep going anyway.

— — —

ps - if you're a Director, VP, or Head of Growth and you want to work through these patterns with a small group of peers who are navigating the same stuff - I'm opening the Growth Council in Q2. Apply here.

Hire Overseas: One of my former coaching clients just launched an awesome business to help growth and marketing teams hire exceptional overseas talent - think paid ads, SEO, designers, content creators, and more.

If you’re looking to scale your team in 2026, this is my first stop - hireoverseas.com/value.

Navattic: One of the most impactful growth projects I've ever run was building an interactive demo and putting it on the website - I did it at Wistia and Postscript, and both times it drove higher quality signups and more conversions. Navattic publishes a free annual report breaking down data from 40k+ interactive demos.

If you're thinking about adding one to your funnel, start here

I was scrolling LinkedIn on my way into the gym when I almost spit out my coffee.

One of my old clients (head of marketing) had just been promoted to CEO.
(I wasn’t surprised she made it - just that it happened so fast.)

And when her boss made the offer, she actually did spill her coffee.

Her name is Arielle Johncox. And she built her entire career on one move.

Someone would ask if she could do something. She’d say yes. Then she’d figure out how to do it later.

Social media manager who’s never run a campaign? Yes.
Create an integrated marketing calendar with no idea what that means? Yes.
Become head of marketing at a SaaS scaleup with no marketing infrastructure? Yes.

If you only looked at her resume, you would safely assume it worked. In 6 years, she went from social media manager to CEO.

But somewhere in the middle, saying yes became a bug, not a feature.

She described it liked this:

“I had completely built my career around saying yes to every single thing. In retrospect, it made me work until 1 or 2am a lot of times, and then I'd find myself waking up at 5am again too. It was a really great way to burn myself out."

That was one of the first things we worked on together during our coaching engagement.

Arielle had recently been promoted to head of marketing. She already knew how to get stuff done. We needed to figure out what to stop.

Here’s what I’ve seen coaching people like Arielle.

The habit that gets you to head of marketing, head of growth, VP of whatever, is the same habit that becomes a liability once you’re there. You said yes to every project. You raised your hand before you knew the answer. You out-worked everybody in the room.

And then you land the role. Suddenly you’re drowning in great ideas you can’t execute. You’re in every meeting. Every decision flows through you.

The muscle memory says: say yes, figure it out, grind through.

The job now requires something different. Sequencing. Saying no to things that feel important. Being okay with mediocre in some areas so you can be exceptional in the ones that actually matter.

That transition is hard. Not because the skills aren’t there. But because the identity is still attached to the old model.

Arielle figured it out. She went from head of marketing to CEO at Balsamiq in 3 years. And the unlock wasn’t learning new skills. It was recognizing that who she’d always been was enough, just expressed differently.

We got into all of it on this week’s episode of Growing Forward.

• How the CEO transition actually happened (it involved spilled coffee).

• What she had to unlearn to lead at a different level.

• Why she stopped thinking about her career as a ladder.

• And what she’d whisper to the version of herself she was when we first started working together.

ps - and if you’re a Director, VP, or Head of Growth who’s tired of navigating this stuff alone, I’m opening a group coaching program in Q2. Join the waitlist here.

The first time, at Wistia. I started and scaled the growth team, did some of the best work of my career, and stayed for 4.5 years. It was long enough that the role became part of my identity.

The second time, at Postscript, I lasted a fraction of that time. I wasn’t that successful.

And in retrospect, it was my fault.

Budgets were tight, and I told myself I was being a team player. Instead of pounding the table for what I actually needed, I scoped everything down to singles and doubles. Projects I could execute with the limited resources I had available - and hoped my effort would be visible.

It wasn’t. And eventually I left because it felt like there was no other option.

That experience stuck with me. So when I started coaching growth leaders, I paid close attention to who stays in the role - and who doesn’t. After working with 90+ Heads of Growth, the same 3 reasons come up over and over.

I made a video breaking all of this down in more depth, including the specific interview questions I’d ask before accepting any Head of Growth role. Watch it here:

The 3 real reasons growth leaders leave in 16 months

1. Their skills don’t match the company’s stage

Sometimes you have the right skills at the wrong moment. You join a company that needs someone to do the work and manage people. A year and a half later, the company has quadrupled (this is happening at a lot of AI companies right now) and suddenly they need a pure executive. Someone who builds strategy, delegates everything, and almost never does the hands-on work.

If that’s not you, the role has outgrown you. And if you’re not honest about that mismatch early, it surfaces in much messier ways later.

2. The culture isn’t ready to be challenged

Growth teams need to question the way things have always been done. That’s not optional. You have to run tests, which means proving that pre-existing ideas might be wrong.

A lot of executives say “yes, we’re ready for that” in the interview.

Then you start, and you find out that the product team is protective of their roadmap and the marketing team isn’t excited to share their channels. What looked like alignment was just enthusiasm about hiring someone new.

You won’t know this until you’re 3 months in. Which is why you need to ask much more specific questions before you sign.

3. They don’t have enough resources and don’t fight for them

This is the one that got me at Postscript.

Short-term growth leaders work with whatever they’ve got, thinking they’re being reasonable - trying to scrap and claw their way to whatever wins are available. Long-term growth leaders push hard for what they actually need, or at minimum make sure leadership understands the trade-off they’re accepting.

When you quietly absorb a resource gap and then underperform against your goals, nobody remembers that you were trying to be a team player. They just see you didn’t hit your goals.

What the long-term ones do differently

Growth leaders who last 3+ years tend to do 3 things that shorter-tenure ones skip:

1. They market their strategy constantly.
   They spend real time upfront getting alignment, and then they keep communicating what they’re doing and why. They don’t assume people can see it.
   

2. They have the uncomfortable conversations early (and often).
   Ownership confusion between growth, marketing, and product? Surface it in the first few weeks, not when people start getting territorial.
   

3. They fight for what they need.
   They don’t absorb resource gaps quietly. They surface the trade-off and make sure it’s a conscious choice.

Looking back, I did all of this at Wistia without realizing it.

I had been there long enough that the relationships and communication were just natural.

But at Postscript, I jumped into execution mode and skipped the foundation. I paid for it.

If you’re about to start a Director, VP, or Head of Growth role

Slow down in the interview process.

Ask: what does success look like at 6 months and 12 months? What resources will I have from day one? Who do I actually work with, and how are decisions made? What’s a recent project that touched multiple teams, and how did it go?

And if they can’t answer those clearly, that’s your answer.

Once you start, spend your first 30 to 60 days getting alignment. It feels slow. But in the long run, it will help you go way faster.

It’s the difference between 16 months and 3 years.

— — —

ps - If you're a Director, VP, or Head of Growth who's tired of navigating this stuff alone, I'm opening a group coaching program in Q2. Join the waitlist here.

One of my former coaching clients just launched an awesome business Hire Overseas to help growth and marketing teams hire exceptional overseas talent - think paid ads, SEO, designers, content creators, and more.

If you're looking to scale your team in 2026, this is my first stop - hireoverseas.com/value.

Everyone thinks they’re one or two prompts away from unlocking the answers to their hardest problems.

(especially the dudes on X)

My latest interview, Jake Woodward, put that to the test.

When he found himself back in the job market, he did what any smart, resourceful person does right now.

He built a system using AI.

A 10-page “super resume” that used AI to automatically tailor a perfect application for every job posting. Every word accurate. Every role precisely matched. He was genuinely proud of it - and honestly, he should have been. It was impressive.

But it wasn’t working.

And this wasn’t some guy half-assing his job search. Jake is a former SVP of Product with 25 years of experience. Plus, he had a new house. Six kids. A family counting on him. The stakes were real, the system was airtight, and it was producing absolutely nothing. He still just applying into a black hole.

So he stopped optimizing.

One day (out of frustration), he sat down and wrote a raw, unprepared, vulnerable post on LinkedIn about how lost he felt. No frameworks, or lessons learned. Just the truth about 18 months he couldn’t seem to stop.

He didn’t even tell his wife before he hit publish.

It went mega viral worldwide. Business Insider covered it. And people reached out from all over the globe.

The most engineered version of Jake got ignored. The most human version of Jake went global.

(and if that isn't a lesson for the future of content I don't know what is)

If any of this sounds familiar - whether you’re navigating a frustrating job search or just feeling like you’re one better prompt away from everything finally clicking - this one’s worth your time.

Watch on YouTube:

Listen on Spotify:

And whenever you’re ready, here’s 3 ways I can help you increase your impact and influence in 2026.

1. Binge my best content on leading growth growth teams for free on YouTube.

2. I’ve helped 90+ growth leaders increase their impact and influence. This video outlines my exact process.

3. I’m about to open the doors to my new group coaching program. Join the waitlist here.

One day, the CEO walked over to my desk, sat down next to me, and said, “Andrew, I know what you’re doing - and I want you to stop.”

I still remember that moment vividly.

We hadn’t worked much together at that point. So it was a heart-racing moment at the time.

It looked pretty similar to this.
(except he only had 2 feet - thanks a lot nano banana)

And I had no idea what I’d done wrong.

Before I started and scaled my first growth team, I was a growth marketer focused on user acquisition.

And our CEO would occasionally Slack me fun ideas he’d heard from his startup founder buddies. Tests they’d run. Changes that had moved the needle. Channels they were scaling. And things he thought we should try.

And every single time, I said:
“Yeah, great call. Adding this to our next sprint.”

I genuinely thought I was doing the right thing. I was being helpful. I was being a team player. I was supporting the execs. And I was making my bosses boss job easier.

But he saw it a little differently.

He sat down and said: “Andrew, I really appreciate how quickly you jump on this stuff. My job is to bring growth ideas to the right person - that’s you. But your job isn’t to say yes just because I’m the CEO. Your job is to evaluate whether it’s actually the most impactful thing to do for the business - and say no when it’s not. I have bad ideas all the time.”

I remember sitting there feeling slightly embarrassed, and completely relieved.

Because I’d been saying yes to everything for years. Not just to him. To everyone. It felt like the safe move. The career-smart move. The move that kept people happy and kept me out of trouble.

What I didn’t realize was that every yes was quietly costing me.

Every yes meant something more important got delayed. Every yes meant my actual priorities got diluted. And every yes sent a signal that I didn’t have a clear point of view on what actually mattered.

Here’s what I’ve learned from coaching 90+ growth leaders since then:

The ones who build the most influence don’t say yes the fastest - or the most. They say no (when it makes sense) clearly - and explain exactly why.

“If we take this on, here’s what we’re pushing back.”

“I love this idea. It’s not the right moment - here’s what we’re focused on instead.”

“I want to make sure we’re spending our time on the thing most likely to move the needle towards our current goals. Can we revisit this next quarter?”

That’s how you build trust with a CEO. That’s how you become someone leadership actually relies on - not just someone who clears their inbox.

Saying yes got you here. Learning to say no strategically is what gets you to the next level.

This week I put together a video on the 5 prioritization skills that separate growth leaders who have real impact from the ones who stay busy.

The "saying no" piece is skill five, but honestly, it's the one that unlocks all the others.

One of my former coaching clients just launched a business Hire Overseas to help growth and marketing teams hire exceptional overseas talent - think paid ads, SEO, designers, content creators, and more.

If you're looking to scale your team in 2026, this is my first call - hireoverseas.com/value.

My guest pulled up his worst performance review mid-interview and read it out loud:

“I’ve yet to see Dan make teams greater than the sum of their parts.”

He’d been a senior leader at Reforge. Built teams at HubSpot. Sold a company before that.

Impressive resume by any measure.

And yet, the thing that made him exceptional as an individual contributor was quietly killing his team’s ability to function without him as a lead.

He jumped in when things slipped. He fixed what wasn’t done right. He held high standards by modeling them himself.

But over time, his team stopped taking risks. They waited for him to tell them what to do. To fix it. And he ended up doing more and more of the work.

Nobody told him until it was in writing.

I didn’t say anything in that moment.
Because I’ve lived a version of this myself.

I can remember reading my own annual review the night before my performance conversation.

There was a line (that’s permanently seared into my brain) about how my exec team had hoped I’d have more impact in my role.

The company had prioritized hiring more developers over staffing my team.

I was frustrated by the decision, but I understood we needed to ship more and faster. So I disagreed, and committed.

I didn’t sit around whining about it.

I scoped projects to the resources I had available vs advocating for what I really needed. I thought I was being a team player. Adjusting without complaining.

I thought that was the right thing for the company.

But the next day, sitting across from my manager, he said something that caught me off-guard:

“Your job is to pound the table for what you need. If you’re not getting it, break down 99 doors until you get through the 100th. That’s your job. Not to give up after the first no.”

My honest first reaction? I don’t want to pound the table. I just wanted to quietly do good work that spoke for itself.

But I didn’t push back. Because underneath my reaction, I knew he was right.

What I thought was being a team player was actually just playing a smaller game than the role required.

In the process I learned one of the hardest parts of growing as a leader: doing the right thing might not always feel good for you.

And the skill that earned me the role (being a great team player and adapting to changing resource constraints) was the exact skill now holding me back in it.

Dan’s version of this story is more brutal than mine.

He read the actual review out loud on the podcast. The full thing - including the presentation that got zero questions from the exec team, the manager death spiral he created without realizing it, and how he worked through all of it.

It’s this week’s episode of Growing Forward.

Watch on YouTube:

Listen on Spotify:

We can’t be the only ones who struggled. What’s your version of this?

And whenever you’re ready, here’s 3 ways I can help you increase your impact and influence in 2026.

1. Binge my best content on leading growth growth teams for free on YouTube.

2. I’ve helped 90+ growth leaders increase their impact and influence. This video outlines my exact process.

3. Apply for 1:1 coaching. I have 1 coaching spot still available in February. Click here to apply.

Mostly Directors, VPs, and Heads of - but occasionally a really ambitious senior IC too.

And I’ve noticed something that still surprises me: many really talented people get stuck at the Director level, because they focus on the wrong things.

So today, I’m sharing the exact framework I use to help leaders break through.

It’s called the Influence & Impact Map. I used it myself when I went from running marketing campaigns to leading cross-functional growth teams at two fast-growing companies. And I’ve used it with Directors, VPs, and department heads to help them move up.

We’ll cover where you might be stuck in your career, what the path ahead looks like, and the specific steps you need to take to get there.

Here’s how it works.

The Career Journey

Growing a career isn’t a straight climb.

The skills that get you from individual contributor to senior IC won’t be the ones that get you to manager or director. At each stage, your role changes. What “good” looks like changes. The way you need to share your work with others changes completely.

The journey loosely looks like this:

Team Member → You’re doing the work. Learning fast. Everything is new, exciting, overwhelming.

Senior Team Member → You’re still doing the work, but better. With more ownership and freedom to make decisions.

Player-Coach (Director at mid-size companies or department head at smaller companies) → You have your own work AND you’re managing others. You’re finally getting invited into the important rooms where big decisions are made. You have more responsibility, more influence internally.

This is one of the hardest stages. You’re overworked, under-resourced, and everything breaks because IC tactics don’t scale to teams. This is where burnout happens.

Leader → You’re setting direction and helping others be successful. The work happens through your team, not by you.

Executive → You move beyond your specific functional lane. The executive team becomes your main team. Less than 1% of workers make it here, but it’s the top of the mountain many people are aiming for.

Where People Get Stuck

Most people can make it to the player-coach level just from working hard.

From being passionate about what they’re doing and staying on top of the latest tactics and strategies. But it’s at this level that you need to change your relationship between time and effort.

To be successful at the next leadership level, it’s not about working longer or harder and being the best “doer” on your team.

It’s about finding amazing people and setting up the right systems for others to do the work. Otherwise, your career will stop here.

Regardless of your level today, the most common mistake I see is being focused on the wrong stuff for your stage.

Directors still acting like the expert on their team who does all the work. Or junior team members copying the strategic work from senior leaders at larger companies (which is also the wrong move because you’re missing all the contextual pattern matching).

You need the right playbook for the moment you’re in.

The Influence & Impact Framework

Let me walk you through the framework I use to help leaders dramatically increase their influence and impact.

(If you’re just looking for quick wins or a shortcut or a hack, this probably isn’t for you.)

Here’s why you need both impact and influence…

For a long time, the growth community was obsessed with winning. With figuring out how to grow faster, learning all the latest loops and playbooks, being the most data-driven, the most technical, the most obsessed.

But I’ve talked with a lot of folks who knew exactly how to win and still struggled to be effective, because they didn’t have influence.

They’d get stuck trying to explain their ideas to executives. They wouldn’t be able to get resources to execute their plan. Or they’d get the resources but wouldn’t know how to delegate or present their work outcomes to senior leaders.

Being right isn’t enough. Being effective isn’t enough.

You need both impact AND influence. That’s what actually moves your career forward. And when you have both, your career doesn’t just advance. It gets better. Your stakes might get higher, but you feel more focused. You’re working fewer hours. Your stress levels are hopefully going down, not ramping up.

Regardless of your current title, level, or specific ownership area - the goal is the same. Move up the ladder and increase your influence and impact.

The Three Requirements

To get there, three things must be true.

1. We have to focus on the right stuff to grow the business.

2. We need to execute really well on what we’re focused on.

3. We need to gain leverage (which looks different based on how senior you are). So that as we’re doing more stuff and becoming more senior, we’re able to level up and life gets better.

On the focus side, our job is to grow faster. On the execution side, we’re setting up an effective operating system (whether for ourselves or our teams). And to make sure we don’t get stuck at this level, we’re upgrading how we show up, make decisions, and communicate to others.

When we’re growing faster, executing really well, and showing up with more intention, work slows down again and becomes fun.

The Practical Menu (Self-Check)

This isn’t an instruction book. It’s a menu to pick and choose from based on where you’re at today.

For each item below, self-assess: Green (solid), Yellow (could improve), Red (big opportunity).

Part 1: Focus (The Goal: Grow Faster)

Find Your Main Goal

This is the single most important thing for success. Get clarity on what really matters for your role.

If you’re a marketer, that might be bringing in new users. If you’re a product manager, that might be keeping users active. If you’re a leader, that might be getting people to convert from free users to paying customers. If you’re an executive, that could be the overall revenue growth rate.

Question: If we zoomed all the way out and fast-forwarded one year into the future and you got a massive raise and promotion, what’s the main number/outcome you were able to improve?

Self-assess yourself (green, yellow, or red) based on your ability to clearly answer that.

Map Out How the Business Works

Create a visual map of all the things (steps customers take or important customer groups) that impact your main goal. Then create a spreadsheet version so you can compare your actual numbers to what they should be and figure out where you can make the biggest difference. Basically, which areas are doing well or poorly.

Figure Out What to Work On

You need to figure out how to organize all the crazy ideas swirling around your head about ways you could improve your main goal into a clear plan. I like to use a template to rank your ideas and another to organize and explain your strategy to other people who need to understand your plan.

Part 2: Execution (The Goal: Set Up a System)

Get the Right Resources

If you’re a team member, this might be tools, data, or technology. If you’re at the player-coach or leadership level, this might look like budget, hiring, and team structure.

Build the Right Dashboard(s)

You know that main goal that everything connects to, but that’s an outcome. You need insight into the right inputs and early signs to prove your work is valuable and fix things before you get too far along.

Set Rules of Engagement with Other Teams

To be successful, we need to work well with other teams. Specifically with marketing, product, and sales (if that applies) so that we’re not stepping on each other’s toes and we’re able to move quickly.

Execute Like the Top 1%

For many of us, this will include designing and documenting tests. If you’re a marketer, this might include building landing pages. If you’re a product manager, this might be designing onboarding flows. But this is the actual “doing” part of the job. Whether you’re doing it yourself or through a team.

We need to know what “good” looks like and hold ourselves or our team to that standard.

Self-assess yourself here. And as you do, I think this is where many of the folks I coach think the core part of their job is. But in reality, this is just one piece of the overall puzzle.

If you’re able to do those things (get the right resources, put together the right dashboards, set rules with other teams, and execute really well), and maybe document all that and turn it into a manual, you should be executing at a very high level.

But it’s not enough to know what to do and get it done.

That gives us impact for sure. We can become a great team member and player-coach by getting really good at these skills. But if we want influence, we’re going to need more. We need to get leverage in other ways.

Part 3: Leverage (The Goal: Gain More Influence)

Many smart, talented people just aren’t sure how to gain more leverage. It tends to be something we’re not taught. Or at least, it’s hard to learn in school. It usually happens in painful moments.

If we want to gain more leverage, there are a few options.

Enable Other Teams

A strong growth leader should be a chief learning and sharing officer. In practice, this looks like:

1. Learning a lot of stuff (which if you’re doing the rest of the things here, you should be).

2. Sharing what you learn in ways that help other teams.

A leader must be sharing on a consistent basis. That visibility (and repetition) is an important influence tool.

The way we share also matters. I’m sure you can picture times you’ve seen folks sharing updates that look like they’re just trying to get attention, versus others who do an excellent job sharing decisions and lessons (not updates).

Delegate and Manage Others

This is your ability to get great work done by managing people instead of managing the tasks yourself. It also includes your ability to run meetings, help people learn and work together, and improve how things work.

Becoming a great manager doesn’t happen by accident.

It’s a skill you need to learn, practice, have strategies for, and get repetitions on.

Communicate to “Non-Natives”

The ability to translate your ideas and work for people who aren’t experts in your capability is super important. Once you get to the Director level and above, your main team becomes the other leaders. So you’ll spend less time talking about your work to other people like you and more time translating it into business results everyone can understand.

That’s hard and different. Even the idea of a summary memo for executives was new to me.

What To Do With Your Assessment

Look at your reds and yellows. Pick the THREE that would move the needle most.

Not sure which three? Here’s a cheat sheet:

• If you’re an IC or Senior IC → Focus on Part 1 (Focus) first

• If you’re a Director/Player-Coach → Focus on Part 3 (Leverage) first

• If you’re stuck getting promoted and not sure why → Pick one from each section

Now you’ve got your roadmap.

Start Here Tomorrow

Pick one thing from your reds:

If you picked a “Focus” item: Block 2 hours this week to map your growth model on paper. Just boxes and arrows showing what impacts what.

If you picked an “Execution” item: Schedule 30 minutes with one other team lead to define where your work overlaps - and who should be involved when that overlap happens. Write it down.

If you picked a “Leverage” item: Send one update this week to someone outside your immediate team. Share a decision you made and why.

Don’t try to fix everything. Fix one thing.

Where You Are Right Now

You’ve now got a map of what it takes to level up.

If you’re serious about making that jump to the next level, you’ve got the roadmap. Behind each one of those reds and yellows are specific tools, playbooks, and systems you can start using tomorrow.

Some people prefer to figure this out on their own. Others get there faster with someone who’s been through it, can spot the blind spots, and knows which moves actually matter at each level. Someone to pressure-test your ideas, give you honest feedback, and help you avoid the time-wasting detours.

If having that kind of support sounds helpful, head to my coaching page.

We can jump on a call and figure out if working together makes sense. Or DM me “COACHING” on LinkedIn and I’ll send the link.

And if you’d rather run with this on your own, that’s great too. I hope this framework gives you what you need.

…

(originally published on delivering value)

One of the most impactful growth bets of my career was putting a lightweight, interactive demo of the product directly on the website.

I did this at both Wistia and Postscript, and it consistently drove higher engagement and better-quality signups than any feature page redesign we tried.

That pattern is now playing out at scale: interactive demo usage grew 50%, top demos are seeing 56% engagement rates. Navattic analyzed 40,000 demos to publish their 2026 State of the Interactive Demo report.

Read it here (ungated)

When I started my last Head of Growth role, I was super excited on the outside - and quietly stressing inside.

I wasn’t new to growth.

I’d started a scaled a growth team already. But this was a new company. Which meant new execs, new culture, and a clean slate.

I desperately wanted to get some W’s on the board fast, to prove they hired the right guy. But I also didn’t want to come in too hot, and step on any cultural landmines I didn’t yet see.

Nobody teaches you how to navigate those first 90 days.

And it's especially hard in growth, because most new growth leads report to someone who hasn't done their job before. So they can't guide the right operating systems, toolset, and kpis.

Most growth leads are left to “figure it out” - while feeling the pressure of everyone around them watching.

That’s why I loved my recent conversation with Jay Desai, who just joined Navattic as their Growth Lead.

Instead of jumping straight into execution, we slowed down and talked through his plan.

- what growth actually means, in this moment, at Navattic
- where he could get some early wins
- how to avoid the most common traps
- how to balance learning, trust-building, and building momentum

And we talked about using these early days to set yourself up for success 6 and 12 months down the road.

I’m currently coaching 14 different growth leads, and 4 are currently looking for new jobs (maybe you are too,) so this convo felt especially timely.

Catch our entire conversation on YouTube:

Or, listen on Spotify:

And whenever you’re ready, here’s 3 ways I can help you increase your impact and influence in 2026.

1. Binge my best content on leading growth growth teams for free on YouTube.

2. Swipe my entire growth operating system. You have a few weeks left to buy this program in it’s current form before I close it and the price goes up.

3. Apply for 1:1 coaching. I have 1 coaching spot available this february. Click here to apply.

   
   

The key word here is “principles.”

Because copying another brands tactics or playbooks is usually not a winning formula. There’s usually a lot of important context that influences if a popular tactic is successful. Tactics aren’t plug and play.

So, if you can learn the psychological principles - and when they’re most effective, you can create your own churn saving playbook.

So let’s get into it.

(and if you prefer a video version of this post - I just published a YouTube video doing a deeper dive below)

The only reason I found this flow was because I almost canceled my Canva subscription. I’m finding myself using Nano Banana a lot more these days, and figured I’d could save a few bucks by downgrading to Canva’s free plan.

In the process, I stumbled onto a masterclass about how one of the biggest PLG brands on the planet saves users from cancelling.

Because instead of the usual dull confirmation screen, Canva showed me a list of exactly how I was using the pro plan - and how many times.

Premium elements used 114 times. Background remover used 102 times. Magic Eraser used 22 times.

I paused.

Because I hadn’t realized I was using this stuff so frequently. And I wondered if I actually still needed it.

Churn Does Not Start at Cancellation

It is the final step in a long decision-making process that started weeks or months earlier.

The signs are almost always there if you know where to look.

Users stop logging in. They stop completing key actions. And stop engaging in a meaningful way. Those signals show up clearly in product data and in your CRM.

But most PLG teams ignore them.

Instead, they obsess over acquisition, onboarding, and free-to-paid conversion.

They spend enormous time and money getting users in the door. Then, after they’ve acquired an active user, they largely give up. Which is wild, because at scale, churn becomes one of the biggest growth levers in the business.

Still, even if cancellation is late in the game, it matters.

It is your last clear chance to remind someone why they paid you in the first place. And it’s your last chance to re-engage a user before they downgrade.

The Wrong Way to Reduce Churn

Many companies try to “save” users in all the wrong ways.

They add friction.
They hide the cancel button.
They force users to call support, submit tickets, or jump through hoops.

Gyms are famous for these dark UX patterns. I currently belong to two gyms, because Planet Fitness won’t let me cancel my plan online, over the phone, or using their app. Instead, I have to physically drive to the gym and cancel in person. What a pain in the ass.

It works for sure, but it damages trust.

It creates a bad brand experience that users remember (and write about on their Substack).

The better approach is clarity.

Does This Actually Work?

That was the question I had too.

So I asked my friends at Churnkey if they could share some data on different cancellation approaches - and their impact on churn.

(this isn’t a sponsored post, but Churnkey hooked up some proprietary data here - so if you do want help reducing churn, check ‘em out)

They aggregated churn data across their entire customer base - and the results are hard to ignore.

Here are four patterns that consistently reduce churn (and by how much).

1. Loss aversion

When users are clearly shown what they will lose, like the features they use or credits they haven’t consumed, over 55 percent abandon the cancellation flow immediately.

More than half simply stop and keep their plan.

2. Special offers

Targeted offers like a pause, a temporary discount, or plan flexibility save about 53% percent of users who see them.

That’s way more than I anticipated.

3. Surveys

Simply asking why someone wants to cancel saves roughly 30 percent of users at that step.

One out of three accounts pauses long enough to reconsider.

4. Double opt-out

A clear “Are you sure?” step saves about 10 percent more users from churning. Which feels small, until you stack it with everything else.

Stacked together, these patterns can be pretty impactful!

What Canva Actually Does

Canva stacks these ideas with intent.

The first thing you see is an offer to pause.

If you continue, you see your specific usage data.

Not generic features included on your plan. Your behavior based on what’s on your plan.

If you still continue, you’re asked why.

A simple survey (sometimes followed by another offer depending on your selection here.)

Nothing here feels sneaky. Nothing feels confusing. There’s no dark UX patterns.

It is direct, respectful, and (based on the data we just explored) effective.

Why This Works Psychologically

Several simple psychological forces are doing the heavy lifting.

1. Motivated reasoning.

Most users arrive at cancellation with a story already formed.
“I do not use this enough.” “It is not worth the money.” “I should cancel.”

Usage data interrupts that story.

2. Personalization.

This is not generic marketing copy written for everyone.
It is about you, your plan, and your behavior.

Personalized messages are harder to ignore and more emotionally sticky.

4. Endowment effect.

Once users see their usage, ownership kicks in.
This is my plan. These are my tools. I rely on this more than I realized.

5. Loss aversion.

Once ownership is established, losing something hurts more.That pain is what stops people mid-cancellation.

These 5 things aren’t new psychology.

We’ve learned these are powerful tools when applied in other areas of our growth model. Most companies already use these in acquisition, onboarding, and pricing.

It makes sense to apply them across the entire customer journey - including the cancellation experience.

The Real Lesson Most Teams Miss

The lesson here not “copy the Canva flow to save users from churning.”

The lesson is to bring the same rigor to retention that you bring everywhere else.

Segmentation.
Personalization.
Experimentation.
Value framing.

Most cancellation flows look like afterthoughts. They are generic. Untested. Unpersonalized. And they leave enormous value on the table

How to Apply This Without Copying Canva

Here is a simple way to start building your own cancellation eperience.

First, collect real churn reasons.

Use open-ended surveys or emails.

Second, analyze the raw response data.

Find the top two or three reasons users leave.
That is where the leverage lives.

Third, build “recipes” for each reason.

If users say they do not use the product enough, show their usage data.
If they say it is too expensive, suggest pauses or discounts.
If they say features are missing, communicate what is coming.

Fourth, stack these steps intentionally.

Order matters.
Sequencing matters.

You already know these techniques work.
You just have not been applying them to cancellation.

And if you lead the team focused on retention or growth and want to increase your impact and influence in your role, I have one spot opening up in my one-on-one coaching roster this February.

If you’re interested, you can set up a call with me and apply here.

Navattic just made it way easier to launch interactive product demos!

Their AI storyboard tool builds your demo for you, and Demo Centers let you showcase personalized flows that match each prospect’s brand - no designers needed.

Try it for free

One of the hardest stretches of my career was when I had learned all the tactical skills, but on the inside... I’d lost my confidence.

On paper, things looked fine. But inside, something felt off.

That is a brutal place to work from.

Especially if you’re in a leadership role.

And it’s why this conversation stuck with me.

So let me paint a picture.

You interview for your dream role.

It goes multiple rounds and you make it to the final stage. They eliminate every other candidate. It’s basically you… or nobody.

And they choose nobody.

Annoying. But it happens, right?!

Then a year later, the CEO reaches out to invite you to interview again. You figure, “they wouldn’t have asked me if they weren’t really interested.” And you go through four more rounds of interviews.

The recruiter says, “Expect good news on Monday.” And you can’t help but get excited.

But then...

Monday turns into Tuesday.
Tuesday turns into Wednesday.

And then, they pass again.

That happened to my guest this week.

Scott McNeely is a multi-time VP of Product.

From the outside, he looks unshakably confident.

In our conversation, he shares how this moment rattled him - and what he did so it didn’t follow him into the next chapter of his career.

We also talk about:

• What to do when confidence drops but skills haven’t

• Why “best idea wins” breaks down in real orgs

• The shift from being right to being effective

This conversation is for anyone who’s quietly wondered:

Am I actually as good as I thought I was?

Catch our entire conversation on YouTube:

Or, listen on Spotify:

Are you a Product, Marketing, or Growth Leader looking to increase your impact and influence in 2026?

Two ways I can help:

Sign-up for the Growth Operating System (before I close it)

I’m about to turn this self-guided system into a group coaching experience. You have a few weeks left to buy this program in it’s current form before I close it and the price goes up.
→ Sign up for the Growth Operating System

Apply for a 1:1 Coaching Spot

I coach a small group of experienced Directors/ VPs of Growth who want to break through plateaus - mastering growth strategy, operating system, communication, and inner-game - so you can earn your seat at the leadership table.

→Apply for a 1:1 Coaching Spot

My podcast, formerly known as Delivering Value with Andrew Capland, is now called Growing Forward!

It’s a small difference in words, but a huge difference in meaning.

I figured I’d share how I got here, because the process mirrors the exact kind of career moments this show now exists to explore.

(And if you haven’t already, I hope you’ll subscribe: YouTube, Spotify, Apple)

The Name I Chose Before I Knew What I Was Building

When I first launched the show, I had no idea what to call it.

I knew that I didn’t want to name it The Andrew Capland show, or something along those lines.

As flattering as that would be, I didn’t want the show to feel like it revolved around me. And honestly, I wasn’t sure my ego could handle it if The Andrew Capland Show didn’t take off.

I also didn’t want the word “growth” in the title.

Coming from the growth world, that word is everywhere - companies, newsletters, podcasts, frameworks, etc. This show was (and is) a creative outlet for me. And “growth” felt a little too on the nose.

So instead of overthinking it, I defaulted to action. I named the show after my coaching business: Delivering Value.

Those words have always been a mantra for my career.

Because I’ve always felt that if I focused on delivering value to users - everything else (the KPIs I was accountable for and my career progression) would take care of itself. And that has mostly been true.

At the time, calling it the Delivering Value Podcast was the right call.

It got me moving. It gave me room to experiment. And it didn’t box me into a specific premise before I understood what the show could become.

By most external measures, the podcast was doing well.

Since launching - we have slowly attracted over 1200 subs.

Downloads have been solid. The guests are sharing meaningful stories. And feedback from listeners was encouraging. Everything has been going okay.

But I felt like I was working way too hard - for the show growth I was seeing.

My gut told me that something was off. When I asked listeners what the show was about, I got a wide range of answers.

Some people said it was about growth. Others said leadership. Some said career advice, mindset, executive communication, or tactics.

None of those answers were wrong. But taken together, they pointed to a deeper issue: the show didn’t have a clear position in the listener’s mind.

That realization is what pushed me to get some help.

The Question That Changed Everything

A few months ago, I started working with a podcast coach.

Someone who’s solved these problems before and could help me shortcut this process.

My instinct was to focus on execution - asking better questions, writing sharper hooks, crafting stronger titles, designing more compelling thumbnails.

(if you’ve been following along, you’ve probably seen me experiment with all of that)

But my coach kept pulling me back to a more fundamental question:

“Why does someone choose to press play on your show instead of doing literally anything else with their time?”

At first, I resisted that question. It felt abstract. I wanted to solve concrete problems.

But once I sat with it, the answer became clearer than I expected.

People listen for two reasons.

The First Reason: They’re Trying to Move Their Careers Forward

Most people who listen to this show already know how to do growth work.

They’re competent. Experienced. Often top performers. In many cases, they’ve already mastered the growth playbooks that helped them get promoted in the first place.

But somewhere along the way, their job changed.

They started to realize there’s a difference between being an expert - and being effective.

Effectiveness requires a different skillset.

One that has less to do with execution and more to do with influence, judgment, communication, and trust. These are the skills that get you invited “into the room” where decisions are made. And more importantly, they’re the skills that help you keep your seat once you’re there.

What surprised me, both as a coach and in my own career, is how few people are explicitly taught this transition. We assume it happens naturally. Often, it doesn’t.

The Second Reason: They’re Trying to Make Sense of Hard Moments

The other reason people listen has less to do with ambition and more to do with reassurance.

Most of the career content online celebrates wins.

My friend (and co-founder of Camp Solo) John Bonini calls this, “winning in public.”

It looks like sharing your promotions, playbooks, and breakthroughs. On social media, we’re constantly surrounded by examples of people who seem to be doing everything right.

We don’t usually get to see the mistakes.

The missteps, the feedback that stings, the goals that get missed, the moments where burnout or imposter syndrome creep in.

When those things happen to us, we tend to internalize them. We assume they’re a signal that we’re not cut out for this, or that we’re in the wrong role, or that we somehow messed up beyond repair.

The truth is simpler and harder at the same time: these moments are normal. But they often don’t come with a clean playbook.

You can’t fix them by working longer hours or trying harder in the same ways that used to work earlier in your career.

From Top Performer to Top-Tier Leader

Once those two insights clicked, the rest of the show came into focus.

Growing Forward is for people making the transition from being a top performer to becoming a top-tier leader.

That transition is more jarring than most people expect. Getting the title doesn’t automatically give you influence. Being great at doing the work doesn’t always translate into being great at leading others who do the work.

Without developing a new set of skills, careers tend to stall in predictable ways.

Some people plateau as high-performing ICs. Others become burned-out player-coaches who never quite break through to the next level.

There’s nothing wrong with any of those outcomes. The problem is when they happen unintentionally.

Why These Skills Are Learned the Hard Way

Even when we know we need to work on our leadership, communication, or judgment skills - they’re hard to learn.

You don’t really learn them from a book. And you almost never learn them when things are going smoothly.

You learn them when something goes wrong.

When feedback lands harder than expected. When you miss a goal. When the old version of you (the one that got you here) starts holding you back.

Those moments force change. They reshape how you see yourself and how you show up.

That’s what this show is about.

Every episode slows those moments down. We don’t just talk about what happened or how it felt. We dig into how people changed because of those experiences, or in spite of them, so that when you face similar moments in your own career, you’re not walking in blind.

Why the Name Growing Forward Finally Fit

I debated a lot of names. Dozens of them.

For a long time, I thought the show might be called Failing Forward. But the more I sat with that idea, the more it felt off.

Because this isn’t a show about failure.

It’s about growth - but not SaaS growth.

At least not directly. Instead, it’s about personal and professional growth - from people who are leading growth teams.

(heady I know)

About what people become because of hard moments. About growing through discomfort, growing because of adversity, and sometimes growing in spite of it.

You’re not just failing forward. You’re growing forward.

Once that clicked, everything else followed.

A Final Thought - and an Invitation

You might have noticed the new artwork too. It’s a little raw. A little gritty. Intentionally unpolished.

The cassette tape on the cover isn’t random.

Many of us grew up replaying old tapes - listening again, noticing something new each time. As a skateboarder in my teens, I did this a ton.

And that’s exactly what we’re doing with this show.

We’re replaying tough moments from real careers, slowing them down, and pulling out what actually matters.

As the show continues to evolve, I want it to evolve with you.

I’d love to hear from you. What moments are you navigating right now? What topics resonate most? What kinds of stories would be most helpful at this stage of your career?

I read and respond to every message, and I’m actively shaping future episodes based on what you share.

Thanks for being here. And welcome to the next chapter of Growing Forward.