Or if you prefer, watch the video deep-dive.

If you’re 60 days in to your new role as a head of growth, this is the exact plan I’d follow for your third month.

This is the 3rd and final part of my series on your first 90 days as head of growth. (If you missed them, part 1 covers your first 30 days and part 2 covers your second month.)

It’s based on the exact 90 day plan I created when I first joined Postscript.

Since then, I’ve revised it based on what I’ve learned after coaching 100+ other growth leaders over the past 5 years.

By now, you’ve drafted the 2 most important artifacts you’re going to need to get started - your strategy document and your operations manual. You’ve lined up some resources and you’ve been shipping for the past few weeks as well. Some stuff is working, a bunch of it isn’t. And your 90-day check-in is coming up quick.

So below, I’ll walk you through the last 3 steps.

Step 1: Get into a rhythm your team can run without you

It takes a few months before you really find your groove at a new company, but 60 days at a startup is a long time. So this third month is all about getting better at executing and learning how much impact you can actually make inside of your role.

The way you do that is by turning all that stuff you planned in month 2 into a repeatable way of working. There are a few things to focus on.

Put 3 types of meetings on the calendar

Start by setting up your meeting structure. In my experience, a growth team needs 3 different types of meetings to run well:

• Some for planning

• Some for learning and analysis

• Some for alignment and decision-making

You’ll also have different managerial meetings, managing up as well as managing down. We’re going to put those aside for the purpose of this post.

The more explicit you can be about what each meeting is for, the faster the team’s going to be able to operate and execute, and the more you’re going to be able to pull yourself out of the weeds and out of the execution layer.

Write down your experimentation process so people can go fast without you

The second is your experimentation process. Growth teams tend to run a lot of tests, and you want everyone on your team running tests in the exact same way.

• A simple experimentation doc template

• A way to prioritize ideas (something like an ICE or RICE framework)

• One place where you can log every test result over time, win, lose, or draw. That log is going to help the team get better at getting better over time. It’s going to improve your hit rate.

You can use AI to help with a lot of this.

But I would write down exactly what a good experimentation process looks like, soup to nuts, so that people can go fast without you needing to be involved.

Share what you’re learning on a regular cadence

The third is sharing what we’re learning. The leaders I get to support who build the most trust and credibility also have the most transparency. So we want to get into the habit of sharing short updates on a regular cadence:

• what we did

• what we learned

• what we’re doing next

Sharing is important for a couple reasons.

One, it lets folks understand what’s working so that ideally they can squeeze some of the juice out of that win as well. And it also lets folks know what isn’t working, which stops them from making the same mistakes in their own area of the org.

Sometimes I joke and say the head of growth is like a chief enablement role. We want to enable other teams with what we’re learning along the way.

Move into a reviewer role before you become the bottleneck

The trap here is staying as the person who does all the work. And it’s tempting in your third month, because you finally know enough to move fast on your own.

But if every test, every program, every campaign or experiment runs through you, you also become the bottleneck for all that work. The goal of this rhythm is to let your team run the process while you move into more of a reviewer role, so you can think about some longer-term goals and planning.

So if you haven’t done this already, set up that experimentation system. Once you’re running tests and logging your results, you’re going to learn a ton about your numbers.

Step 2: Refine your growth model and dashboards with real data

That model we built in our first month was a first draft. We knew it had some gaps, but it was based on what we knew back then. Now we’ve been shipping for a few weeks and we’ve got some real data flowing.

So now it makes sense to refine our dashboards, because the numbers we track, the data we prioritize, and the dashboards we share with our peers and executives determine how people judge our work.

There are 3 important things to look at.

Close the data gaps tied to your strategy first

The first is closing the data gaps. Of course, you are never going to have enough data.

I have never met a head of growth who felt like they had all the data they needed.

But this is where we want to figure out the most critical data gaps and see if we can prioritize fixing those, especially the ones related to our strategy and our roadmap. Those have to be priority number 1.

Pressure test your activation metric

The second thing we want to do is pressure test our activation metric.

I’ve seen this go wrong a ton. Somebody really senior defines activation off the cuff. They’ll say something like, “Oh, activation is probably when a user invites a teammate.” And because they’re tenured, it becomes the gospel.

No one ever fact-checks it against what actually leads to retention and conversion.

Now’s the time to check it.

If you’re at an early stage company, you can reach out to folks who recently converted and ask them when was the first time they felt like they really got value out of the product. If you’re later stage, take a peek at what some of your active users did in their first few days and compare that to the ones who aren’t active and churned out.

What you’re looking for is one tight sentence:

Users who take this action within their first X days retain at Y% and convert at Z%.

In my experience, a good activation metric shows about a 5 to 7x difference in conversion to paid down the road. So it’s an input metric to that outcome.

Build a KPI scorecard with owners and alerts

The third thing to look at is our KPI scorecard. We want to do a few things here:

1. List out the handful of metrics we’re going to prioritize tracking.

2. Define who owns each one of those metrics.

3. See if we can set up alerts if and when one of those metrics starts to dip outside of the standard deviation.

That way, the right people find out early, and you’re also not the only one watching every single number in the dashboard.

Make sure the KPI you were handed actually predicts revenue

The goal is to stop optimizing for a metric you inherited without checking whether it actually leads to revenue.

Sometimes your CEO (or the board, or another exec) hands you a KPI. When you’re new, it’s usually an acquisition goal.

If you chase that number on its own, your team is going to get really good at generating signups. But some of them might be cheap, low-quality signups who never use the product or convert to paid. A few months later, you’re the one answering tough questions about why signups keep climbing and revenue doesn’t.

That’s what your activation metric is for.

It’s the input number that tells you whether those signups will turn into revenue. If you haven’t defined yours yet, take a first pass this week, even if the numbers are rough. If you have one, pressure test it. We’ll need it for step 3.

Step 3: Update your strategy before day 90

The first version of your strategy was your best guess about where you should focus your time, your energy, your attention, and your resources.

Now we’ve got a couple months under our belt. It’s time to revise our roadmap and refocus.

Check what’s working against your OKRs and the threats you outlined

The first step is to review what is actually working and what isn’t.

Go back to that V1 growth strategy and look at your OKRs. Are we on track? If we are, great. Let’s keep going.

If we’re behind, take a peek at the threats we outlined from the beginning.

If one of those threats or risks has actually showed up - that’s our cue to re-sequence and revisit our roadmap or our priorities, so we can keep making progress even if we hit a roadblock along the way.

Bring your updated numbers to your execs

The second is to bring our updated numbers, metrics, and models to our execs. If you nailed that activation metric in the last step, it’s a pretty big deal.

We may want to use it as a North Star to revisit our strategy and retool our team a little bit.

Because as a growth leader, whether we were assigned goals or not, if you’re a few months in and you present to your executives that you found a higher-impact metric that predicts future retention and conversion, and you want to revisit your goals to grow that number instead of this other thing, that’s how you build a ton of trust and credibility.

Walk into your 90-day check-in with an updated plan

The third thing is your 90-day check-in.

In your first few weeks, you sat down with your manager and agreed on what success would look like at day 90. Now you close the loop on that conversation.

Walk in with an updated strategy. IE what you’ve shipped, what you’ve learned, and where you plan to focus next. Bring your activation metric too, even if it’s still rough. It shows your manager which numbers you think actually lead to revenue.

Be transparent about your thinking, so the conversation shifts to what comes next: the next 90 days, the next 9 months, or whatever horizon fits your company.

Changing your plan is a sign you’re doing the job well

Don’t feel like you have to defend your original plan just because your manager already bought into it.

If what you’ve learned says the plan should change, this is the meeting to change it

A lot of new leaders feel like changing their plan means admitting they were wrong, or that they didn’t have the right information. What I’ve found is that updating your plan based on what you’ve learned is a sign that you’re doing the job well.

Your manager and your peers would much rather see you adjust early and often than watch you dig your heels in on something that’s clearly not working.

The plan I’d follow in month 3

That’s the plan I’d follow for your third month as a new head of growth:

1. Get into a great rhythm.

2. Refine your growth model and your growth dashboards.

3. Update your strategy before day 90.

This is part 3 of the 90 day series.

If you missed them, part 1 covers your first 30 days where you learned about the business and built a ton of trust and credibility. Part 2 covers your second month when you built your strategy and your operations manual, and you lined up the resources you needed to be successful. And in your third month, you turned all that information into momentum.

At day 60, some stuff was working and a bunch of it wasn’t. At day 90, you know which is which, and you’ve got the numbers to show your manager.

The full plan is in the free workbook. Grab the full 90-day plan here.

Want some help? If you’re in your first few months as a head of growth and you want help working through this plan, setting up your growth strategy, setting up your growth team, or scaling yourself and the skills you need to be successful in your job, that’s exactly what I do as a coach. Check out my coaching page and reach out if seems like we’re a match.

Or if you prefer, watch the video deep-dive.

If you just wrapped up your first 30 days as head of growth, this is the exact plan I’d follow for your next 30 days.

This is part 2 of my 3-part series on your first 90 days as a head of growth. (If you missed it, part 1 covers your first 30 days.) It’s based on a plan that I made when I joined Postscript, and I’ve revised it based on what I’ve learned after personally coaching 100+ other directors, VPs, and heads of growth since then.

By now, you’re 30 days in.

You spent about a month learning about the business, meeting your cross-functional stakeholders, and figuring out where those biggest growth levers might be hiding. But you’re learning that everyone has a different idea about what growth should be working on.

And if you’re not careful, you’ll spend your second month (and probably every month after that) working on everyone else’s priorities instead of your own.

Step 1: Create your growth strategy and your growth operations manual

You’re a third of the way through your 90-day plan, and that plan is all about ramping up. But by now, you’ve learned a ton of stuff about the business, about the funnel, about the people. Now it’s time to turn your attention to the bigger question.

How are you going to grow this business?

An academic answer, based on content you’ve consumed or talks you’ve listened to or social posts that seemed relevant and interesting, only gets you so far.

You need to know how to grow it at this company, at this stage of growth, in this moment that this company’s navigating. With this team, with these cross-functional stakeholders, with this existing process, and with these resources that you need to figure out how to work with.

These 2 artifacts are how you answer that. And they’re going to help you make the jump from someone who’s right to somebody who’s really effective.

Your growth strategy - what you’re doing, why, and what it looks like when you get there

The first artifact is your growth strategy. At the highest level, it outlines what you’re going to do, why you’re doing that, and what it looks like when you get there.

And having this matters, because without something written down, without an artifact, it’s really hard to prioritize.

You can’t protect your priorities if they only live in your head.

Sometimes I hear from folks who work at super early-stage companies, and they’ll say, “We don’t really need to do this at my company. I work at an early-stage company. Nobody else has like a formal strategy documented. Things are more fluid here.”

I get that. But the truth is, you do need this. And if you’re at an early-stage company, maybe even more so than anybody else.

At other stages, scaleups and enterprise companies ask you for your strategy. But when you’re working at a startup, typically you’re the one presenting it to others.

And the reason this is so important for you is because these are the folks that tend to have a million ideas and changing priorities tossed their way on a weekly, if not daily, basis. This is one of the tools that’s going to help you navigate that challenge.

There are 6 things I’d include in my growth strategy:

1. Mission and vision. Mission = what you’re focused on and why. Vision = what it looks like if you’re successful. You can describe that for “non-native” speakers, ie folks that don’t work on growth problems every day.

2. The actual plan. It’s kind of the meat and potatoes of your strategy. I like to use the GST framework for this. Starting at the highest level, what is your goal? That’s the G. The S are the levers or the strategies you’re going to pull to achieve your goal. These might be different areas of the growth model, written quantitatively in terms of outcomes, like “improve activation from X to Y” or “increase acquisition from Y to Z.” And the T are the tactics that ladder up to each one of those strategies or levers, which ladder up to your goal. G, S, T - 3 layers of the cake.

   

3. How you’re going to measure success. These are going to be your OKRs.

4. A visual roadmap. It shows what you’re going to sequence first and what you’re going to do later, ideally with a mix of quick wins and some bigger, longer-term bets mixed in there as well.

5. The resources you’re going to need to be successful. These could be people, tools, or budget. You know you’re going to need some help executing on your roadmap in service of your goals.

6. The threats. You want to outline the risks or the roadblocks that might derail the plan, so they don’t catch anyone (especially you) off guard down the road.

I like to write all this stuff in plain English. No acronyms or jargon, because most of the people consuming this information don’t live and breathe the growth world every day like we do.

Your growth operations manual - how growth gets the work done

The strategy outlines what you’re working on and why. The operations manual outlines how you’re going to go about the work. IE, how you collaborate with other teams, how you track your process, how you run experiments, how you approach important decisions, all that kind of stuff.

And this is incredibly important, because working in growth is fundamentally different from traditional marketing, product, or data teams.

The lines of ownership are different. The way we approach our work is different. The testing, the experimentation, the iteration. Most teams don’t approach solving problems that way.

So if you don’t spell this out proactively, other teams won’t know what to expect from you, and you’re probably going to bump into a bunch of cultural roadblocks down the road.

For a new head of growth, I’d start with 6 sections in your growth operations manual.

What your team looks like. Ie, the org chart. I like to create 2 of these. One outlining what the team looks like today. The other is what the org chart looks like if you fast forward 1-2 years down the road, so everybody knows what to expect.

A KPI scorecard. Both a list of metrics you’re going to be tracking in service of your goals, and who owns each one of those metrics.

Your operating principles. Sometimes I use the word values synonymously here. Basically, how you want your team to make decisions when you’re not in the room. Some examples that have been in my operations manual in the past: being focused on learning and enabling other areas of the org, putting users’ opinions in front of our own opinions, and having a bias toward simple solutions that scale, etc. This can help you create cultural change based on where your company’s baseline is today, so tweak those accordingly.

Your cross-functional rules of engagement. I mentioned that working on a growth team is fundamentally different from other teams: different in approach, and way more cross-functional. That’s a pro and a con, because if you don’t define how to work with other teams, you might end up bumping heads for way too long and not being as productive as you could be.

One of the tools I find really helpful here is a RACI matrix, which is a cross-functional project management framework. R is who’s responsible, A is who’s accountable, C is who’s consulted, and I is who’s informed.

I like to outline both the KPIs and the surface area, then make sure it’s crystal clear by filling out each RACI letter for each one.

For example, you might be ultimately accountable and responsible for your activation rate. But onboarding emails might be owned by a lifecycle marketer.

And on the flip side, for your pricing and packaging page, your designer might be heavily consulted in that work, but there are going to be a bunch of other teams that need to be informed as you make changes.

Defining this stuff up front allows you to go faster later. That’s why it’s in your operations manual.

Your meeting structure. Typically, growth has a few different types of meetings. You’ll have planning meetings, learning meetings, and alignment meetings.

Your important SOPs (standard operating processes). The big one in growth is defining specifically how you brainstorm, how you prioritize, and how you run experiments. If you define that stuff up front, and you have documents and templates that help you do it, everybody knows what to expect from you. And anybody new who joins your team knows exactly how to plug into your operating processes and your systems.

Ideally, these 2 documents link to each other.

You’re going to keep updating them as you learn. This is your second month as head of growth, so you’re just drafting your first version of these. (I also have a whole video breaking down each one at length, if you want a deep dive into the 2 most important artifacts for a growth leader.)

Share both drafts before they’re polished

Once you’re done drafting these documents, you want to share them. A huge part of your success or your failure is your ability to manage up, and these 2 artifacts help.

Start with your manager. Walk them through your drafts and ask them a couple of questions:

• Based on what I’ve got here, how might you change the way that I’ve prioritized and thought about these challenges, especially with our strategy?

• If we could fast forward into the future and I was not successful for some reason, what would be the most likely reason or reasons why?

Based on the feedback and the answers you get, you might want to make some changes.

Once you’ve shared them with your manager, share them with the peers you met during your first 30 days. A lot of them gave you amazing ideas on how to grow the business, and this is a nice chance to show them that you listened.

Sharing this stuff early, while it’s still in draft, allows you to get more input while there’s still time to act on the feedback. And if you’re headed in the wrong direction, you’ve got plenty of time to redirect your energy and your approach.

The trap here is trying to make these 2 artifacts perfect before you share them with other folks.

And I get where this comes from. Especially when you’re hired to be the expert. You’re the head of growth. You’re the head of the capability. You want to show people what an expert you are by thinking through all the nuances and then presenting it as a finished body of work.

But I’ve worked with so many people who have made this unfortunate mistake.

If you wait until they’re polished, you lose the most valuable part, which is getting input early enough to change course.

So if you haven’t done this already, prioritize those 2 artifacts. Start with the strategy. Put together everything you learned in your first month (your growth model, your customer research, all those ideas that you had as you got to know folks) and fill in those 6 sections. Then do the same thing with your operations manual.

Once your stakeholders have had a chance to review all this stuff, and you’re aligned on what you’re focused on, why, and how you’re going to approach the work, the next question is, “what resources do we need to pull it all off?”

Step 2: Line up the people, tools, and budget before you need them

After the first step, you know what to focus on, and you’ve got confidence it lines up with what the company had in mind for you, your role, and your success.

Now you need to figure out what it’s going to take to actually execute on this.

The earlier you have clarity about what resources are available, the better. Approvals take time. Budget requests take time to review. Design and engineering usually take a little bit of time to get things into their scope and their roadmap, and that stuff tends to happen weeks and weeks in advance.

So you want to get to this early.

The 4 resources I’d look at

1. Cross-functional help. In growth, that’s typically going to be design and engineering.

With all the AI tools available today, your growth team needs less design and engineering help than it ever has historically.

But you still need help deploying things to production, making backend changes, and taking any of the big swings you’ll want to make.

You can certainly ship some small stuff on your own. Like UX changes, copy, design tweaks, and front-end stuff. But if you’re taking big swings (which hopefully you and your team will be doing sooner rather than later), you’re going to need help from those teams.

Which means either you need resources solely dedicated to supporting your growth efforts, where you get to own their roadmap and their prioritization.

Or you need dedicated access to other teams’ resources and their roadmaps, which means getting your ideas on their radar, on their backlog, and on their roadmap early.

This is where everything you learned in your first month about how the company gets its work done today is going to pay off. Get your asks into their sprint planning, and slide them seamlessly into the way they already work.

2. Tooling and tech stack. Reporting, A/B testing, user testing, whatever else your growth programs need. Take a peek at what already exists in the stack before you ask for anything new. But your growth model probably showed you where some of the gaps are already.

3. Budget. It’s going to help you execute on or acquire any of the things I already talked about. That might mean contractors, freelancers, additional hires, maybe an agency, and these days probably some agents as well.

4. Customer insights. If you don’t already have a crystal clear picture of the problems and opportunities, this is the time to get some more research going. That could be user testing, research or survey tools, or even some deep research on your back-end customer data.

Tie every resource ask back to your plan

The trap here is asking for resources without tying them back to your plan. And unfortunately, I see this way too often in my coaching practice.

Folks will walk into a resource conversation and they’ll say, “Hey, we really need this A/B testing tool. We need a designer. I need a marketing ops person. I have all these things that I need to do things the right way.”

That might be technically correct. But it’s a really tough way to get a yes when you’re asking for more.

Instead, walk in and say:

“Hey, here’s my goal. Here’s the plan I’ve got to achieve my goal. Here are the milestones I’m going to be looking at along the way. And here are the resources it’s going to require to execute on this plan and achieve my goal.”

It’s going to be way easier to get a yes.

Once you’ve got your strategy, you’ve outlined how you’re going to approach the work, and you’ve acquired your resources, it’s time to start shipping.

Step 3: Start shipping, and protect your roadmap while you do it

It’s going to take a few months before you get into a good rhythm at a new company. Expect it to feel a little clunky at first. That’s totally normal.

And this is usually when all those ideas really start rolling in. Working in growth, people are going to send you a ton of ideas every day, every week.

Some of them are going to be good ideas. Some are going to be great ideas. And a whole bunch of them are going to be cool ideas that are probably distractions.

If you’re a people pleaser like me and you say yes to everything because it feels good, you’re going to end up spread too thin. And the roadmap you just shared with everybody (the one you just got everybody aligned on) is never going to get done.

Give every idea a home in your backlog

You do need a system so that everybody sharing ideas with you can feel heard. That’s an important part of being a leader.

Which means you need a place to address and store all of these ideas, even the ones you’re going to say “not right now” to.

So start a backlog. A running list of all the non-essential projects people send your way. Every idea gets cataloged and written down, so nothing gets lost. Then re-evaluate that backlog every couple of months.

When those requests start coming in (sales asks you for something, marketing suggests something different, the product team has another idea), you can point at your strategy and say:

“Look, this is our growth strategy. This outlines what we’re focused on and why. I personally love this idea. I’m going to add it to our backlog, and I’ll follow up in a few weeks when we re-evaluate whether we add it to our next sprint cycle or not.”

That’s a great way to balance staying focused on what you need to achieve your growth goals, while also making sure nothing gets lost and everybody feels heard along the way.

Saying yes to everything and saying no to everything both cost you

There are 2 traps here. I already talked about one - saying yes to everything and giving away your roadmap, which would be a waste.

The other trap is saying no to everything without explaining why.

Amazing, smart, talented folks are going to share their best ideas with you. Then those ideas go into a black box. You never follow up, they never get executed, and those people are stuck wondering why they even bothered to share the idea in the first place. You lose a lot of the goodwill you were able to build in your first month.

The backlog is your tool here. It lets you say, “Hey, I’m not doing this right now.”

The plan I’d follow in month 2

That’s the plan I’d follow in your second month as head of growth:

1. Create your growth strategy and your growth operations manual.

2. Share them for input, ideally while they’re still drafts, before they’re finished.

3. Prep your operating system.

4. Start shipping while you protect your roadmap with that backlog.

Again, the full plan is in the free workbook. Grab the full 90-day plan here.

This is part 2 of 3. If you missed it, part 1 covers your first 30 days. Next up, I’m covering days 60 through 90. Subscribe so you don’t miss it.

Want some help? If you’re in your first few months as a head of growth and you want some help hitting your growth goals, running your growth team, or accelerating your career as a leader of a growth team, those are some of the things I can help with as a coach. Set up a consult and see if we jive.

Or if you prefer, watch the video deep-dive.

If you just got hired as head of growth, this is the exact 4-step plan that I’d follow for your first 30 days.

Because starting a new growth leadership role is tricky.

You obviously want to make an impact right away. But you definitely don’t want to come in too hot, start changing too many things too soon, and piss everybody off before you even understand how the company works. This is the exact problem I was trying to solve when I joined Postscript as their head of growth.

I couldn’t find a good playbook that was built specifically for people in my job, leading cross-functional growth teams.

So, I made my own.

Since then, I’ve shared this exact plan with more than 100 other growth leaders (directors, VPs, and heads of growth) who I’ve been fortunate enough to coach.

Below, I’ll walk you through all 4 steps, including how you can get your first meaningful wins without stepping on anyone’s toes in the process.

Step 1: Slow down and learn where the leverage is

Step number one is putting aside the urge to jump straight into quick wins, and instead slowing down so that we can learn where the leverage is.

When you start a new growth role, your brain is going to be buzzing with a million different ideas. Growth model ideas, acquisition playbooks, onboarding experiments, pricing and packaging ideas.

You’re going to want to hit the ground running.

That itch is totally normal. That’s why you took the job. That’s why they hired you. That’s why you’re the right person for this gig.

But in my experience, one of the biggest mistakes new growth leaders make is pushing projects too fast, too soon, before they really understand the business fundamentals well enough to prioritize. So they end up going really fast, working on the wrong stuff.

And this is a shame, because your first 30 days the bar for making and producing stuff is the lowest it will ever be.

There’s no pressure to be shipping. There are no OKRs you’re behind on. This is the moment where you get to soak in as much as you possibly can.

There are 3 things I’d prioritize learning:

1. The business/ company fundamentals

2. The growth model and funnel (the quantitative side of the business)

3. The operating system

Let’s double click on each one.

Learn why people buy, why they don’t, and why they churn

The first is the business itself, because the more we understand about this business, the better we’re going to be at acquiring, activating, converting, and retaining users and customers down the road. It’s also how you start finding quick wins and building trust with your new peers.

You’re going to want to understand the company vision, who the competitors are, a little bit about the ICP or target customer (who they are and what they love about the product), and also some of the conversion barriers.

These are especially important for those of us who work in growth.

Why do people buy?
What stops them from buying?
And why do they churn out down the road?

The best place to start picking this stuff up is your onboarding meetings.

If you’re joining an existing company with existing process, they’ve probably already scheduled some stuff for you, which is great. Show up to those with specific questions. If they didn’t, or if you’re at a really early-stage company, this is your prompt to proactively put some time on people’s calendars yourself.

Take a ton of notes when you have these conversations (or use a notetaker if your virtual) so you can turn them into a context file later that you can use in your LLMs.

I’d also recommend using the product as much as humanly possible during your first few weeks.

Go on the website, navigate around, click the CTAs. Go through the sign-up and setup process. Go through the onboarding flow a couple times. Pull out your credit card and actually go through the process of converting from a free plan into a paid customer.

And as you’re doing all that stuff, take notes and ask yourself:

Is it clear what someone should do next here?
Where do I think users might get stuck?

You have a very small window when you come into a company where you’re not too close to the problems to see where the friction points and opportunities are. That’s your first 30 days. So you want to really use that time and attention well.

At a lot of companies, they’re not going to know the answers to these questions. If that’s true, now’s the time to get surveys live.

On the website, if you want to understand website conversion barriers, I love implementing survey questions like, “What would stop you from creating a free account or a free trial today?”

Or in the product, asking folks, “What would stop you from taking the next step?” That could be converting from a free plan into a paid subscriber, or from a free trial into a paid plan.

Use AI for the synthesis and meetings for the trust

Research like this is way easier than it used to be. In the past, we had to listen in on customer calls, parse through survey data, and ask a bunch of folks who had internal domain expertise.

But now, we can pull up our last 20 sales calls and support call recordings.

We can export our G2 reviews. We can take our competitor reviews and compare those against our own, compare the 5-star reviews against the 1-star reviews, feed all of that stuff into our LLM, and ask it why.

Why do customers buy? What objections seem like they’re out there that might kill our deals? And how do customers describe the product in their own words?

You can compress what used to take weeks of research, compiling information, and distilling it into action items into a few hours.

So use your AI for the synthesis. Use your meetings to build trust internally and ask the right questions. You’re going to need both of those down the road.

Learn the funnel in intense detail

The next thing we want to learn is the funnel, and really do a deep dive into it. If we’re leading growth at an organization, we need to understand in detail how this business grows and what stops it from growing.

So we’re going to need both the raw numbers and the conversion rates at every stage of the growth model or customer journey.

If you did a good job interviewing and you’re a pretty senior candidate, you probably already know a lot of this from the interview process. (At least I would hope you knew a lot of this.) But if not, we’re still going to want to go deeper.

As a growth leader, you eventually probably want to know all these numbers by heart.

You want to understand the different cohorts that are valuable, where the opportunities are, the different segments, and how those convert better. The more you understand about this stuff, the more value you can provide later.

You don’t need to have this stuff memorized on day 1.

But the sooner you understand the nuances of the business and how it performs, the better you’re going to get at prioritizing your time and attention, which is the most important part of the job.

To do this, start by getting access to any existing dashboards, reports, or business intelligence tool. There’s probably something that’s already there. Then use that to build the growth model as you see it.

If you haven’t built one before, you basically want to map out the major levers that drive growth for the business. Things like visitors, signups, trials, activated accounts, purchases, upgrades, and then downgrades. And then the conversion rates. Not just the raw numbers and how those fluctuate (hopefully growing over time), but also the conversion rates between them.

With an LLM, you can draft a version of this model or report in about an hour or two.

Export whatever funnel data exists, have the AI help you structure it into a model, and then use it to flag what’s missing. Every company is missing some data. You need to figure out where the gaps are at this company and what you need.

Learn how work actually gets done here

The third thing we want to really understand is this company’s operating system. It’s basically a fancy way of saying, how does work get done at this company, in this moment?

Are there sprint cycles? Are there key meetings and stakeholders between having an idea and shipping it? How do we request work when we need to collaborate with other teams? If there’s a project management tool, what’s the tool? How do they use it? What does the project management tech stack look like?

Understanding this stuff early is how you avoid stepping on toes down the road. It’s going to come back in a big way in step 4.

You’ll probably pick up a lot of this in your onboarding meetings. Whatever isn’t covered there, follow up with your key stakeholders and talk to your new teammates about the cultural norms and the little nuances of how things really work at this company.

Learning about the business is important, but we also need to learn about the people. Which brings us to step 2.

Step 2: Build trust with your team, your peers, and your manager

Growth is incredibly cross-functional. Almost everything we ship on a growth team is going to overlap, touch, or come into contact with another team.

That means a lot of our success or failure depends on how well we’re able to collaborate with people who don’t necessarily report to us.

If you’re at a small startup, you’re going to meet with everyone. You’re going to end up working with everyone down the road. But if you’re at a bigger company, start with the folks you’ll collaborate with most closely, then work your way out from there.

Your team: you’re starting at zero trust

That first group is your immediate, direct team.

If you’re inheriting a team, you’re basically starting at zero trust. They don’t trust you. You don’t necessarily trust them. And these first conversations are where you can start building it.

So we want to meet one-on-one with every direct report within our first week or two. First, obviously, get to know them as people. Then get their answers to some specific questions:

• What are they working on, and why?

• How do they think about success in their role?

• What would they fix if they ran the team?

• Where do they want to grow in their careers down the road?

All that stuff is going to be incredibly helpful to you, especially what they’re working on and why.

A lot of times folks are working on stuff you might not necessarily agree with, just because someone before you said those were the things to focus on (even though you might be revisiting that).

So understanding the what and the why is a good place to start.

Your peers: keep it light, and ask about the landmines

The second group, as we build our way out, is your peer group.

If you’re a director, VP, or head of growth, you’re in a leadership role, and your peers are the other leaders in the organization. Product, sales (if you have a sales team), customer success, engineering, design, finance, data. These are the folks we’re going to need to collaborate with on almost every project down the line.

And a lot of them have probably never worked with a growth leader before.

So we want to make sure they understand where our role fits in before we ever need to collaborate with them.

With peers, I like setting up 30-minute, coffee-style chats.

They can be in person or over Zoom, but ideally not in a conference room. With our peers especially, we want to keep the energy light.

Start by getting to know them as people. Who they are, what their life looks like outside of work, the important people and pets in their world. Then really get into the role. How you’ll collaborate together, how they like to communicate, what decisions they’d like to be consulted on.

Then I’d really encourage you to ask 4 specific questions:

1. Have you ever worked with a growth leader/ team before?

2. What questions do you have for me about my role and about how I think about success?

3. What are the biggest growth opportunities you see from your perspective? (These could go on your quick wins list.)

4. What landmines should I avoid in my first couple months?

That last one is your get-out-of-jail-free card, so you don’t step on any landmines without knowing about it in those first few weeks and months.

Your manager, agree on the metrics you’ll high-five over

The third group is your manager group.

At some companies, maybe you’ll report to a CEO or COO. At other companies, you probably have a boss, but you also report to the board or the executive group. Getting aligned with these folks early is going to keep you from getting surprised down the line.

So we want to agree upfront on how you’ll work together. Things like how often you want to meet, what type of updates they’d like to receive, how they’d like to hear bad news, and what decisions they want to be involved in.

Before the end of your first week or two, make sure you’re absolutely aligned on what success looks like down the road for someone in your role.

Here’s how I like to ask this:

“If we could fast forward a year down the line and we were incredibly successful, what are the 1 or 2 outcomes that we’re high-fiving over and celebrating together?”

If you’re in a leadership role, you should probably suggest the answer, but we want to make sure they’re in agreement. If you’re a new leader, you might feel more comfortable asking that question versus directing what you think the answer is.

Either way, have that conversation. If you’re not on the same page, you’d much rather talk about it during your first few weeks than 6 months down the road, when you’ve already been heads down in the wrong direction.

Step 3: Define your role before someone else does it for you

Growth is historically undefined as a capability.

And a lot of times, especially at a startup, you’re the first growth hire, which means the company is hiring you as the expert. So the scope, the ownership, the accountability, and the responsibilities usually aren’t going to be spelled out for you in advance.

A huge part of your job is teaching people what growth is at this company.

It’s an awesome opportunity, right? It’s why we love working in growth, because we get to own the direction. But it can also be intimidating, and it can be a blocker if we don’t do this upfront.

If we don’t define what great looks like for growth and for your role specifically, eventually somebody else will do it for you.

That means you’re going to be at the whim of whatever ideas that person has or throws your way. And you can get overloaded quickly with other people’s priorities, because we can’t protect our own when we don’t know what they are and we haven’t articulated them for other folks.

When I work with growth leaders who are 6-9 months into a gig and it’s not going well, misaligned expectations are one of the main reasons they hit speed bumps down the road, and why these roles turn over so fast.

Show up with your own plan, even if they gave you one

So we want to start by writing down our own goals and milestones that we can present to other folks. This is exactly what I did at Postscript.

When I showed up, it was my second time being a head of growth, and I knew they had never been in my role before.

On my first day, the CEO said, “Hey Andrew, here’s your 90-day plan.” But I also showed up with my own 90-day plan. So I said, “Great I also made my own, here’s how I’m thinking about my goals and my milestones, let’s compare notes.”

That’s really helpful, because when you share that, you can get people aligned. And only after we’re aligned and on the same page do we want to think about executing.

So start by writing this down. Do this for your 30-day plan. It doesn’t need to be anything fancy or crazy, but artifacts are an important tool of influence. Write down:

• Here’s what I’m going to be focused on, and here’s why.

• Here’s what success is going to look like for me in my role at 30, 60, and 90 days. (You could pick a longer time horizon eventually. You’re probably not ready to do that in your first few weeks, but you will be.)

• Here are a few qualitative milestones for my first few months.

• Here are the resources I think I’m going to need to be successful.

Write it for non-native speakers

It’s important to remember who we’re presenting all this to. I call them non-native speakers.

If you report to a manager, a board, or an executive team that hasn’t done your job before, the job is to make sure they can understand it in plain English.

Skip the fancy acronyms and jargon.

Then walk folks through it, especially your manager, plus the executive team or board if you report to them. Walk them through your 30-60-90 day plan. Ask for feedback. Talk through your vision for the role. What does growth look like at this company? Make sure your perspective on that stuff matches what they had in mind when they hired you.

Do the same thing with your other key cross-functional stakeholders. In my experience, if you don’t do something like this, eventually someone’s going to ask you to do it anyways.

So you might as well take the initiative and do it proactively. That starts building trust from the moment you show up.

Step 4: Get your first wins without stepping on anybody’s toes

By now you’ve been in learning mode and listening mode. That itch and pressure to ship something is getting heavy. And we need momentum.

Getting wins on the board helps us build that momentum. It also helps us build trust, and it feels good.

But how you get that first win also tells the entire company what to expect from you down the road and how you’re going to operate. So it’s worth being really thoughtful about it.

Start with the backlog you already built

My 2 cents would be to start with your backlog. You already have 2 great sources of ideas.

The first is the growth modeling work you did in step 1.

You did both quantitative analysis and qualitative walkthroughs, taking notes to yourself. Where are things confusing? Where are things stuck? That’s an amazing source of quick wins.

The second is from step 2, when you asked, what ideas do you have to grow the business? What would you do if you were in my shoes for the first few months? What things have always been on your backlog that you’ve never had a chance to execute, but you wish somebody could?

The answers to those are going to help you build an amazing backlog.

Then filter those for projects that will have an immediate impact and that you can execute with the resources you already have.

In my personal experience as a 2-time head of growth, and supporting a bunch of other growth leaders, quick wins usually come from removing friction.

Find the spots in the customer journey where users are getting stuck.

Those tend to be fast to fix, and they move conversion rates pretty quickly. And if something urgent pops up outside of that, where your expertise and experience can help, go ahead and jump in.

Ship it through the system that already exists

Eventually you’re going to build your own operating system, what I call a growth operating system.

I like to make a growth operations manual that describes, in incredible detail, how growth works, how you prioritize, how you make decisions, and how you collaborate with everybody else at the company. That’s part of the job of being a head of growth.

But in the short term, we want to slide into how the company already operates.

Use their existing sprint cycles if they do them, their existing project management tools, their existing meeting and decision-making structure.

Our quick wins are going to happen way faster when they fit into the way people are already working.

Give away all the credit

If one of those quick wins came from an idea somebody else shared with you (someone from your team, your peer group, your manager group, the executive group, whoever), loop them back in.

After you ship it, let them know: “Hey, I just did this thing. It was an amazing idea. Here’s how I went about solving it, and here’s what happened afterwards.”

Ship it through you or your team, but make sure they get all the credit.

That’s an important job of a leader. If it came from the team, give the person some public kudos: “Hey, I just did [this thing]. But the awesome idea came from [this person]. Shout out to them.” That kind of stuff.

The main thing we want to avoid here is falling in love with quick wins, and never taking the time to really slow down and figure out our long-term strategy.

During our first 30 days, quick wins are great.

But we also want to make sure we’re using all the information we collected in the first step or two of this process. We want to be working toward a more comprehensive, strategic, long-term view of where the leverage is.

So do these quick wins, but make sure you communicate to everybody proactively: “Hey, I’m going to take 20% of my time for quick wins, but really I’m going to take 80% of my time and develop that long-term vision in parallel.”

Because I work with some folks who just go from quick win to quick win to quick win, combine some of the quick wins, and call that a strategy. That’s not a strategy. And I promise it’s not going to help you make the impact your manager is excited for you to make at this company.

The plan I’d follow (and did)

That’s the plan I’d follow, and that I did follow, for my first 30 days as a head of growth:

1. Learn about the business, the model, and how work gets done at this company.

2. Build trust with your team, your peers, and your manager stakeholder group.

3. Define ownership, accountability, and success before somebody else at your company defines it for you.

4. Get your first wins without stepping on anybody’s toes.

When I started at Postscript, it was my second job leading growth, and I couldn’t find a plan like this. So I built my own.

Now, you can borrow it. Grab the full 90-day plan here.

This is part 1 of 3. Next up, I’m breaking down days 30 through 60, then 60 through 90. Subscribe so you don’t miss them.

Want support leveling up? If you’re about to start a new growth role, or you just did, I spend all day every day working with directors, VPs, and heads of growth to help with their growth strategy, running their growth team, and leveling up their personal skill set so the company never outgrows them. Learn about coaching.

So I’m going to walk you through the 6 steps - and the tools that helped at each one.

Each step has a tool behind it, and the tools feed each other. At the end, I’ll also share 2 changes I’d make if I rebuilt this stack today.

If you’re new here, my name is Andrew. I’ve worked in and around tech startups for the past 15 years. I’ve been head of growth twice for 2 different high-volume scaleups, and I’ve coached 100+ directors, VPs, and heads of growth since going out on my own in 2021.

These tools fit into my growth process but they’re certainly not the only tools.

None of these companies paid for my endorsement (though I do advise one of them, which I’ll disclose below).

Prefer to watch? Here’s the full video. Or keep scrolling to dig in.

1. Find the leverage

If I was hired to lead growth at your company, my very first step would be figuring out where the leverage is. Job number 1 as a head of growth is figuring out how we grow faster.

To start doing that, I need some type of analytics tool. Historically, I’ve used Mixpanel.

If you can’t see where users are dropping off, it’s impossible to prioritize. Every idea in the backlog or on the roadmap looks equally good.

Then later, after you’ve been executing a bunch of this work, your CEO or one of your executives asks, “Hey, what impact did [that thing you just shipped] have on the business?” And you can’t make the connection, you’re stuck talking about localized data like click-through rates or engagement instead of business impact.

We used Mixpanel at Wistia. It helps you build your own funnel reports and drill-down views based on what users do in your product, and it integrates with your A/B testing tools (I’ll get to my favorites in a second). That meant my team and I spent hours inside those funnel reports. We tracked all of our growth model data in there, all of our product engagement data, and all of our new user onboarding and activation data.

We could connect how the things we did on the website trickled into product behavior and eventually conversion down the road. That was super helpful, because we used it for a lot of our pricing tests.

In a product-led company, data is an incredibly important currency.

When you can connect a change you made to the impact on the actual business, whether that’s number of customers or revenue, leadership likes that. Your execs understand what you’re doing and why. And your prioritization and alignment, which is a big part of the success of this work, gets so much easier.

Our business intelligence team owned the Mixpanel account, but our growth team basically lived in it.

If you’re at a new startup today with the luxury of picking a tool off the shelf, there are a couple of other options to consider.

A bunch of folks in my coaching portfolio are building their own dashboards and doing all their analysis in Claude. They use something like Segment for event tracking and pipe the data wherever they need it for visualization and analysis. I think that’s a good starting point. I’m also intrigued by PostHog, which I’ll talk more about later.

But job number 1 as a head of growth is understanding how to grow the business faster, and we can’t do that without understanding where the leverage is.

2. Figure out why

Once we’ve found where the leverage is, let’s say there’s an area of our growth model that’s underperforming compared to benchmarks or what we think it could be doing.

The second step is to dig into why.

A dashboarding tool like Mixpanel shows you where your conversion rates might be low, but it doesn’t tell you why.

It doesn’t tell you see where the friction is. And when you’re working on something like new user onboarding or activation, you can’t guess. Guessing is time-intensive, labor-intensive, and expensive when you think about the cost of not fixing it.

I liked using FullStory session recordings, so we could watch exactly what users do or don’t do inside the product.

We built a whole ritual around it with my team, called FullStory Fridays.

We’d get the team in a room and watch 10 or 20 real user sessions of people navigating whatever area of the growth model we were focused on.

We’d walk out of those sessions with a laundry list of impactful changes: bugs we didn’t realize we needed to fix, UX changes, empty state designs, flows, and some very big tests we might want to bet on down the road.

During one of those sessions, we saw something pretty impactful.

We knew from the Mixpanel data that about half of the people who signed up for Wistia never uploaded a video. Without a video, you can’t really get much value from the product, and you’re probably not going to convert into a paying customer.

So we had a sample video people could borrow from us. It starred Lenny, the office dog, walking around being cute with an old VHS tape in his mouth. Sort of an nod to Wistia being a new way to do video.

What we didn’t see in the Mixpanel data was that basically every person who clicked play on that borrowed video watched the whole thing.

When we saw that in FullStory, we asked ourselves a question….

What if the video we showed them, instead of just being cute and brand-y, was educational? What if it showed them what to do inside the tool while they watched it?

So we tested it.

We made another version of the video that said, “Hey, this video lives on your media page. Go up here and look at that. Then go over here.” And in Fullstory, we watched people literally follow along on their screen as the video told them what to do.

It was pretty cool. Activation in that test cohort went up by about 30%, from something we never would have seen in Mixpanel.

There’s a lot of functionality in that tool, but growth lived in the session replays. It’s still a big part of my personal tech stack today.

If you just need replays, other tools can do this.

VWO, which I’ll talk about in a second, has it built in. So does PostHog. Hotjar has something similar. But if you’re trying to find the actual friction points (and what might help you break through them), having some way to watch users navigate the tool on their own is incredibly helpful.

3. De-risk the fix

Even once I understand the problem in more detail, before I ship something, especially a high-stakes test, I want to de-risk it. I want to double-click on the problem and see if I can pre-validate that my solution is likely to work.

That’s where user testing comes in.

Watching shows you what users do. Asking helps you understand why they take an action or don’t. There’s no better way to understand what’s stopping users from taking an action than asking them.

My teams used UserTesting.com for years.

You give them your website or your app, show it to strangers who match parameters you set, and give them a specific task: go through this set of actions and say out loud what you think you’re supposed to do.

We did this a ton for pricing and packaging, and also for our new user onboarding tests. We’d ask lots of open-ended questions.

On pricing and packaging:

• Would you purchase one of these plans? Why or why not?

• Which of these plans do you think would be best for you?

• If you didn’t move forward with one of these plans, what would be the most likely reason why?

On new user onboarding:

• What do you think you’re supposed to do here?

• What do you think the next step is?

• What would stop you from taking the next step? Or what almost stopped you?

• What do you think the main value of this tool is?

All of those are incredibly eye-opening questions that help you pre-validate the work you’re about to ship.

One of the coolest uses of user testing I had was during the pricing and packaging work.

We’d done a lot of modeling to figure out the most effective new pricing and packaging for Wistia. We were pretty confident the team landed on the right solution, but we didn’t know the right way to present it to users.

So our designer created a few versions of the same pricing page.

Same price, same feature lists in each plan. But different ways of presenting the options.

Version 1 said 10 videos were included for that $100. When we asked folks if they thought the plan was valuable, or which one would be the best fit, they all thought the same thing out loud: “Wow, 10 videos for 100 bucks a month. So that’s $10 a video? I’ve got a couple videos that are just internal, and one isn’t even edited. I don’t know if we want to pay 10 bucks a month indefinitely for that stuff.”

Version 2 was the exact same plan at the same price, but it said your first 10 videos were included for free. Every single person we showed that version to said, “Oh wow, that’s a pretty good feature bundle for just 100 bucks.”

Same price, same features, totally different perception.

An A/B test probably would’ve shown us that version 2 won statistically, but it would have taken weeks to collect that data and we never would’ve never understood why. That means we couldn’t have taken the learning and applied it to other areas of our growth model.

That’s what user testing gets you. You de-risk the decision before it get shipped. I still recommend this to all my coaching clients.

Unfortunately, UserTesting’s prices have gone up dramatically. Today I’d probably recommend Userbrain. That’s what we used at Postscript, and it’s a little more startup/ scaleup friendly on price.

It’s so helpful to have people who match your ICP review your site, your product, and your user experience, answer open-ended questions, and then use what you learn to guide your thinking before you run a test.

4. Test the fix

Once I’ve pre-validated my solution with user testing, at some point I want to implement the version I’m moving forward with and see how it performs against our baseline.

For that, I’d run a test using a tool like VWO (Visual Website Optimizer).

A lot of startups and scaleups start with free a/b testing tools. But once you’re in the optimization stage of growth, you’re ready to test, personalize, and break through your growth plateaus. You need rigor. You need statistical validity. You need a tool the team can use to ship quickly, with all your experimentation tracking built in.

I actually grew up using Optimizely, but at some point Optimizely went upmarket and priced out startups and scaleups. So at Postscript, I used VWO.

There are a few tests we ran with VWO at Postscript that I’m really proud of.

Postscript is an app in the Shopify ecosystem and you could install it from 2 places, either directly from the website or from the Shopify App Store.

My instinct as growth lead was to keep people where they were.

IE, if visitors were on the website, they should install from the website. If they were in the App Store, install from the App Store.

But in our FullStory data, we saw users on the website hovering over the App Store language (on our homepage) and trying to click it. So we tested letting users go from our website to the App Store, and linking from the App Store back to the website.

I thought signups would probably go down and we’d lose users in the process. Conventional wisdom says that on the signup page you remove all the navigation and let people do only 1 thing: move forward, or eject and go backwards.

Instead, total signups went up by about 20%.

That was a complete surprise, and it changed how we thought about those 2 channels. They were working together.

Testing is a huge lever to break through your growth plateaus, and a tool helps enables those tests to be done accurately.

Optimizely is no longer a fit for the startup and scaleup community, and VWO is a great fit. One of my other clients has been on GrowthBook for the past year and seems really happy with it, and the price is solid. PostHog lets you run experiments too.

Any of those would be a great fit for anybody leading growth today.

5. Nudge users inside the product

The next step in my growth process would be nudging users inside the product toward the next action - helping them get stickier, increasing retention, and combating the churn challenge with upsells and cross-sells.

In a product-led company, your product is a huge channel for communication, conversion, and engagement. You need a way to maximize that channel.

At Wistia, we custom built our own checklists, popups, and communication tools. It worked amazingly, but it took forever. And over time I learned about something called code decay, which I’d never heard of before.

Basically, you ship a piece of code, and at some point it goes bad and bugs pop up because of other code changes around it. We didn’t have anyone supporting those things full-time, and eventually that happened to us.

So at Postscript, I pushed for us to buy a third-party low-code or no-code tool. We bought Pendo and were pretty happy with it.

It let us ship guides, checklists, and even customized onboarding recipes that routed people based on what we knew about them, nudging them toward activation, retention, and habit building.

In a product-led environment you need ways to maximize the product communication and conversion channel, and you need a tool to do that.

6. Follow up outside the product

The last step is following up with people outside the product. Because in-product nudges only reach people who log in.

For everyone else, you need a way to take what they did (or didn’t do) in the product and use it to trigger the right message, pulling them back toward the next action.

To do that, I need a tool that connects product data to your CRM and automates the follow-up. For me, that’s HubSpot.

It’s worth flagging that I worked at HubSpot for 4 years. So please know I’m biased here.

You can send all your product data, milestones, and CRM data into HubSpot, then build campaigns based on what people did or didn’t do. That’s what I did at both companies.

The most impactful campaigns were segmented programmatic campaigns that nudged existing users to upgrade from free to paid, or from Pro to Enterprise.

We identified product-qualified lead signals and used them as triggers to kick off evergreen campaigns that showed people features and encouraged them to take the next step to the next plan.

Those were some of the coolest campaigns I got to work on. We obviously had onboarding flows and plenty of non-product emails going out too.

There are some newer tools in this market (and some folks claiming to have built their own tools using Claude for this). But you need something to communicate with customers outside the product, using your product triggers to nudge them toward the next action.

2 changes I’d make if I rebuilt this stack today

That’s the 6-step system I’d run if you hired me to lead growth at your company, and the tools I’ve used at each step.

It worked. But if I was rebuilding it from scratch at a startup with no history and no existing tech stack in place, I’d keep the steps and make a couple of changes to the tools.

The first replaces part of the growth playbook we built ourselves at both companies. The second lets you cover half of the stack I just talked about with 1 tool.

Let the product sell itself

The first change is that I’d use the product to market and sell itself more.

At both Wistia and Postscript, the number 1 thing we heard from people who signed up and never engaged in a deep way was that they just wanted to see what the product could do, poke around, and see it in action. They weren’t ready to buy or use it in a meaningful way yet. They were just doing some research.

So my teams built interactive demos in-house.

What’s really fascinating is that with a typical PLG offer, say a free trial or free plan, maybe 3 to 6% of your website visitors will sign up. And that’s if your website is well optimized.

When my team put the demo we built ourselves on the site, more than 25% of visitors to those pages engaged in a meaningful way. They got to play with the product and really experience the value.

Total signups went down slightly, but the number of activated accounts went way up, because the people who did sign up were way higher intent. They’d already built momentum in the tool before they ever created an account.

Using your product to market and sell your product is where the magic happens.

Today, you could build this in-house like my teams did, or cobble something together with AI. I’d use a tool like Navattic, which lets you build, ship, and host interactive demos right on your website, and spend my team’s time on other workflows.

Quick disclosure: I’ve been an advisor to the Navattic team for the past few years. I really respect what they’re building and how they’re building it, so please factor in my bias.

Consolidate 3 tools into 1

The second change: I’d consolidate a few of these tools so the data from each step lives in one place.

At Wistia and Postscript, we bought Mixpanel, FullStory, and VWO to do 3 separate jobs: analytics, session replays, and experimentation. Today, some newer all-in-one tools cover all 3.

You’ve seen me mention PostHog 3 times in this piece already. I’ve actually never used it myself, but so many of my clients do that it’d be the first all-in-one tool I’d evaluate if I was hired to lead growth at your company.

How the 6 steps work as a system

Here’s the full system, step by step, with the tool I’d use at each one:

1. Find the leverage with an analytics tool like Mixpanel.

2. Figure out why with session recordings in FullStory.

3. De-risk potential fixes with user testing (UserTesting.com or Userbrain).

4. Test the new experience with an A/B testing tool like VWO.

5. Nudge users inside the product with a tool like Pendo.

6. Follow up outside the product with triggered marketing comms in a tool like HubSpot.

Then I’d add an interactive demo to let the product sell itself (Navattic), and look at consolidating steps 1, 2, and 4 into something like PostHog.

If you’re leading growth in your org and want support breaking through your growth plateaus, running your growth team more effectively, and getting to the next level in your career - that’s exactly what I do as a coach.

Learn more about working with me here.

If you’re a Director, VP, or Head of Growth and you’ve been interested in surrounding yourself with a peer group of A-players, you can apply here. Applications close this Saturday, October 10.

Apply to join

In a PLG model, the product has to do what a great sales rep would do.

Create urgency. Follow up. Present special offers that feel personalized. Answer objections before they block the deal. Nudge users toward the next step in the journey.

But it has to do all of that in a touchless way. Without a human in the process. One to many.

That’s pretty hard, considering the vast majority of new users sign up, poke around a little bit, then leave after 5 to 7 minutes.

And if a new user leaves without experiencing the core value of the product, it’s really, really hard to get them back.

On top of that, if you're growing fast, at some point the number of new customers converting equals the number churning out every single month. Even with world-class churn rates. You eventually hit a point of stagnant customer growth.

So the product has 3 important jobs:

• Activate new users quickly

• Convert free users into paying subs

• Get existing customers paying more over time

Navattic runs the hybrid version of this playbook

The version I like most still keeps a sales team in the mix. I call it the hybrid motion. It balances product-led growth with the traditional inside sales motion.

It’s become one of the best playbooks for scaling a big business.

And Navattic runs it really well.

So a few weeks ago, I carved out a few hours and went through their entire PLG approach. And I filmed a video sharing what I liked, why I think it’s working, and what I might try differently if I were on their team.

I typically try to create written content and then have a video version for those who prefer. But this one’s really meant to be watched, so check out the video below.

You’ll see me break down three parts of the Navattic experience:

1. Getting new users to value fast with a minimum viable setup experience

2. Making the product upgrade path easy and obvious

3. Growing revenue from the customers you already have

(Quick disclosure: I’ve advised the Navattic team on parts of their PLG journey over the past few years. That’s what let me go this deep. They didn’t pay me for this piece or ask me to make it. I ran the video by them before publishing, and they didn’t influence the content, critiques included.)

And if you like this content, let me know what business or product I should break down next. Send me a DM or add a comment to this piece

But in every case, the company with the head start lost. The companies that won had products that did more of the work for them.

At the fastest-growing SaaS companies, growth runs through the product.

If you’re PLG, the product is your go-to-market. So the signup flows, the setup process, your empty states, the upgrade and conversion experience, and the cancellation flows are incredibly important.

Every one is a key growth lever.

I’m a former 2-time head of growth, and over the past 5 years I’ve coached 100+ other growth leaders from some of the fastest-growing startups in the world. And in this post, I’m going to share 5 secrets that those companies use to pull their growth levers, including the one that decides whether your team gets more budget next year or potentially gets cut.

Secret #1: They give you the product before you ever have to pay for it

In the past, if you signed up for Notion, the very first thing that you’d see was a blank page. A blinking cursor. The scariest screen in software.

The user has nothing to click, nothing to copy, and no idea where to get started.

So Notion built thousands of templates, eventually letting their own users build templates. Today they have a library with over 70,000 to choose from.

Now, every template helps Notion scale because it impacts 3 growth levers at once.

1. Discoverability: templates create tons of content that ranks when somebody searches for things like “weekly planner template.” They cover a ton of surface area for high-intent, long-tail keywords to help their brand get found on search engines and LLMs.

2. Acquisition: all of those landing pages create unique entry points into the product. So instead of having 1 “sign-up” page shown to every visitor, they have 70,000 that are completely personalized to the specific search intent.

3. Retention: after the user signs up, these templates help new users get past that blank page/ blinking cursor challenge way faster. Instead of starting at zero, users have content they can just customize to their specific use case.

Canva runs this playbook too. Their templates have essentially become the core product.

Figma also did it with their community, where you can grab someone else’s file and start editing it in just a few seconds. And Miro created a massive template library aligned with their most common use cases.

Now, compare templates as a growth lever to a lot of the traditional inside sales process that’s still run today:

A user fills out a form, they book a sales call, a rep reaches out and schedules a conversation, and eventually demos the product does on a call.

That experience makes people ask for the product, and it delays the value.

Contrast that with a template, which gets them into the tool quickly, using it, customizing it to their specific needs, and experiencing that value in minutes.

And there’s a name for why this works, too. It’s called the endowment effect.

People put more value in something when they think it’s theirs. So the second your team signs up for Notion and puts your strategy and roadmap inside, it becomes instantly more valuable.

The team built something exactly like this during my time at Postscript.

At the time, SMS was still a relatively new channel. We learned that many people signed up for the tool and never got started because they weren’t sure what types of campaigns they should launch, or which types were most effective.

So the team created a template library that allowed them to inject everything that we learned, the best examples and use cases, straight into their account.

It created a bunch of pages that ranked and drove acquisition, and it was a massive product retention tool also.

*Note: this screenshot is from the wayback machine and the team has changed how they leverage templates over the past few years since I’ve left.

The 2 challenges with templates as a growth lever.

1. Figuring out who owns it

The ownership and accountability is challenging because templates cover 3 different growth levers. That means they sit between product, content, marketing, and growth.

So I’d recommend getting an executive-level sponsor who oversees the project holistically, with 2 main stakeholders or collaborators on the work:

1. One person or team (depending on how large you are) that’s accountable for the discoverability + acquisition side of the project. IE, getting people to the site and signing up from the template pages.

2. Another stakeholder that’s accountable for the retention piece. IE, making sure the templates are effective at helping people get set up, activated, and building habits.

2. Deciding where to get started (which use cases)

If you’re not sure where to get started and you’ve got a thousand templates you could create, prioritize your highest-value use cases first.

And if you’re not sure what those are today, the easiest way to find out is to run a survey. Ask new accounts:

“What’s your main goal for creating an account today?”

Then see which of those answers go on to purchase plans, and which plans (pro vs starter, etc).

Templates are really helpful in getting more high-quality users to sign up. Which brings up the next question… how do we want them to use the product next?

Secret #2: They obsess over activation

Early on, the Slack team noticed that teams who sent 2,000 messages or more tended to stick around. (source)

So Slack organized their whole company to get every new team to that 2,000-message mark. Their onboarding flows, blank states, emails, and product nudges all helped new accounts get to that same metric.

Facebook very famously had a similar activation metric years earlier, 7 friends in 10 days. When a new user got to that milestone, they stayed.

A lot of the fastest-growing SaaS companies have different versions of this as their north star. For Canva, it’s successfully creating and sharing a design. At Pinterest, it’s saving content within your first session.

And with my team at Wistia, when I was leading growth, we wanted new accounts to share their first video with somebody else. We obsessed over that metric.

Now, contrast that focus on activation, usage, and value with what happens at a lot of other companies.

They set these big internal, public goals around increasing the number of signups by some order of magnitude, and they pay way less attention to the retention and conversion side of things.

I’ve seen this a ton as a coach for heads of growth and as a SaaS Advisor.

Where a company has really low conversion rates, but they’re still celebrating hitting a signup/lead milestone. It drives me crazy.

Acquisition helps you figure out if your marketing channels are working. But activation is the road to monetization.

Why signup goals backfire

There’s a name for why this happens at a lot of companies… Goodhart’s law.

By setting a public goal, a team will figure out a way to hit the goal, regardless if it’s in support of the bigger picture.

Basically, if you set signups as a goal, your team’s going to get really good at generating signups.But they might be cheap, low-quality signups.

They might be from people/ accounts who are never going to use your product in a meaningful way and will never convert into a paying subscriber.

So if you’re leading a growth or marketing team and you inherit a massive signup goal when you first start the gig, from your CEO or from your board, and you never renegotiate it, you might end up being that person hitting your goals but not impacting revenue.

That’s one of the big traps.

The second is picking and defining your activation rate without rigor. Doing it by gut, or tenure, or seniority - without anybody fact-checking to make sure it actually leads to the business outcomes you want. Conversion and retention.

How to find your activation moment

If you’re not sure how to do this and you work at an early-stage company, I like asking open-ended questions in surveys or interviews.

Reach out to folks who recently became customers, or users who recently converted from new user to active user, and ask them to tell you the moment they felt like they first experienced the value of the product.

See what the common answers are and use that as a starting point for your activation metric.

If you’re a little later stage, with a little more confidence in your data, you can do this more quantitatively. Take a peek at the folks who recently converted from new user to active user (and hopefully eventually paying customer). See what they did in the early days that led to their retention, and inversely, double-check that against the things they didn’t do.

What you’re looking for is a small number of actionable steps that predict future intent to use the product again and hopefully convert.

So eventually, you’re looking for something like this:

Users who [take this action] in their first X days retain at Y% and convert to paying subscribers at Z%.

Once you land on this definition, take it to your execs.

Because if you’re a growth leader and you walk into the exec meeting and say, “Hey, I found a better north star metric that predicts retention and conversion,” you’ll probably get to rewrite your goals.

Once you know what your activation moment is and you’re obsessing over it, the next question is, how fast can we get somebody to activate?

That answer changes depending on who the user is.

Secret #3: They customize the first user experience based on who signed up

If you sign up for Canva, one of the very first things they ask, right after you give your email address, is “What will you be using Canva for?”

When you pick your answer, the entire product experience rearranges. The templates they suggest change. The examples they email you about change. The first thing it suggests you design inside the tool changes.

All the biggest PLG companies have a version of this too.

Duolingo asks what you're learning and how much time you have. And their app looks totally different for somebody who’s cramming for a trip compared to somebody who wants to do 5 minutes a day for the next 6 months.

Calm meditation app is one of my other favorite examples. When you first sign up, the very first thing they ask is, “What’s your main reason for wanting to meditate?

Then they customize everything you see to your answer.

If you select, “Improve sleep quality” the background literally changes to a dark, starry night.

I’ve implemented something very similar at basically every single company I’ve worked at. At Wistia, we asked 2 questions that were super actionable:

1. What’s your level of experience with video? Beginner, intermediate, or advanced?

2. What’s your main goal for using video, for creating your account in the first place?

We changed our onboarding sequence, the email copy, and the in-app nudges based on your answers.

If you said, “I’m a newbie,” we gave you intro-level instructions. If you said, “I’m advanced,” we showed you all the badass advanced features.

A marketing use case got marketing examples and marketing features. A sales use case got sales examples and sales features.

These answers are called jobs to be done.

The idea is that people essentially hire your product (or sign up for your product) to do a specific job, to accomplish a specific task.

If your onboarding experience isn’t customized to help them achieve that task or do that job, you might show them the wrong stuff, which means a user is going to think maybe your product isn’t the right one for them.

Even if your tool can do the exact thing they want, they might just not be able to figure it out on their own, or quickly enough.

The 3 traps with customized onboarding

Trap number 1 is buying into the concept but over-engineering it.

This has happened with a few teams I’ve shared this concept with. They get excited, they go out and design like 12 different onboarding paths, and then you end up with all of this stuff you need to manage. Stuff breaks, and you’ve got to rebuild it every time the core product experience changes.

Trap number 2 is making the signup form way too long.

Asking a bunch of questions that might be interesting to know the answers to, but aren’t actionable. If asking a question in the signup form doesn’t change what you want to show them next, don’t ask it.

This matters because over the years I’ve learned that a new user has a certain amount of time and attention they’ll apply to your product.

You want to spend that time helping them gain as much momentum and get as much value inside the tool as possible. We don’t want to waste it on any unnecessary questions, friction, or process.

Trap 3 is the idea that onboarding only belongs to the product team.

Other teams just do the emails, or work on the low-code popup, tour, or checklist tools, but they’re not going to have an impact on the core product design of the onboarding experience.

How to build your first onboarding recipes

If you’re interested in creating your first recipes (as I call them), meaning onboarding flows and different ways to segment your onboarding, the first thing to do is figure out the main reasons folks are signing up.

I like to start with one open-ended question on the signup form: “What’s your main goal for creating a new account today?”

Then look for the 4 or 5 most common answers.

Typically, people use different words to describe the same thing, and those answers will cover like 90% of your signups each month.

Next to each of those goals, write down the first thing that person should see.

What’s the screen, what’s the template, what examples do you want to send them? That should eventually help you land on customized onboarding recipes. They should all lead users to that activation moment. We’re just taking them down slightly different roads to get there.

Asking that question at the moment of signup (”What’s your main goal for creating an account today?”) actually does more than one job. It also helps you determine who goes to sales versus who stays in the one-to-many flow.

Secret #4: They decide who gets routed to a human-assisted experience

Today, if you sign up for HubSpot’s CRM from a 5-person startup, you’re going to get the one-to-many experience.

You’ll get marketing emails. You’ll use a product that’s really simple and intuitive. There’s a path to upgrade inside the tool where you can do it yourself. Just pull out your credit card when you’re ready.

But if you sign up from a 500-person company, there’s going to be a rep in your inbox or your voicemail within a couple hours.

It’s the same product and the same signup form, but a completely different user experience, decided by 2 things:

1. what you told them at signup.

2. what you did inside the tool.

Slack runs a very similar play.

If you’re a small team, you’re probably not going to interact with a salesperson, but big ones do. And the handoff typically happens based on some invisible signals that sync with their CRM. Not somebody eyeballing a list and using their gut.

How routing goes wrong

If you’re going to run this play, there are a few ways it could go wrong. The main one is that you just end up moving conversions from one pocket to another, from self-serve to sales or vice versa.

If you end up calling every single signup and you don’t have this routing in place, you’re probably going to call folks and put them into the sales process who are small and happy to buy on their own.

It probably doesn’t make sense to have a human inserted in the process for a bunch of those folks.

The flip side is also true.

If you don’t call anybody, you’ll leave conversions on the table, because some of those folks need help.

They might have custom procurement needs. Or maybe they prefer to buy in a sales-assisted way. So it’s important to use these signals to identify the leads where it makes sense to insert humans in the process.

The name for this is the PQL, or product-qualified lead.

Instead of scoring people based on a form submission (which is typically how marketing qualified leads are scored), we want to score them based on their product behavior.

Did they do high-intent activities?

IE, did they invite teammates? Did they connect a high-value integration? Did they hit a usage limit? Or did they just raise their hand and ask to speak with sales? These are all helpful qualifying signals.

The trap here is routing based on one signal.

If you only route at the moment of signup, you’ll find that some folks don’t look like an enterprise account when they sign up. They might not have an impressive company name. They might not have a huge procurement team involved. Nothing that screams they might need or be eligible for a high-volume discount. But then they start behaving like one of those bigger brands.

If you’re only reading the signup data (company size, title, industry, that kind of stuff), you might miss this.

And if you’re only reading the usage data, you might miss the big accounts that were obviously enterprise the second they filled out the form, just because they didn’t engage in a meaningful way.

That’s why you want a few different moments in the journey where a PQL can fire into your CRM, and a few different types of PQLs.

Sometimes there’s also a leadership-level trap here, where teams get stuck debating these signals endlessly.

What each signal means, which are most valuable, etc. They spend so much time building something incredibly complex instead of something super actionable, at the expense of maybe being slightly less accurate.

My 10 cents is to keep it simple. See if you can start with a real simple sentence:

If they look like [this] at signup, or they do one of these [2-3 specific actions] in the product, a human reaches out. Everybody else stays on the self-serve path.

Routing helps decide who gets that human-assisted experience on the way in. The last secret is about who gets one on the way out.

Secret #5: They treat churn as 3 different challenges (because they are)

Some of your churn is going to be involuntary churn, like a credit card that expired.

Other churn will be voluntary. People signed up and never activated. Or accounts that used the product in a meaningful way, then stopped and decided to cancel.

But those are completely different problems.

Many companies treat them all the same way. They send a “we’re sorry to see you go” email, or maybe they have some special copy on the cancel page inviting them back if they want to stay.

The fastest-growing SaaS companies in the world create the same type of recipes and segmentation to offboard customers as they do to onboard them.

Many start by asking, “What’s your main reason for canceling your account?” and then customize their communications, with some special offers, based on your answer.

• When someone clicks the bubble that says “I’m just not seeing value right now” or “I’m not using any of the features I’m paying for,” you can show them all the premium features they might not have realized they’re currently using.

• If somebody says, “I just haven’t used this product in a while,” maybe you give them a special offer to pause and save all of their progress and content for a couple months at no cost.

• And if someone says, “You know what? It’s just too expensive for me right now,” they can be given a time-limited discount.

(I actually did an entire deep dive into Canva’s cancellation experience. I think it’s world class.)

These all work because of the concept of loss aversion.

Basically, if you show people exactly what they’re going to lose, and ideally give them a special offer to keep it, a lot of them will take that offer to avoid losing all of their stuff.

Individually, each of these recipes will save users from churning. Combined, they can have a huge impact.

The trap here is treating voluntary and involuntary churn as the same challenge, so it gets the same owner (usually customer success) and the same plan to keep folks, instead of treating each one uniquely and creating unique paths based on the common answers.

If you haven’t done this already, start by learning the common reasons accounts churn.

See if you can eventually let them self-select their reason as part of the offboarding experience, just like they do in the onboarding experience.

Then, once you’ve figured out the common reasons, bring those numbers (and the plan) to your execs, instead of just talking about churn as one all-encompassing number.

A team with a plan for each type of churn is really hard to cut. A team that only owns the signup number is the first one to go when things get tough.

The growth plan is 1 of 3 jobs as a head of growth

Everything in this post helps with job number 1 for a head of growth… growing the business.

But a plan only works if someone owns it. That's job number 2, leading the team. Because each lever needs a clear owner and an operating system to run it.

And job number 3 is growing your career. Being right is half of it. Being effective is the other half.

That means learning how to communicate your thoughts to people who don’t speak growth, bringing folks along, and convincing them these playbooks are worth prioritizing.

The growth leader who can do that probably gets to rewrite their goals.

The other one celebrating, “Signups are up 30%!” get asked why revenue hasn’t moved. And when things get tough, their team is the first one to go.

Cohort 2 of the Growth Council kicks off in October.

The Growth Council is my peer mastermind for growth leaders working on growing the business, leading the team, and growing your career.

It’s a small group of Directors, VPs, and Heads of Growth - meeting twice a month.

You bring the real stuff you’re stuck on (the signup goal you inherited, the roadmap pushback, the exec meeting you’re dreading) and work through it with people who sit in the same seat.

Apply to Cohort 2 here.

We talked about how AI is changing the scope, roles, and skills required to be successful as a head of growth in 2026, and how to stay ahead.

But the best part was the audience questions.

The Q&A ran past the hour. So I'm sharing 3 of the best ones here.

“There's a lot of hype right now. How many growth engineers actually exist?"

There’s way more demand for this skill set than there is supply.

A16Z ran a growth AI fellowship recently. Essentially their way of getting a bunch of smart, talented folks together to share what they're doing with AI, establish some norms and industry-leading best practices, and see if they can curate AI-pilled folks to put into their portfolio.

They accepted 30 people out of the 3,500ish who applied (which in the grand scheme of the market, is still really small).

So there’s definitely way more demand than supply.

Which is why the folks who are extremely AI savvy and talk about it publicly are getting multiple recruiters and job offers right now. One person that I coach was getting around 10 recruiter messages a week for these exact gigs, and she barely posts on LinkedIn.

And if we rewind, this is very similar to the promise of the growth hacker in the mid-2010s.

This unicorn person that could come in with a marketing, product, and data skill set, execute everything with no additional resources, and grow the company like crazy.

The growth eventually community rejected the term “growth hacker” over time because the idea didn’t match the reality of what’s needed to be successful in the role.

I think we’re revisiting that.

We’re stress-testing that thesis again with this new growth engineer role, because in 2026 we can do more, we can ship code, we can cover all this surface area.

The dust is still settling there.

“Do companies know how to hire for growth roles in 2026?”

No. Businesses have no f-cking idea what they’re doing when they hire someone like us.

And I used to say that’s their fault. Now I say it’s our fault.

When I work with folks who hire me and they’re 6 months into a new role and it’s not going well, 10 times out of 10 it’s because they’re fundamentally misaligned on what the company actually needs, what the company thinks they need, and what growth looks like at this moment, at this company.

And if you’re the head of your capability, making sure that alignment exists is your job.

It’s death by paper-cuts if you don’t do that stuff. So you gotta go slow in the interview process. There’s 3 things I’d keep in mind.

One is the go-to-market model, and channel alignment with your passion and your skill set.

The second is the stage of growth. Adam Fishman has a great framework here that I like to share with other folks, because I find it helpful: a building zero-to-one stage, an optimization stage where you’re iterating and testing and segmenting to break through your plateaus. And an innovation stage, which is all about layering new things into the model that’s working.

And the third is team and scope.

“I keep hearing about VPs going back to IC. How does that look to the market?”

This is hard. I don’t have the perfect answer here, so I’ll just share what I’ve observed and maybe my personal opinion.

First, I think worrying about these optics is a today challenge, but not a future challenge. Because this is new and emerging, it feels like a step down.

I’ve spent the last 5 years working with folks in these types of roles, and a lot of them have shared some version of:

“I would be totally okay giving up the salary and the stress that comes with being a VP if I could just go back to doing the work. The work was fun. It was straightforward. It was simple. But I don’t think that’s gonna look so great on my resume.”

That has been our past. I don’t think it’s going to be our future.

So rather than talk about the downsides, I think about the upside, which sounds like, “I went from managing a big team that moved slow, that had lots of process, to covering 10x the surface area with a small team of generalists who are extremely AI-pilled.” I think that’s the biggest asset any of us can build in our careers.

Candidly, I don’t know how to best position it yet.

Elena has talked about it. She is one of the first high-profile leaders to make the leap and champion it, like a new category of work. But I think it’s just going to be the normal, or more normal, in the future.

So position it in terms of your impact and your output. And consider having a small team an asset, not a bug.

Every one of my clients getting recruited for new gigs hears the same pitch: “We want you to come in. You’ll be the first person to build out this capability. Do as much as you possibly can on your own, then let us know if and when and what type of people you need, and we’ll scale it.”

The expectation is a fully-staffed team will look much smaller than 5 years ago.

One of my clients in this exact role jokes about it on our calls: “I’m the head of the team, but I’m the entire team.”

That would have been a red flag on a resume 3 years ago. But in 2026, it’s a huge green flag.

If you read all 3 of these and thought “yep, that’s my life right now,” that’s exactly who the Growth Council is for.

It’s my peer mastermind for Directors, VPs, and Heads of Growth who work at startups and scale-ups, workshopping this stuff together: role changes, team design, what to kill, how to position yourself. One founding member described why he joined better than I ever could: “I just want to peer into the window of how other people work.”

The founding cohort sold out (24 applications for 6 seats). Cohort 2 kicks off in October.

Apply to Cohort 2 →

The first cohort sold out in May, and I expect this one will too. It's 2 calls a month for 6 months with a small group of directors, VPs, and heads of growth who actually understand your job. People to brainstorm with, problem solve with, and lean on when the shit's hitting the fan.

Cohort 2 kicks off in October. Apply here if that sounds like you.

Learn about the growth council

Working in growth is hard, and sometimes it’s lonely.

This topic comes up all the time in our group. Why do so many of us feel so isolated in these roles?

It wasn’t that way as an individual contributor. As an IC, it feels great to be part of a team. Even if it’s a bad team.

Even if you have a horrible manager, you can bond about it with your peers. You can talk about the hard stuff. You have people you can vent with, people you can go to, people you can use as a sounding board when you get stuck and need some help.

The camaraderie disappears the moment you become the manager

As we go from individual contributor to manager and eventually leader, especially in growth and marketing roles, that camaraderie and support starts to disappear.

Some of us become the manager that other folks complain about.

And sometimes, being the leader puts us in an awkward position. We may not always agree with the decisions being made at the executive level, but we need to support them publicly so our team doesn’t get distracted, or complain, or turn into a bunch of detractors.

So we stuff a lot of our personal feelings down.

And if you’re like any of my clients, you probably don’t have someone who’s done your role before that you report to, or who sits near you at the company, that you trust enough to vent to, share some of these feelings with, or problem solve with.

2026 is making it worse

Because of AI, our surface area and our output have increased dramatically. But our teams are getting smaller.

So we’re spending more time brainstorming and problem solving with our agents, our skill packs, and our prompts than we are with other people.

Many of us are still working from home, which means we’re not bumping into our peers in the hall. We can’t see if people leading other teams are having bad days, if they look stressed, if they’re grinding, or if they’re in the office late too.

We’re just not having those micro interactions the way we used to.

And a lot of us millennials are entering our parent era. We’re stressed at home. We’re working hard in the office. We’re ping-ponging between these two activities and these two identities without getting to properly refill our cups.

What we actually need

We all need some type of camaraderie and support.

We need folks who can review what we’re doing and say, “Attaboy, attagirl, keep going. It looks good. You’re on the right track. You’re almost there.”

Or folks we trust who can pull us aside and say, “Hey, I think you missed something. Here’s what it looks like if you tried it a different way. Here’s how I approached it. Here’s a different way of thinking about it.”

We need community to lift us up.

We need folks to cheer for us when we do the hard thing, even when it doesn’t feel good in the moment.

And we need folks to vent to when the shit’s hitting the fan.

The fix is the right peer group

In my experience, the fix is finding the right peer group.

Other folks who understand the challenges you face day to day, both strategically and culturally.

Folks who are also on the journey of solving them, maybe a step ahead or a step behind you, but working on the same problems. Folks you can share what’s working and what’s not with. Because it just isn’t happening as easily or as organically as it used to.

My first peer group was my friend John Bonini.

He’s become a close friend. And when we first met, he was leading growth at Litmus and I was leading growth at Wistia. They were similar sized companies and our jobs were pretty similar.

We started meeting once a month.

We’d talk about what was working, what wasn’t, the challenges we were facing, how we were thinking about structuring our teams, the big presentation we were nervous about, how we were asking for budget. All kinds of stuff we wouldn’t talk about with our peers because we didn’t want to show weakness, and couldn’t really problem solve with our team.

We had this nice little trust circle.

It's basically what I wanted the whole time I was leading growth at Wistia and Postscript.

So if you haven’t already, go find your John.

Start with 1 person at a similar-sized company, in a similar role. Someone a step ahead of you or a step behind, doesn't matter. Ask to jam for 30 minutes once a month. Bring the board deck you're nervous about. Bring the budget ask. Bring the stuff you can't share with your team.

John and I still meet.

- - - - -

And if you don’t have a John yet, that’s what The Growth Council is. Cohort 2 kicks off in October. Apply here.

It drove me crazy when I was leading growth. I could see it was so obvious we needed to prioritize activation. But I couldn’t convince the executives that work was more important than the other stuff they were already focused on.

That’s how I learned there’s a big difference between being right and being effective.

In this piece I'll walk you through the 2 artifacts I wish I'd had at the time. It's where I start with every coaching client.

“I work at a small company. I don’t need artifacts.”

I know that’s what you’re thinking. That’s what I thought too when I first started running growth and marketing teams at startups.

But sharing something once doesn't work.

People forget, new people join, and your execs are juggling 6 other priorities and putting out fires you don’t even know about.

Repetition is an incredibly powerful tool, no matter how big your company is.

The famous “rule of 7” applies.

So having things documented that other folks can refer to when you’re not in the room, that you can train folks on, that you can unveil like a new program or a new feature release, is super important.

Artifacts, whether you like it or not, are an important tool of influence.

Artifact 1: the growth strategy document

The first artifact I work on with every coaching client is formalizing some type of growth strategy document.

At the highest level, a growth strategy outlines what we’re doing, why we’re doing it, what it looks like when we get there.

It explains how you’ll grow faster. This is important for every team. And especially important if you work on a small one.

When I coach folks at super early-stage startups, they sort of scoff at this.

They’ll say something like, “at my company, things are fluid. We move quick here so I don’t need to have things documented. We run things a little leaner.”

But these are the same folks who complain that they’re exhausted from changing direction every few weeks, have trouble saying no to ideas their founders and execs “chuck against the wall”, and struggle to have the impact and influence they want.

If you don’t have something documented, it’s nearly impossible to prioritize. You end up at the whim of whatever ideas are being thrown your way, and it’s really hard to pick the right work because you don’t know what the right work is.

Half the leaders I coach say some version of "I need help saying no to good projects, so I can spend my time on a small number of great ones." The strategy doc helps.

Even just thinking through the questions helps.

• What does success look like?

• What has to go right for us to be successful?

• What projects are part of each of those pillars?

• What milestones should I keep track of as we go?

That’s the 80/20 of this process, and a lot of folks don’t do it.

If you skip it, you get overloaded with other people’s priorities because you can’t protect your own.

So here’s my strategy template.

I’ll walk you through it the same way I’d walk a client through creating the first version of their strategy. A good growth strategy includes 6 things.

1. Mission and vision

Mission is what we’re focused on right now. Vision is a more qualitative description of what the future looks like if and when you’re successful.

You can take this a few different ways.

If a core part of your strategy is scaling your team, this could describe what the team looks like when it’s fully up and running. If you’re building a PLG motion, describe what that looks like in the future. Use whatever timeframe the strategy covers. If it’s a 6-month strategy, pitch me what the future looks like if everything goes perfectly in 6 months. If it’s 12 months, take the longer view.

This should be conversational. It’s a bit of a North Star.

A core part of creating these artifacts is sharing them with what I call non-native speakers, people who aren’t in the growth world every day. So describe the future in common-sense language. No acronyms or jargon.

2. The plan: goals, levers, and tactics

This is probably my favorite part. There are 3 layers.

The goal sits at the top. What's the one number that either gets us promoted or gets us fired at the end of that timeframe? Usually it's an ARR goal. Sometimes it's a customer goal. That's the guiding KPI.

The levers ladder up to that goal. In my experience you can have 2 or 3 main priorities. A lever might be an area of your growth model: acquisition, activation, free-to-paid conversion, retention, etc.

If we’re going to hit the goal, what are the 2 or 3 things we have to nail?

And ideally, phrase them as outcomes. “Increase acquisition from X quality signups a month to Y.” “Increase activation from X to Y.” “Increase conversion from X to Y.” And model them out to make sure that if you’re successful, they actually ladder up to the goal.

Do the math. If the goal is $12M in new ARR and better activation gets you $7M at your current conversion rates, the other 2 levers have to cover the remaining $5M. If they can’t, you either need a 4th lever (and more resources) or to negotiate a smaller goal, and it’s a lot better to have those conversations now than in month 9.

The tactics are the third layer. What’s the “stuff” you’re going to do to achieve each outcome? These may look like specific programs, campaigns, tests, or other initiatives in your backlog.

You’re probably thinking, “But I do more way more stuff than this.”

When I think about a strategy, I think of it as 80% of your focus, resource-wise and time-wise. There’s always other stuff outside of it.

This is the work that’s most important to your success, the stuff where, if it doesn’t go well, the team probably isn’t going to be successful.

I like to do this visually because I’m a visual person, but a list works too.

3. OKRs: how you’ll measure success

The levers are the bets. Key results are the early checkpoints that prove a bet is working before the ARR shows up.

Objectives read almost like the levers: “Get new users to value faster.” Key results are the 2 or 3 numbers you’d check at the 90-day mark. “Activation from 22% to 30%.” “Time to first project under 3 days.” If those are moving, the ARR follows. If they’re not, you know 2 quarters early instead of at the end.

This is you saying, “In the future, if I’m successful, here are a couple things I’ll be excited to tell you about that are early indicators I’m on the right track.”

4. A visual roadmap

Once you’ve got the goal, the 3 levers, and the tactics, you want a picture of how you’ll sequence the bets. Ideally that’s a mix of quick wins, and some long-term, high-effort, high-impact projects that pay off later.

You need some way to visualize the order of operations, both for yourself and for the folks you’ll be sharing OKR results with down the road.

Here’s an example:

5. The resources you need

Resources come in a few flavors.

People, whether that’s contractors, in-house folks, agencies, or freelancers. Agents could be part of this in 2026 and 2027.

Tools, meaning the tech stack you need to execute.

And budget, the cost to acquire the resources or run the plan.

Some of these asks will need approval, and the earlier you can say “here’s what we need to achieve the plan,” the more successful you’re going to be.

6. Risks

Here’s how I frame this with execs (if I’m presenting).

We’ve just outlined a plan that’s going to help us win. But if I’m up in front of the room X months from now and the story isn’t “we absolutely crushed it,” these are the things that could pop-up and derail us along the way.

It could be things that are in your control, like budget issues, hiring challenges, or channel costs rising.

Or they could be things outside your control like market conditions, competitor funding, challenges in the acquisition landscape, other dynamics we can’t always predict.

Whatever you can see that might impact your success, highlight it so nobody’s surprised later.

And ideally, if you’re behind on your OKRs and one of the risks you outlined is happening, you can adjust. Re-sequence, or revisit your priorities, and keep going.

Those are the 6 things to include in your strategy.

Some teams include more, some include less. But this is a good starting point.

Together they answer what we’re working on, why we’re working on it, and what success looks like if we absolutely knock it out of the park.

Artifact 2: the operations manual

The strategy answers what we’re working on and why. The operations manual outlines how we’ll approach the work.

This matters because working in growth is different from working in a core marketing, product, or data function.

The way we approach the work is different. The way we run experiments is different. The way we collaborate with other teams is different. The lines of ownership and accountability are different.

Growth as a capability is still new and still evolving, and if we’re not proactively communicating how we approach the work, we’re going to hit a ton of cultural roadblocks down the road.

It’s also important if you’ve inherited a team, or you’re leading a team that isn’t changing and evolving the way you need them to. If they’re not thinking big enough. Or defaulting to the way they’ve always done things.

This artifact lets you point at something and say, “This is how we operate as a team. You’re outside of that right now. Let’s talk about how to align.”I use it to coach the team, to give feedback in one-on-ones, and as part of the review cycle.

It’s a lot easier to give that feedback when you’re pointing at an artifact.

Combined with the strategy doc, it makes onboarding easy, whether that’s an executive stakeholder above you, a cross-functional partner, or a new direct report.

The 2 documents should live in a shared file system, link to each other, and get updated consistently, because things are changing fast right now.

Here are the 8 things a great operations manual includes.

1. A link to the current growth strategy

A link or a summary, so everyone understands what we’re focused on, why it matters, and how we win.

2. Team structure

Because growth is so new and unique, outline what the team looks like today. Both the roles and their jobs to be done today. Then include a future version of the team so other folks understand how it scales and evolves.

You’ll want to include things like:

• What are the individual roles on the growth team?

• What does each role focus on?

• Who does each role report to?

3. KPI scorecard

A mix of OKR-type metrics that are tightly aligned with the strategy, plus stuff outside the current strategy that’s related to our work and worth watching. Include not just the metrics but the owner of each one, and who gets alerted if a metric falls into yellow or red. If something starts underperforming, who needs to know?

Not sure what to track? Feel free to use my product-led tracking example. It has a mix of high-level metrics and drill-down views.

4. Team values and operating principles

These are specific guidelines for how the team makes decisions and gets the work done and are incredibly helpful for creating cultural change.

Examples include things like:

• Focused on learning & sharing to enable other areas of the organization

• Providing value to the user as quickly as possible

• Putting the users’ opinions over your own

• Using data to make decisions

• Experimentation before deep investment

• Bias for simple solutions that scale

When clients tell me “my team isn’t taking enough risks, they’re defaulting to how they’ve always done it, I can’t get them where I need them,” values are almost always where I start.

5. Operating procedures

This is the boring stuff that eats your week if it isn’t written down.

These are different at every company and in every moment. But typically: the systems the team needs, how they request work from copy or design, the process for supporting a feature launch (who to involve, how we collaborate).

If there are docs or templates, link to them here.

6. Cross-functional rules of engagement

Growth works way more cross-functionally than traditional marketing, product, and data teams. If you’re not explicit about both the KPIs and the surface area, people bump into each other or get left out of the right work.

The easiest starting point is a RACI matrix: who’s responsible, who’s accountable, who’s consulted, who’s informed.

Do it for both the KPIs and the surface area, meaning the shared real estate: the pricing page, the onboarding flow, lifecycle emails, in-app messaging, wherever growth and product or marketing both have their hands.

You’ll want to create something like this document below, and fill in with the appropriate letters from the RACI definition above. The more explicit you are, the more successful you’ll be.

7. Meeting structure

Some meetings are for planning. Some are for learning and analysis. Others are for alignment and decision-making. The more explicit you are about which meeting is for what, the quicker the team operates and the more you can pull yourself out of the weeds as you scale.

8. Experimentation process

Growth teams are usually at the iteration stage of company growth. Which means lots of A/B testing. And if you’re running a lot of tests, you should outline how you run tests.

Link to an experiment doc template.

Link to a prioritization rubric, something like RICE or ICE.

And have somewhere to log results, win, lose, or draw, so you get better over time.

You can use AI to assist in the process, but outline what good looks like so people can go fast and you can eventually shift from executing to reviewing.

Those are the 2 most important artifacts every Head of Growth should create.

The strategy helps everyone understand what we’re doing and why. The operations manual helps everyone understand how we’ll approach the work.

Next time an exec throws an idea at you, you won’t be arguing. You’ll be pointing at something. That’s the transition from being right to being effective.

If you'd rather watch this than read it, here's the full walkthrough, including the templates on screen.

And if I can help you make that transition, that’s exactly what I do as a coach. Set up a consult and let’s see if we jive.

I’m going to share the exact six-step framework my team used to onboard and activate hundreds of thousands of new users across multiple SaaS companies.

Typically we see 30 to 40% of new users are lost within the first 7 minutes.

Which is brutal when you think about how much time, money, and energy companies spend to acquire an account, only to lose it that fast.

If you watch these accounts (I've spent hours and hours watching these accounts in user interviews and tools like FullStory), you typically see new accounts sign up, poke around for a couple minutes, then close the browser, and leave.

And if they leave before they’ve experienced any meaningful value, they don’t come back. It drives us growth nerds crazy.

I’ve spent years of my career focused on increasing activation rates and improving new user onboarding experiences. Through a ton of trial and error, failed experiments, and a few lessons learned along the way, my teams stumbled onto a framework that helped us drive 40 to 50% activation rates.

In this piece, I’m going to save you the years of trial and error and give you the framework, so you’ve got a roadmap.

Step 1: Define What Value Looks Like

Get crystal clear here. Value is a fuzzy term, so in SaaS we’ll often call this the activation moment, or the aha moment. It’s when a user first experiences the main benefit that inspired them to sign up in the first place.

This matters because if you don't clearly understand what the value is, onboarding becomes a guessing game, or worse, an opinions game, and you'll run into a few challenges.

One, you spend too much time helping a user get set up.

New users have a limited amount of time and attention when they come into your product. If you take them through too many setup steps before they see tangible value, that momentum runs out, they get frustrated, and they leave.

Two, you guess at the features and order of operations to walk them through, and onboarding becomes an endless tour of everything your product could do instead of a path focused on helping the user experience value on their terms.

When you’ve clearly defined what value is, you can guide a new user from blank account straight to their first win.

So how do you actually define “value”?

If you’re an early-stage company, go qualitative. Talk to users. The growth community loves to glorify quantitative data, but in my experience, if you’re early stage without much confidence in your model, this source is more helpful.

Ask them something like: “We’re so happy you’re a customer here. Would you mind taking us back in time and walking us through the moment you first felt like you got real value out of the product?”

Ask 10 to 20 of your first customers that question, then look for trends in the answers.

If you have confidence in your data, go confirm it quantitatively. Does reaching [this step] correlate with higher retention, and ideally higher conversion from free to paid?

Ideally you combine the two sources.

Get qualitative input from customers as a starting point. Then check the quantitative data to confirm that it correlates to retention and conversion.

Step 2: Reduce Time to Value

Once you’ve defined what that value is, start measuring, and then reducing, how long it takes a new user to experience that value for the first time.

The faster and smaller that time to value is, the higher your activation, retention, and conversion metrics tend to be on the back end.

Three steps to get started:

1. Audit your existing onboarding sequence. For most of us it’s filled with bottlenecks, unnecessary steps, and distractions between new user and first value. Go through the experience with fresh eyes. Pretend you’re a new account, not the power user you actually are if you work there. Write down every step, page, and workflow a new user has to complete, and ask yourself “is this absolutely necessary?”

2. Streamline the actions. Focus only on the actions that build momentum toward activation. Simplify the path by removing as many distractions, tutorials, redundant fields, or overlong setup steps as you possibly can.

3. Track it with metrics. If you haven’t already, start measuring time to value. Focus on getting that number as small as reasonably possible, and compare how long it takes your best users to activate versus your less active or at-risk-of-churning users. You’ll usually start to see a correlation.

Step 3: Use Triggers to Guide Users

Now that we’ve defined success, step three is about using effective triggers to guide users toward it.

Triggers are nudges that guide users to take an action.

They’re essential for keeping users on track, especially when they’re not sure what to do next. Triggers act almost like a GPS: they remind users where to go, what to do next, and how to get there.

A few kinds worth exploring:

In-app prompts. Progress bars, tooltips, popups. Basically anything that shows users how close they are to completing a task, keeps them motivated, or points out next steps.

Behavioral communications. Email, or SMS/push if your product is a mobile app. Things that remind users to complete incomplete actions and suggest which actions to take next.

Checklists. A list of the actions a new user might take, suggesting the next action that leads them toward that value moment.

You can leverage low-code tool options, or build these yourselves.

The key with effective triggers, regardless of type, is timing and simplicity. The trigger should appear when users are ready to act and when you know what the next step toward value is. And simplicity means not suggesting everything they could do, just enough guidance to push them forward to one clear next step.

At this point you’ve got a pretty good baseline onboarding experience.

You’ve defined what value looks like, reduced the friction and time to value, and added clarity through effective prompts and triggers.

Step 4: Personalize with Custom Recipes

The mistake most companies make is stopping here, which treats every new user exactly the same way.

But not everybody signs up for the same reasons.

Step four is about personalizing the experience to match user goals, through what I call custom recipes. IE different journeys or flows a user can take from new account to first value.

Four steps to build custom recipes:

1. First, understand what the different recipes could be. Learn your users’ jobs to be done, essentially their goals for signing up. Ask an open-ended question to every new account, something like: “Thanks so much for signing up today. Would you mind sharing the main reason you created an account?” Ask it open-ended so you get answers in their words, not yours.

2. Second, once you’ve got enough responses, review the data and categorize the answers into 4 or 5 common themes. Those are your main jobs to be done.

3. Third, once you’ve identified the themes, start asking every new user to self-identify, in a dropdown or self-select format: “Which of these best describes the reason you signed up?” using those same 4 or 5 themes.

4. Fourth, use that data to customize what actually happens inside the product. Regardless of which prompt system you’re using (onboarding tours, popups, checklists), you still want to get people to the same value goal, the same aha moment.

   But the examples you use, the way you talk about the features, and maybe even the order or templates you offer will differ slightly based on the goal they self-identified.

Learn the custom goals, prompt users to self-identify, and then deliver value on their terms.

Step 5: Use Ready-Made Templates

Step five is about using ready-made templates to help users experience value even faster, instead of starting every new user with a blank slate.

This matters most for companies that need a lot of “stuff” to get going, or have a long setup process.

For example, if you’re an email product, the user can’t send an email without first uploading their contacts list. Or if you’re a video product, the user needs to upload their first file before they’re able to use the video to grow their business.

Not having your stuff ready is a blocker to experiencing value, and at a lot of companies you might not even have access to the “stuff”, or you have to go ping someone for it.

Templates solve this challenge elegantly.

To use them at your company, first identify the common use cases (you already did this work when you identified the main jobs to be done), then design pre-made templates that help people accomplish the thing they’re signing up for.

Embed those templates in the onboarding sequence, where users can apply one if they’d like, or on the website itself.

Miro is a great example here. If you sign up and say your goal is strategy and planning, they suggest strategy and planning templates to help you get going. Canva has a similar experience. And we built something very similar at Postscript to solve this same problem.

The goal isn’t to replace a user eventually uploading their own stuff and using the product their own way.

It’s to accelerate the engagement, showcase the product’s potential, and let them experience that value moment with your stuff, so they’re more likely to come back and use their own stuff later.

Step 6: Build Momentum Before Sign-Up

The sixth and final step is building product and onboarding momentum before the form submission ever happens.

There's a lot of ways to build excitement and demand before someone ever hits your signup form. Your website copy, your positioning, your proof points all play a part.

But one of the highest-leverage moves is letting people actually use the product before they ever fill out a form.

One way to do this is by embedding a lightweight version of your product on your website, so visitors can play with it and experience value right away, without filling out a form.

A large population of users just want to see the product in action before they commit to signing up. A simple embeddable or lightweight version lets them do that, and makes them more likely to convert down the road. Users who sign up after already knowing what to expect, having already seen and played with the product a little, are much more likely to keep engaging in a meaningful way.

Here’s what I’ve found works best if you’re building pre-signup momentum:

I’ve had the most success with something interactive (vs. a video or static media), whether it’s an interactive demo or a lightweight version of the tool on the website that users can actually play with.

Typically you’ll see high double-digit conversion or interaction rates (Navattic has published comprehensive benchmark data here), compared to the 2 to 4% of your traffic that will sign up for a free plan/ free trial. So it engages a much more meaningful population of your website visitors. And you don’t need the full functionality available, just enough to help users see what the value will be like.

After a few interactions, a certain amount of time, clicks, or completions, prompt them to sign up to save their progress and continue inside the tool. That way you build momentum pre-signup while still encouraging people to get inside the tool and keep building it in a real way.

You’ll find that when folks do sign up, they’re way more likely to continue that momentum, activate, and experience value in a way that leads to conversion.

Recap

That’s the six steps to improving onboarding and activation, and saving more of the new users you’re already paying to acquire:

1. Define value and get crystal clear on the aha moment inside your tool.

2. Reduce time to value as much as possible.

3. Guide users along the way with effective prompts and triggers.

4. Don’t treat all users the same. Use jobs to be done to personalize onboarding into recipes.

5. Start users in the middle with ready-made templates, for when they don’t have their own stuff ready.

6. Build as much momentum as possible on the website before a user ever signs up

Need help improving your onboarding and activation rates? I take on a small number of advising opportunities each year. Interested? Let’s chat!

Interactive demos are one of my favorite self-service levers, they let someone feel the value of your product before a rep ever gets on a call. Navattic just launched their MCP, so Claude can build and update those demos for you.

The new Skill Library is the fun part, exec summaries from demo analytics, persona script adapters, share-link follow-ups, etc.

Browse them all here.

In this piece, we’ll cover five important decisions to help you build a product-led growth strategy from scratch.

These are the same decisions I worked through as a former 2x head of growth that helped drive 1m+ free users and 100k+ paying customers.

It’ll help you figure out where the leverage is, and along the way, avoid some of the common speed bumps where even good teams get stuck.

The order you work through these matters too, because each answer influences the next decision.

IE, if you haven’t defined activation, it’s hard to figure out where users are leaking out of your model. And if you don’t know where the money’s leaking out, you might spend a lot of time prioritizing the wrong problems.

So let’s go in order.

Decision 1: What counts as activation?

Activation is an industry term, a fancy way of saying the moment when a user first gets real, tangible value out of the product.

It’s a binary moment.

Either they activate and experience that value, or they don’t. And if they don’t activate, they’re probably not coming back.

You’ve experienced this yourself.

When you sign up for a new tool and don’t understand what it does, or it doesn’t seem like it’ll help with whatever goal you had when you signed up, you leave.

You poke around for a few minutes, you leave, and you probably never come back.

The data confirms this. When people don’t activate, retention from first use into ongoing usage is very poor, and the likelihood they convert into a paying customer is almost zero.

That’s why activation ends up becoming a north star metric for most product-led growth teams.

We can’t reach through the screen and tell somebody to pull out their credit card. But we can provide an amazing experience that gets new accounts to that value as quickly as possible.

When we do this, my own experience has taught me that people who activate convert to paid subscribers at about 5 to 7x the rate of those who don’t.

Which means defining this metric is a decision that gets argued and debated a lot.

Product has an opinion, because they’re building the tool. Marketing has one, because they tend to be closer to the user and the user’s goals. The founder and exec sometimes have a more forward-looking, aspirational definition.

If you’re at an early-stage company, this is even harder.

Because you probably don’t have enough quantitative data to do a proper look-back analysis and see which moments in the user journey correlate with purchase. So what happens is the person with the loudest opinion, or the highest title, or the most tenure, usually wins the debate.

When I joined Postscript, we were basically in this exact spot.

I was employee number 11. And we had a few million in ARR. A couple months after I started, we had a company offsite, and a handful of customers came too.

As the head of growth, I asked them all the same question:

“Could you take us back to when you first signed up. What was the first time that you felt you really got value from the tool?”

And internally, a lot of us expected the answer to be “when I sent my first campaign.”

Because Postscript is an SMS marketing tool for Shopify brands (although they’ve recently announced they’re launching email too), and all of our messaging and onboarding at the time was built around getting people to ship their first outgoing message.

But every customer said something different.

They didn’t care about sending the campaign. That was cool, but it was a stepping stone. What they really cared about was the first purchase that came from a campaign they sent through our platform.

Intuitively, it made a lot of sense. They cared about generating revenue.

Once we understood how they described the moment of value, we rebuilt our onboarding around it. We retooled the in-app flows, redesigned the blank states, updated the microcopy, changed the onboarding email, even updated some ad copy, because we understood the value point with more nuance. We built templates that helped people get revenue-generating campaigns live as fast as possible.

If you’re doing this for the first time, here’s what to know:

• Activation is usually different from setup. Entering your information and getting your account configured typically doesn’t provide value on its own. Activation happens when someone uses your product to solve the goal that got them to sign up.

• It’s a leading indicator. The goal isn’t activation for its own sake, it’s that activation correlates highly with purchase. Increase the number of people activating, and how quickly they do it, and revenue tends to follow.

• Early-stage companies won’t have the quantitative data. Do the qualitative work instead: interviews, user testing, customer conversations.

• The thing you want them to do and the thing they actually care about are usually two different events. Yours is the stepping stone. Theirs is the payoff.

Reach out to five or ten recent customers and ask a version of: “What was the first moment you felt like you got value out of the product?”

Phone, in-app pop-up right after they convert, an email with one question in it, whatever works.

And don’t lead the witness.

IE, don’t offer a dropdown of predetermined answers. Ask open-ended questions so you can see answers in their terms. And look for the answers you hear most often. Customers will use different words to describe the same event.

Once you have that moment defined, get laser focused on getting more people to it faster.

Decision 2: Where you’re losing the most users

At a lot of companies, nobody has actually written down or diagrammed what the user journey looks like.

So when people ask how to grow faster, the easy answer is always “get more signups, more leads, more top of funnel.” Signups are the easiest thing to point at, and whoever owns acquisition gets the pressure.

But in my experience, the real leakage is usually somewhere in the middle of the funnel.

If you only focus on top of funnel without understanding what’s happening downstream, you’re pouring new signups into an experience that isn’t giving them much value.

I’m advising a team right now that generates hundreds of thousands of trial signups a month, but converting only a small percentage, low single digits, into paying subscribers.

Their marketing team is under pressure to acquire even more, but the data makes it clear that something later in the journey is broken. No amount of new signups is going to fix that. We spend time digging into where exactly the leak is; the setup process, the activation journey, the checkout or free-to-paid conversion, pricing, friction somewhere in the experience.

You need to understand the root cause instead of trying to acquire your way past the problem.

Sometimes this shows up differently.

I’m working with a head of growth at an early-stage, founder-led startup who was stuck building whatever his founder got excited about that week. The founder would talk to other founders, scroll X or Reddit, come back with ideas, and pressure the head of growth to execute, essentially forcing him to work off hunch and intuition.

We spent time helping him diagram the user journey and understand the growth model, so he could finally say, “Not right now, we’re doing this other initiative, here’s why it matters more.”

It unlocked leverage for him as a leader, and it solved some of the interpersonal dynamics too, because he finally had the information to back up his calls.

Here’s what to do: create a written version of the user journey.

Diagram how someone visits the site, signs up, activates, converts from free to paid, and ideally expands or upgrades over time. Put the conversion rates, or raw numbers, next to each step.

It should look something like this example:

Then compare your numbers to public industry benchmarks. Lenny’s Newsletter and OpenView both publish good ones with different ways to filter.

Without that information, your prioritization decisions come down to comparing hunches and opinions, and in that environment, the person with the most tenure and confidence wins.

Decision 3: Where you’re losing the most money

This is the one I find a lot of people skip, and it’s a different question than where users are leaking.

Where you’re losing the most money, and where the financial leverage actually is, often has a different answer.

Activation is easy to prioritize. It’s probably the most fun project in growth.

It has a fast feedback loop, you get to watch real people interact with your product, dig into cohorts, run experiments, do interviews, and see behavior change almost in real time. It’s the project everybody around you assumes growth is supposed to work on.

But it’s not always the most impactful part of the revenue model.

I learned this firsthand at Wistia. I was leading our growth team with a mandate to get more revenue from more paying customers, and activation was the obvious focus, until we did a deep dive into the data and found two opportunities we’d missed.

One: we could probably raise pricing a little, and a small increase in average revenue per customer could move total revenue by a substantial amount.

Two: we had a massive opportunity in customers who weren’t upgrading or increasing their average contract value over time.

Both were pricing and packaging problems.

So the team paused the activation work and ran a nine-month revenue focused sprint.

We A/B tested a range of pricing models to balance new customer acquisition against upgrade revenue, added feature-based upgrades and some usage-based pricing, and once we landed on the new model, migrated more than 10,000 existing customers into it.

Of everything I did in 4+ years at that business, nothing had the impact that pricing and packaging did.

A few things I took away from that:

• Model the dollars behind each growth lever before you pick one to focus on. A 5% price increase and a 5% activation lift don’t produce the same revenue.

• Users and dollars leak in different places. Some parts of your growth model convert well but bring in a bunch of people who were never going to buy.

• The most fun project and the most impactful project are two different questions. Ask both.

• Pricing and packaging work is slow. It requires a ton of alignment. Budget months, maybe years, not weeks.

Create a growth model. Take your revenue goal for the year, map how users flow through it, put a rough dollar figure next to each stage, and sort by size and impact. Be honest about where you’re already planning to focus, and compare it to where the actual revenue opportunity is.

A lot of clients come in thinking they need more activation or acquisition, and end up finding more leverage deeper in the model: pricing, packaging, upgrade revenue, churn.

Decision 4: Balancing sales and self-service

One of the biggest misconceptions about PLG is that it means no sales.

In reality, it means the product is the primary go-to-market tool for acquisition, activation, and conversion… but not the only one.

Missing this distinction causes a lot of internal friction.

Most mature, high-volume PLG companies run both motions: a freemium path where people sign up and buy on their own, and a sales team that works one-on-one with a subset of accounts.

The challenge is that some accounts were always going to buy on their own, and adding sales to that process just adds friction, slows things down, and costs money without making the deal bigger.

And the flip side is true too... Some customers were never going to buy on their own, whether because of custom needs, questions, or a preference to talk to a human, and if you don’t catch them, you leave a sale on the table.

The goal is to grow the total number of customers, not just shift the same customers and revenue between the sales pocket and the self-service pocket.

I’ve had a version of this conversation at every company I’ve worked with, in-house and as an advisor.

Sitting down with the head of sales, we typically work through four questions:

1. What are the indicators that someone wants or needs to talk to a human?

2. Where in the user journey do those indicators show up?

3. Where on the website should we push people toward one path versus the other?

4. Where in the product can we insert those offers so it stays one consistent experience, even though we’re managing multiple pathways?

That last point it’s really important. Because it should feel like one experience to the user, even if you’re managing several paths behind the scenes.

Picture two funnels.

The self-service funnel: someone visits the site through SEO, LLMs, word of mouth, or ads, signs up for the product, goes through an activation journey, and either stays on the free plan or converts to paid and upgrades over time.

It looks something like this:

The sales-led funnel: someone visits through the same channels, but becomes a marketing lead and then a sales lead, goes through a qualifying process, gets a one-to-one activation and purchase experience, and has a human involved when it’s time to upgrade.

That looks something like this:

A mature hybrid company runs a modified version of both, with a few extra connections between them: moments where you decide which funnel someone belongs in. The sales-led side also gets a new lead source once you have a free plan: product qualified leads, PQLs, where product usage data indicates someone might be sales-ready.

That full system looks something like this:

I actually walk through the diagrams for these two funnels on screen in the video version of this. If you want to see them side by side instead of picturing them, watch it here:

There are three moments where important routing decisions gets made:

• Offer type. Did someone sign up for a demo or price quote (sales), or to use the product itself (self-service)? Someone can self-select into sales straight from the site.

• Sign-up enrichment. Information at sign-up, like a specific high-value use case, a sophisticated-seeming user, or an enterprise plan or page, might indicate this person needs a one-to-one experience even though they signed up self-service. They keep full access to the product, and you add a one-to-one nurture layer alongside it.

• In-product behavior. Someone raises their hand and asks to talk to your team, or their usage volume is way beyond your average self-service plan, or their behavior (exploring upgrade buttons, opting into a premium trial) signals they’re a PQL worth routing to sales.

If you haven’t done this already, diagram the core steps in your user journey, mark where it makes sense to bring in sales, and identify the paths that lead to a paid customer.

Then sit down with your head of sales and work through those four questions above.

Decision 5: Who owns what

This is the one I’ve seen kill more PLG motions than the other four combined.

You can get the first four decisions right and still have the whole program stall out, because PLG touches product, marketing, sales, and customer success.

When it touches that many teams, ownership becomes unclear (and can be territorial). And if you’re leading growth, you’re usually the one trying to coordinate all of it, which means you often have responsibility without authority.

A few years ago, I did advisory work where a head of marketing reached out because their company wanted to scale their PLG motion.

Their team wanted to work with me, but their head of product blocked it.

She believed product should own every product decision, including the in-app journey, onboarding, conversion, checkout, and churn mitigation, and wouldn’t let anyone else weigh-in.

It was a territorial standoff.

Nothing ever got shipped, and I never got to work with them. I’ve seen different versions of that tension play out at other companies since. Alignment is the silent killer here.

You need both ownership and accountability.

Clear lines on who owns what, how to collaborate, and executive-level support. I’ll often encourage clients to build a RACI matrix for their major growth metrics: who’s responsible, who’s accountable, who’s consulted, who’s informed. Just having that mapped out unlocks a lot of the tension.

You’ll want to create something like this document below, and fill in with the appropriate letters from the RACI definition above.

If the executive team had been aligned in my example above, the standoff with the product lead shouldn’t have happened at all.

Where to start

1. What counts as activation.

2. Where you’re losing users.

3. Where you’re losing money.

4. Where the line sits between sales and self-service.

5. Who owns what.

And if you have accountability for an outcome without ownership over the surface area to get there, that’s the problem to fix first. It’s the hardest of the five to solve, but it makes the other four possible.

Whenever you’re ready, here’s 3 ways I can help you increase your impact and influence in 2026:

1. Binge my best content about becoming a world-class head of growth on YouTube.

2. Looking for a peer group to workshop stuff like this in real time? Apply for the Growth Council.

3. Want 1:1 support on your specific situation? Schedule a coaching consult.

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The highest paid marketer at your company in 2 years probably won’t be a people manager.

And until recently, that really wasn’t possible.

If you wanted to make more money, you typically had to go down the manager track. But now, some of the most accomplished and respected leaders in the world are stepping back into individual contributor roles, and keeping their executive-level pay when they get there.

A bunch of my clients have been asking me about this over the past couple months.

Two have recently accepted high-level, high-status, high-paying IC roles and I suspect they’re the first of many. So in this piece, I’m gonna explain the change that’s going on right now, the new rungs on the skills ladder, and the new career optionality that’s just opened up for the first time.

The old career ladder

Historically, we were all handed the same picture of what a marketing career looks like:

There’s 2 things to note about this ladder.

The first is the connection to management.

As an IC or senior IC, you’re managing yourself. As a director, it’s typically a player-coach role, so you’re still managing yourself plus a handful of direct reports. As a VP, you’re usually managing a larger team. And in the C-suite, you’re typically managing other managers.

The second is the connection to the amount of money you make.

There’s a direct correlation between your title, how many people you’re managing, and your paycheck. Being a people manager was our avenue to more budget, more status, more influence, more impact.

And historically, stepping down from leader to doer wasn’t a good look.

It was something you had to explain in interviews. It looked like you couldn’t hack it. Like you weren’t successful. Like you weren’t ambitious.

The ladder became a loop

It’s important to note the career ladder and the skills required to climb the ladder are separate things.

The skills stayed fairly unchanged. You stack skills to get from IC to senior IC to director to VP to C-suite. There are some new skills with AI (new tooling, tech stack, playbooks), but the shape has been fairly consistent.

The career ladder is where the major changes happened.

In 2026, the titles are still pretty similar, but instead of a ladder that goes straight up, it now looks more like a loop. Same roles available: IC, senior IC, director, VP, C-suite, etc.

And once you make a certain level of seniority, you can choose to go back to being an individual contributor.

But it’s a different type of individual contributor. Higher-status, higher-paying, higher-influence, and higher-impact.

Making another pass around the loop adds more value.

Because you’ve stacked more skills, which makes you way more valuable as an IC when you come back to that seat. And AI has compounded this and made it even more valuable than I think any of us could have anticipated.

The skills ladder is your ticket to ride this loop.

That distinction really matters, because if you don’t understand it, you might make the wrong decision: either chasing a title change when you should be stacking skills, or turning away an amazing opportunity because it looks like what historically had been a step down or a demotion.

The skills ladder got re-weighted

As a coach who supports directors, vps, and heads of growth - I get asked to review a lot of those JD’s.

And today, they’re way longer. They include way more stuff than they did a few years ago. They’re weirder. Half still kind of reads like the jobs we’ve done historically. The other half reads like it’s been borrowed from an engineering spec.

To oversimplify, most of our skills fit into 1 of 4 buckets:

1. Tactical skills

2. Management skills

3. Soft skills

4. Personal attributes

Historically, tactical skills carried entry-level value.

Management skills kicked in around the director/ player-coach level. Soft skills got more valuable as you climbed from director to VP into the C-suite. And personal attributes are the things you bring with you that make you uniquely you.

But the weighting on these 4 buckets just got totally redone.

Tactical skills, which used to matter most when you were an IC, are now weighted way heavier. There are new rungs on the skills ladder: AI fluency, prompt engineering, leveraging MCPs, managing agents, shipping your own work into production end-to-end, getting into code. These skills mostly didn’t exist a couple years ago. Now they’re at the top of the JD.

Management skills changed in shape more than weighting. Today’s teams are smaller - and skewing towards more generalist. Some of my Director and VP clients only manage 2-3 in-house generalists + a bench of external specialist contractors/ freelancers. A few of them manage a team of agents instead of people, which didn’t really exist a few years ago either. The core skills are what you’ve known historically: task-relevant maturity, sharing your thinking in a way that enables others, helping them problem-solve. But we’ve added a bunch of new management types.

Soft skills, I believe, are worth more than ever before. Because when 1 person can do 10x the work they ever could, and execute end-to-end the kind of work a team of 3 or 5 used to do, communication, buy-in, and alignment become more important than they ever have.

Personal attributes Adaptability, speed, hustle, grit, curiosity, and the ability to just figure stuff out are some of our most important skills today. Because we’re navigating such crazy change, the folks who charge head-first (vs folks who prefer the “ways we’ve always done it,”) will be the ones leading us into the future

If you’re not sure what to do, here’s my best advice…

Pull a couple job specs from other companies hiring for your exact title. Highlight everything in there that wasn’t in your job spec 3 years ago. That is the set of skills you need to focus on picking up to keep navigating the career loop.

What those skills unlock

One of the VPs I support described the top of the old career ladder like this:

“It was really cool. I’ve achieved this title that I’ve always dreamed about, but the truth is, I wasn’t doing any of the work that I loved so much anymore. I was just in meetings all day, every day.”

Your calendar gets full of other people’s work, other people’s priorities, other people’s problems to solve. And for longer than I’ve been working in and around tech, there was really nothing you could do about that.

Here’s the model that fits better for 2026…

Your career is a loop. There’s no top, there’s no bottom. There are seats around it, and you can move between them in any direction, because every seat you’ve held and every skill you’ve picked up is applicable to the next job.

And you’ve probably seen the market head this direction already.

Elena Verna is a high-profile, high-powered individual contributor at Lovable with executive-level pay. She’s completed the loop, and she’s written about it on her Substack.

Lap 2 feels completely different, because you take everything you learned the first time around with you. You’re an IC that can advocate for budget and resourcing. An IC that’s in the executive rooms, maybe presenting to the board, executing all the things you always wanted to execute but didn’t have the resources (or authority) to do.

Companies used to hire multiple people for this work.

One person to set strategy, direction, and budget, and a separate junior team to execute. Now they’ve got 1 person doing both jobs, and they’re paying that person accordingly.

That’s why your value compounds every lap.

Each trip around the loop adds a job you can do that used to be someone else’s salary. But you can’t skip the first lap. You can’t go from IC to director, jump back to being an IC, and think “well, I’m just gonna double my salary doing this.”

You need to be able to do all of the jobs to have as much influence, impact, and hopefully pay as you want. There’s no shortcutting that process.

The 4 seats on the loop

Your title doesn’t always tell you which seat you’re in.

Two people can have the exact same words in their LinkedIn title and be living in completely different worlds day-to-day.

In my experience, that’s because there are really 4 different jobs to be done.

1. The early-stage builder. This is your IC or senior IC, typically at an early-stage company. Maybe you’re the first growth or marketing hire, likely reporting directly to a CEO or founder. Because it’s early stage, there’s no product-market fit, no playbook, no growth model, no channels you’re already scaling. You’re figuring out all of it: the channels, the data stack, the first version of the ICP, the copy, the initial experiments. The vibes and energy are off the charts in this role because there’s so much freedom and autonomy. The job is basically “figure it out.”

2. The player-coach. Typically a small team, somewhere between 2 and 5. Half your week is doing your own IC work, and the other half is coaching other people on how to ship and execute theirs. In my experience, this is the toughest seat on the loop. You have to manage your time, manage others, do your IC work, drive alignment up the food chain, and learn how to be a manager for the first time. There’s just too much work for one mere mortal.

3. The coach-first strategist. Typically a bigger org, managing a bigger team. Your output becomes your team’s output. The job is about driving strategy, getting buy-in and alignment on it, helping your team prioritize, and giving them air cover so they can get good work done on time. The shipping happens via delegation through other people. And this is the seat where the all-day meetings start.

4. The high-leverage IC. The new one from the top of this piece. No direct reports, a massive surface area, executive-level pay. You ship your own work with AI doing a bunch of the heavy lifting. You delegate to AI, using it like junior employees, and your strategy, decision-making, and judgment are how you figure out what’s worth shipping. This seat is really only available once you’ve made the first loop around. It’s built for people who have already been coaches, leaders, and managers, because a core part of being successful here is your understanding of what good looks like and your ability to push until you get an output that’s high leverage. That’s why the people landing these seats are typically ex-heads of growth or ex-CMOs, and that’s why the pay holds at this level.

Which seat do you actually want?

As a coach, most of the pain I see comes from folks sitting in the wrong seat.

There’s a mismatch between their core passion and skill set and what their actual job is day-to-day. Like an early-stage builder who got promoted, is now leading a big team, and is stuck all day, every day in alignment meetings.

And these roles are so in demand right now that if you don’t define what you wanna do, the market might pick it for you. You might get one of these amazing opportunities that you feel like you have to say yes to.

So here’s a couple questions to ask yourself:

1. Do you want to manage the work, or do you wanna be implementing and executing it?

2. Does strategic thinking or more technical execution get you fired up?

3. When the workday or workweek flies by, how would you describe it?

If you want help figuring out your seat, take my free assessment. It’ll take you a couple minutes.

Somebody in a few years at your company, or your next company, is gonna be the highest-paid marketer on the team with zero direct reports.

It might as well be you.

Want to go deeper on all of this? My friend Daphne Tideman and I are hosting a free live session tomorrow, August 19th: The Rise of the Growth Engineer: The One-Person Growth Team. We’re breaking down her side-by-side head of growth job specs from 2022 vs 2026, plus a bunch of live Q&A based on what you’ve got going on.

Save your spot here —>

Save your spot here —>

A few weeks ago, a director of marketing told me she wants to stop managing people and go back to being an individual contributor.

Ten years ago, saying that would’ve been career suicide. But in 2026, it’s kind of a savvy play.

Companies are rewriting the org chart.

In the past, to move up, they used to ask: how big of a team can you run?
Today they’re asking: how much can you do yourself?

I’m seeing this shift come up with about a third of my coaching clients right now.

So let’s get into it: what is the one-person growth engineer, what’s the skillset it takes to be successful, and how do you get paid like a level 7 staff engineer while you’re at it?

Engineers already figured this out

I mention engineering in the last sentence on purpose. Because historically, engineers have had two distinct career tracks.

One is into people management. The other is essentially a senior doer. A highly respected and high-impact individual contributor with no direct reports, massive service area, and sometimes, executive-level pay as your career progresses.

In many cases, the senior doers are paid more than the people managers. And culturally - they carry a lot of influence internally.

Marketing and growth only had one viable track.

If you wanted more money, more impact, more influence, you had to manage more people to get it.

But this second option just made itself available in our world.

And unless you’ve been living under a rock, you probably saw what Elena wrote back in May about firing herself out of the leadership seat and going back to an individual contributor role at Lovable.

Historically, going from exec to IC might have looked like a demotion or something that we would need to explain on our resume.

But when one of the most followed voices in our space makes this move publicly, it’s a sign this new career track is starting to become available.

Is the grass actually greener?

Before you chase this role, figure out if it’s actually the right fit for you.

The director I mentioned at the beginning spent 4 years at the same company. They went through a CEO change, a recent reduction, a couple new bosses. And on our recent call, she told me she’s tired, that she’s burned out, that she’s in this weird, toxic relationship with her job.

“I miss getting the work done,” she said. “Every promotion I’ve gotten has taken me further from the IC work I loved.”

That’s what it looks like from the individual side.

From the hiring side, I talk to plenty of people being recruited for these roles right now. It’s really a high-level individual contributor role, but with director or VP-level experience and strategic ability.

Companies want someone to come in, do as much as they possibly can on their own, and then fill the gaps with freelancers or contractors, or identify where they need full-time headcount down the road.

So it’s a senior decision-making job plus hands-on execution.

You know what good looks like, because you’ve already led the function. You’ve managed people, held them accountable, and now you can build the work yourself because the tools finally let one person cover this much surface area alone.

That combo of judgment, strategic decision making, and the ability to drive alignment across the org, is why ex-leaders like Elena and a handful of my own clients are winning these seats over traditional individual contributors.

It’s a skillset most ICs haven’t had the chance to build yet.

A few gut checks if you’re thinking about exploring this:

1. When you picture an amazing day at work, is your head down in the trenches, or are you coordinating at a higher level?

2. When you think about the work that drains you, is it the execution, or the communication and alignment?

3. Would you actually trade some of your direct reports for more service area, more ownership, fewer meetings?

If you enjoyed the work itself more than the communication and alignment side, this seat could be calling for you.

I cover this in more detail in the video below. Watch it here, or keep reading below.

The skillset: strategy plus AI-native execution

I have a client in this exact seat right now.

A former CMO who led a marketing team of 40 people. Today he runs growth at one of the biggest AI products in the world with almost no resources.

He gets access to engineers on a project-by-project basis, but most of the time he ships his own experiments. He writes his own code with AI tools. He pushes to production himself. On a recent call he laughed and said, “Yeah, I guess I’m the head of the department and I’m also the entire department.”

Frustrating at times, for sure. But he’s learning the exact playbook every company is betting on being part of the future.

You need 3 skills to be successful here:

1. Strategic decision making. Judgment. Knowing where the leverage is, which problems to solve, what great looks like when you solve them, when to move on from something that isn’t working. If you’ve been in a leadership seat for a few years, you’ve already picked this up. No prompt or agent can replace that lived experience.

2. AI-native execution. Actually shipping the experiments, the analysis, the code. The tools are good enough now that you don’t need an engineer for most of your growth work.

3. Knowing where the tools stop. Understanding the limits of what one person can actually execute. If you’ve been doing the job, you know exactly where you hit the outer bands of what’s possible even with every tool available. Being able to explain that in an interview is a credibility builder: “Here’s the playbook I’ve been running, here’s where I hit the wall, here’s the resources I’d need to fix that.” Most people haven’t figured that part out yet.

To build this, figure out where you want to deploy AI in your workflow.

My 10c: own the strategic components, delegate the execution to the tools. Because asking AI what your strategy should be is an anti-leverage move, and it’s the thing that separates you from most individual contributors.

Don’t give away the part of the job that’s your primary value.

If you haven’t built this muscle yet, pick a project you’d normally hand off and ship it yourself, end to end, letting AI do the heavy lifting. You’ll build proof, find the tools that work, and find the outer bands of what you can do alone versus what needs help, all at the same time.

You still need a system, or you’ll drown

Even if you can do the work of a whole team, there’s so much surface area that you’ll burn out in the process.

My clients in this seat describe it the same way: spread thin, juggling a million projects. One told me it felt like standing at a door watching a tsunami of work coming at him. If you’re covering the surface area a whole team used to cover, you hit that wall faster. There’s nobody else to delegate to, nobody to absorb the overflow.

Three parts to the system:

1. Figure out what great looks like. What’s the one KPI that defines success? Fast-forward a year or two, you got the raise or the promotion, what’s the one number you moved?

2. Build a short list of bets that ladder up to that number.

3. Make a kill list. Everything you’re not going to do right now, so you can focus on the higher-leverage work.

If you haven’t done this, step back and evaluate your current portfolio of bets against that number. Set up a couple recurring work blocks, one for building and shipping, one for reviewing data, one for the conversations that drive alignment and buy-in.

Because being a team of one doesn’t mean people will automatically give you a long leash.

You still have to coordinate with executives and cross-functional stakeholders. When a request comes in that doesn’t ladder up to your number, put it on the not-right-now list, and make that list public. Trello, a Kanban board, whatever.

A lot of the influence in this seat comes from letting people know what you’re doing and what you’re not doing right now.

The money

Growth and marketing folks have never made level 7 staff engineer money because our field never valued IC work in this way.

Our salaries capped out unless we went the manager route.

So when that director told me she’d even take a pay cut to step back into the work, I stopped her…

She makes well over $200,000 but I told her the truth… at her level, with her strategic ability and the surface area she can cover today, I think she could make way more than that.

In the past, comp followed team size. Today it’s starting to follow surface area.

And it’s not just my hunch.

I’m seeing massive offers for high-level ICs across my client base.Because when one person can own what a team used to own, the market adjusts.

I think we’re a few years from level 7 IC marketers making half a million a year, doing 10x what they were doing 5 years ago with the tools and agents available now.

Engineers have been living in that world for years. And I think we’re next.

The market pays for proof

One challenge is there isn’t a trusted third party determining AI fluency.

There’s no program or certification that an industry leader has created yet, so it’s hard for individuals and hiring managers to understand if what you’re doing is cutting edge or status quo.

Building a portfolio of proof is really important at this stage.

The formula is simple. Do the work in public. Talk about what you’re building. Collect third-party proof and outcomes wherever you can get them. A stamp from someone else beats any claim you make about yourself.

That director I mentioned at the top hasn’t made the jump yet.

But she doesn’t need anyone’s permission anymore. Elena already proved it’s not career suicide. The tools already prove one person can cover the surface area. The market’s already starting to pay for it.

The org chart used to ask how big of a team you could run. Now it’s asking how much you can do yourself, and it’s ready to pay level 7 staff engineer money for the answer.

I hope you enjoyed this piece.

Whenever you’re ready, here’s 3 ways I can help you increase your impact:

1. Binge my best content about becoming a world class head of growth on Youtube.

2. Looking for a peer group to workshop through stuff like this in real time? Apply for the Growth Council.

3. Want 1:1 support on your specific situation? Schedule a coaching consult.

You just got hired to do a job you already know how to do.

That’s why they hired you. But you can’t ship anything. Every draft comes back with 10 rounds of changes. Somebody always swoops in at the last minute and redoes your work.

You’ve got the title, you’ve made the strategy, and you still need 3 people to sign off before you can do anything.

And after supporting dozens of growth leaders through this exact situation I’ve realized that your own survival instincts are part of the problem.

Because when someone keeps grabbing your work back, every instinct you’ve got says the same thing. Protect yourself. Write them off as a control freak. Polish everything before anyone sees it. Guess at the rules instead of asking. Keep your head down and grind.

But every one of those instincts digs the hole deeper.

You do less. You bring less. You shrink your own scope down to whatever survives the committee. 6 months in, you’re doing half of what you were hired for, and the founder’s meddling more than ever, because now they’ve got evidence you need watching. One leader I coach described the feeling as “my brain is used and exploited, but not valued.”

There’s a name for what your boss is doing, by the way…

Managerial meddling.

It’s when a leader grabs back work they already handed off, using their seniority to override you instead of letting you run.

So in this piece, we'll walk through all 4 instincts, why each one backfires, and the counter-moves to run instead.

A few weeks ago, a member of the Growth Council brought this exact problem to our session.

Their founder rewrites everything, their projects die in review, and he could feel himself starting to shrink because of it. The group spent 45 minutes brainstorming and workshopping.

Many of the ideas below came out of that conversation.

I also broke all 4 of these down on YouTube, if you'd rather watch:

Instinct #1: writing them off as a control freak

The instinct: slap a label on them.

Control freak. Micromanager. Founder mode.

Then vent to your partner, resent every review cycle, and wait for them to change. The label feels good and fixes nothing. If they're 'just a control freak,' your only option is waiting for a new boss.

But if there's a cause behind the meddling, you've got something to work with.

I’ve seen 3 causes over and over.

1. Fear. Your area is probably the biggest thing they own. If it goes sideways while they’re heads-down elsewhere, that’s on them. And if there’s outside pressure (a board, investors, private equity targets), that fear gets louder.

2. Missing the work. A lot of leaders got promoted away from the stuff that made them love the job. Campaigns, ideas, building things. Managing managers matters more and it’s a lot less fun. Your projects are where they still get to play.

3. Having a deeply technical background. And focusing on the nitty gritty details is the exact skill set that made them successful in the past, so they point their superpower at everything. Including your work.

“Sean’s” company is owned by private equity, so everything is about hitting the number.

And whenever the founder senses they’re a little behind, he starts throwing new ideas at the wall. Shiny object after shiny object. That’s fear. A scared guy grabbing the wheel.

The distinction matters because the fixes are different:

• A scared boss needs proof things are okay when they’re not in the room.

• A bored boss needs something to play with that won’t wreck your roadmap.

• A technical boss needs a very specific problem to point their superpower at.

So watch them for a week. When do they jump in? On the risky stuff, or on the fun stuff, or on the deep technical stuff? Write down your hunch.

It’s easier to solve the problem once you understand it.

Instinct #2: polishing your work before anyone sees it

The instinct: if every draft gets torn apart, show fewer drafts.

Build in private, make it airtight, then present something so finished nobody can argue with it.

Except the arguing happens anyway.

It just happens after you’ve spent 3 weeks building. You show the thing, then 3 people take turns marking it up. 5 rounds with your boss. Then their boss has notes. Then whoever builds it throws in their own opinions. And you ship some bastardized version nobody believes in, weeks late.

A consultant from one of the big firms taught me this back in my HubSpot days:

pushback is usually the last thing that happens before somebody goes "ahhh okay, I get it." And if you present something and get zero pushback, that's often worse. It might mean they're a detractor being polite.

The fix is moving all that debate before you build anything.

One growth leader I know, “Jacob” walked into a company with a famously opinionated founder and did this with a literal blank Google Sheet. He wrote down everything in his head. Here’s what I’m seeing. Here’s what customers are saying. Here’s how I’d solve it.

Then he sat down with the founder and went through it line by line.

He marked every belief on that page as either backed by data or just an opinion. Including the founder’s beliefs. That put everybody on the same level. Now it’s 2 people looking at information together, instead of 2 egos defending turf.

One warning. Do the marking together, and stay curious about it. Walk in and stamp your boss’s favorite idea as “just a guess,” and that can blow up in your face fast.

Then when you do show your finished work, don’t present it as done.

Say “here’s version 1, and I want your ideas for what we test next.” Every note they give you goes on the list. People usually loosen up once they feel heard.

Before your next project, write the one-pager first. What’s the problem, what do we know, what are we guessing, how would I solve it.

Get that reviewed instead of the finished work.

Instinct #3: guessing at the invisible rules

The instinct: figure out the rules by trial and error.

Ship something small, see if you get burned. Most people in this spot spend months playing hot stove. What needs approval? What can I just ship? Nobody tells you, so every project is a gamble on getting your hand slapped.

But the conversation you’re avoiding takes 30 minutes.

Here’s the exact thing to say, (I got this line from Brené Brown who spoke at the HubSpot conference back in 2016). Tell your boss:

“The story I’m telling myself is that you don’t fully trust me yet, and you’re not sure my plan gets us there. What would you need to see to fully back what I’m doing, so I can move fast and we both win?”

“The story I’m telling myself” are the magic words Brené advocates for.

They allow you to communicate how you feel (and your frustrations) without pointing a finger, so the other person doesn’t get defensive. Every time I’ve given this line to a client, they’ve said it was successful.

Then, in the same conversation, ask: “what kind of decisions do you want to be part of, and which can I make autonomously?”

Now you're negotiating the rules of the game when tensions are low, instead of fixing them mid-situation.

Get 30 minutes on the calendar this week.

Instinct #4: going quiet and grinding

The instinct: put your head down, do great work, and let the results speak.

Or its cousin, the big swing: roll out a whole new operating system, get everybody to agree to a new way of working, prove yourself in 1 move.

Both backfire. Because quiet work is invisible work, and invisible work is exactly what a scared founder can’t stop checking on. And if your founder’s been running the show their way, the big swing is dead before it starts. Take your autonomy back 1 piece at a time instead, and make noise while you do it.

Find the small stuff your boss would hand you tomorrow if you just asked.

Usually it’s the stuff they already half trust you with. Running the weekly meeting. Owning the report. Take 1, do it well, and show them how it’s going so they don’t have to be in the room to know it’s fine.

Then make your work loud.

Send updates.

Weekly, bi-weekly, monthly, whatever you can stay consistent with and share them wherever people will actually see them (Slack, email, video recordings, or at the bi-weekly show and tell). Share your wins, misses, and what’s coming next. Now the information comes to them instead of them coming to check on you.

Those updates do double duty, too.

A list of what you’re already working on is your best defense when some new shiny idea shows up. You just point at the list. “We’re doing these 3 things. If we add a 4th, which of our existing list should we deprioritize?”

And if you diagnosed a technical founder, give them something specific to dig into.

Now their superpower’s pointed somewhere useful, instead of scanning your whole work canvas for something to fix.

Send your first update this week.

Movable, or set in stone?

Run these plays for a few months, at least. Because trust gets built through reps, and you need enough of them to make a fair call.

Then ask yourself 1 question: is this behavior movable, or set in stone?

A movable boss can change. Maybe slowly, maybe grudgingly. But their behavior shifts over time. You can work with that, and eventually win in that environment.

But a boss who’s set in stone isn’t interested in adjusting their behavior. Some people are just wired this way. So if you've run these plays for a few months and nothing's moved, you've learned they're not going to change, and now you get to decide what to do with that information. Either stick it out, or head somewhere else.

But most bosses aren’t set in stone. They’re just scared. And now you know exactly how to make them less scared.

- - - - -

ps - whenever you're ready, here's 3 ways I can help you increase your impact and influence in 2026:

1. Binge my best content about becoming a world class head of growth on Youtube.

2. Looking for a peer group to workshop through stuff like this in real time? Apply for the Growth Council.

3. Want 1:1 support on your specific situation? Schedule a coaching consult.

And I’m using the milestone to hit pause on the show.

I don’t have a plan for when (or if) I’ll pick it back up. But I’m using the word pause somewhat intentionally. Because if the creative itch returns someday, I want to leave the door open to restart it.

This decision took me about a year to make.

And since this show was always about the behind-the-scenes stuff, the honest stories instead of the polished ones, it feels right to share the behind-the-scenes on this.

I started the show because every growth podcast sounded the same

Four years ago, all the popular podcasts in the growth and marketing space were people sharing their best playbooks, their biggest case studies, or their favorite frameworks in an academic vacuum.

And frankly, once you listen to a few of those, they all start to blend together.

The moments I found interesting were when someone slipped and shared a mistake they made along the way, and what they learned in the process.

That was the content I wanted more of, and I wasn’t seeing enough of it online. So since no one else was making that show, I decided to make it.

I also partly made it for myself.

I’ve made so many mistakes in my own career. One of the first times I presented a growth strategy, a thing I’d worked on for weeks, I basically got laughed out of the room and I had a panic attack in the process. Another time, I sat through a brutal performance review where the executives told me, as a member of the leadership team, that I wasn’t doing a great job.

For years I wondered: does everyone have moments like this? Or is it just me?

I wanted to make a show for myself and for the people silently suffering with that same question.

(And sure, I figured I’d land some sponsors and make a little money doing something I was passionate about. More on that below.)

The episode that proved the whole thesis

My conversation with Joanna Lord is probably my favorite of the 100.

She’s someone I never would’ve had the chance to talk with if it wasn’t for the show. It gave me an excuse to reach out, and it probably gave her a reason to say yes to spending 75 mins chatting with a stranger.

She told a story about being up for a CMO promotion.

She didn’t get it, because a peer she’d need to work closely with was so competitive with her that this person said she’d leave if Joanna got the role. The painful lesson she took from it: if you’re too competitive with your peers, it can stop your own career from progressing.

She shared it so honestly and vulnerably.

When I filmed that episode, I remember thinking it wasn’t my best interviewing. But it was exactly the kind of storytelling I wanted to share when I started the show.

But I hit a plateau

Growing a podcast subscriber base is brutal

For most of the show’s life, the audience grew modestly, about 3 - 5% month over month. Last summer, I was sitting just shy of 1,000 subscribers, and I felt like I was working so hard for every one of them.

On the audio platforms especially, you gain subscribers 1 or 2 at a time. With Spotify and Apple, I was clawing and scraping for every single one.

YouTube is a little streakier. One outlier video can bring in 100 subscribers, then the next 5 videos bring a handful each.

A few times a year, I try to take a step out of the business and re-prioritize where I’m spending my time. When I did, it was clear the hours I was putting in just weren’t matching the outcome.

So I gave myself an ultimatum. It was time to shit or get off the pot.

Either make a real investment in the show (to break through) or move on. I felt like I had invested so much already that I didn’t want to walk away until I had turned every stone over.

I doubled down.

I hired a podcast coach. I rebranded the show from Delivering Value to Growing Forward. I revisited the premise of the show, it’s positioning, the questions I was asking, the guest prep, the production value. It was a lot of work!

At the end of Q1 this year, I picked my head up to evaluate the results.

There’s an expression from my HubSpot days: “the data don’t lie.” And the data wasn’t lying. I got a nice audience pop when I rebranded (I did a bunch of marketing around it), but after that I was growing at more or less the same clip as before. While spending more hours on the show than I ever had.

Here’s where the show stood when I published episode 100:

• 1,392 subscribers (739 on YouTube, 467 on Spotify, 186 on Apple)

• Somewhere north of 35,000 plays across all channels (my best estimate)

• Just north of $100K in total sponsorship revenue over 4 years

The hard costs were manageable. I spent about $1,750 on gear when I first got started:

• a Shure SM7B mic ($700)

• a Canon EOS R50 ($700)

• a mic stand ($150)

• a teleprompter ($200)

Those were one-time costs. And I paid roughly $375 per episode in post-production support.

But the real cost was the time.

Guest outreach, interview prep, setting up the camera and lights and mic, editing instructions, writing the promo content, the LinkedIn posts, sending assets to guests.

Every episode was a long tail of small tasks. Time I could’ve spent in other ways.

The confusing part: the podcast kinda worked

By a lot of measures, the show worked.

Of my 100 conversations, probably 90 were with people I’d never met before. And there’s an amazing connection that forms when you spend an hour in pure listening mode while someone shares their most vulnerable stories. You’re not jumping in to top their story with your own (like I tend to do in my non-podcast-host life). You’re just listening.

The network that came from those interviews and relationships is hard to quantify.

Some of those guests led to members of my group mastermind. Plenty of my coaching clients reached out saying they’d listened to the show. It was great for relationships. It just wasn’t great for top of funnel or monetization.

Meanwhile, something unexpected was happening on YouTube.

With just a handful of episodes living on a platform with built-in discovery, people started reaching out to work with me. I never thought that would be part of this journey. It was a very pleasant surprise.

So the sunk cost was real. Walking away from the show means walking away from my best excuse to reach out to people like Joanna. That’s the part I’ll miss.

What I’m doing instead

I’m reinvesting all of that time and money into YouTube and email.

YouTube was already more than half of the show’s audience (739 of the 1,392 subscribers), and it’s got discovery built in. It makes sense to double down on something that’s already working and just adjust the format a little.

And the early data backs that up.

I’ve published a handful of solo videos, and my YouTube channel jumped from 739 to 1,077 subscribers. That’s 338 new subscribers in about a month, on a show that took 4 years to claw its way to 653 across Spotify and Apple combined.

And unless you’ve been hiding under a rock, you’ve seen what’s happened to LinkedIn reach.

I can’t speak for everyone else. But my reach is down around 70% from last year, by my estimate. So I want to invest in channels where I own the relationship with my audience and can go deeper: sharing more of my thoughts, longer-form, with people who actually want to hear from me. That’s email.

That’s also the challenge with a b2b podcast.

You essentially need to grow 2 audiences: one on a discovery platform, then point those people to a relationship platform, which ends up being Spotify and Apple. Where you’re clawing for every subscriber and still renting the relationship.

And the content I’ll be sharing will be coming from my own lived experience and client work.

Because at this point I’ve worked with 100+ clients: people at some of the largest most companies you’d recognize and plenty of small startups with big ambitions. Spending 1,000+ hours of calls with Directors, VPs, and Heads of Growth helping them…

• Stress test their strategy

• Prep for a team restructure

• Set up their operating systems

• Deal with a micromanaging boss

• Work through imposter syndrome

• Figure out where AI actually fits into this job

• Navigate anxiety attacks and board presentations

• Decide if they want to leave the people manager track and become a one-person growth engineer.

I’d bet I have more real-world data points on this stuff than almost anyone else.

I’ve spent 4 years telling other people’s stories.

Now it’s my turn to talk.

ps. if you were a guest on any of the 100 episodes, thank you for trusting me with your stories. If you listened to even one, thank you for that too.

pps. if there’s a topic you want me to go deep on, hit reply and tell me.

ppps. if you’re interested in working together, I have 1 coaching spot available in August. Apply here —>

One of my coaching clients got an amazing job offer. At least it seemed that way.

It was Head of Growth at a new company. And the role came with more money, more seniority, and the opportunity to build the growth capability from scratch.

They said yes.

And 6 months later, they were still doing a solo IC job at a tiny startup, with founder dynamics they’d never encountered. They were miserable, and they didn’t last long.

This person was super talented.

In their last role, they were also a Head of Growth, and leading a 7-person team and running a high tempo testing system.

On paper, these 2 roles looked nearly identical.

Their titles were the same. But in practice, they had almost nothing in common. Because a Head of Growth who is the entire growth team and a Head of Growth leading a large team share a title but not much else.

Your real job is defined by your team size and your stage.

I've been a Head of Growth twice, and over the past 5 years I've coached 100+ Directors, VPs, and Heads of Growth through these transitions. I want you to go into your next role eyes wide open, knowing exactly what the job looks like day to day, week to week.

This post will help.

The growth team of 1

At the bottom of the mountain, you’re the entire growth team. And in practice that’s actually 3 jobs at once:

1. You create the growth strategy.

2. You execute that strategy as the main IC.

3. And you represent the growth capability at the leadership level.

All while campaigning for the budget and headcount you don’t have yet.

This job is a ton of fun, and also really challenging. You’re usually reporting to a founder who’s never done your job, so there’s no one to rubber duck with. And you’re paying what I call the founder tax. Basically every time your founder talks to their founder friends or scrolls X, they come back with a million ideas. Some are great ideas for a different business. Others are great ideas that need 10x your resources.

So you’re constantly reacting to all of them.

You’re a team of 1, so every idea that comes in either blows up your roadmap or pulls your attention from the more impactful work. Either way, you’re paying for it with the only resource you’ve got: your time.

You’re really helping to answer 1 big question at this stage: do we have a real business here?

In practice, that breaks into:

1. Who are the customers, and are there any inklings of product market fit?

2. Are there 1 or 2 channels worth scaling?

3. What does the first version of our growth model and go-to-market motion look like?

The A/B testing, the segmentation, the dashboards, the high volume experimentation programs all come later.

I coach 2 people at this stage right now.

“Marcus” (a Head of Growth at a small series A startup) was so busy he never had a second to slow down and figure out the most important work.

Ideas kept flowing at him and he kept reacting. So we carved out time and wrote a formal growth strategy: the priorities, the KPIs, what “good” looks like. He turned it into an artifact and presented it to his CEO. That 1 document let him say “not right now” to most of the incoming ideas. It also shifted his influence. He went from order taker to the person setting direction.

“Theo” (Director of Growth running a 1-person growth function at a scale-up) had a political challenge.

At his company, whatever the founder gets excited about is what everyone works on, and the leaders who pushed back - got pushed out. So we attached Theo’s most important growth ideas to ideas his founder was already excited about. He kept the same priorities, and had way fewer debates.

Answer those questions well, and eventually you prove the model is real and scalable. That usually earns you a little more budget and the green light for your first growth hire.

Which brings you to a fork in the road… who to hire first.

1. You can list all the work you don’t like doing and hire someone junior to absorb it.

2. You can list the most impactful work that’d move the business faster and hire into that.

A lot of first time leaders are tempted by the first, and there's no leverage in it. (If the work is low impact and you hate it, maybe just stop doing it.) The second option is way more impactful. You hire into the work that grows the business, so you scale further, quicker.

One more thing before we leave this stage.

Before you accept a new role, interrogate the org size and stage of growth, not the title. The title will mislead you. The stage won't.

Quick break for Navattic, who presents this issue.

They just launched their MCP, which means Claude can now build and update your interactive demos for you. The new Skill Library is the fun part: exec summaries from demo analytics, persona script adapters, share-link follow-ups. Browse them all here.

The 10 person growth team

This is the player/coach stage.

Roughly half your time is spent doing your own IC work, the other half leading the team. And even though you’re the person leading the team, you’re still the most talented executer on the team.

Which means right around 10 people, everything kinda breaks.

There’s no longer enough time in the day for you to touch every project. The team is busy but maybe not super effective, so your instinct is to lean in. “Ping me and I’ll help.” “Email it over, I’ll review it tonight.”

Their busy weeks become your late nights.

2 fixes that help:

1. Clarify (and verify). Bring the team together and lay out what matters most right now, the strategy to get there, and how each role ladders up to it. Then have them share back what they absorbed, and reinforce it in your 1-on-1s, planning meetings, and strategy reviews. Under-communicating is one of the biggest mistakes I see from growth leaders.

2. Develop team operating principles. 5 to 8 rules for how your people make decisions when you’re not in the room, written around specific trade-offs. Speed or rigor? Polish or rough first drafts? Spend aggressively or protect the CAC? When the team knows the answers, they know when to sprint and when to go deep without you needing to be involved in everything.

And recently, leaders of teams around this size keep telling me they’re unhappy with how their teams use AI.

The complaint is always a version of the same story… Someone on your team prompts Claude with "based on what you know about me, what should I do?" Then they hand you the 8 to 11 page strategy brief and ask what you think.

They outsourced the exact judgment you hired them for.

There’s no playbook for this yet, but many leaders are writing their own AI specific SOPs to include in their team operations manuals. Defining which parts of the job AI is encouraged in, and at what stage of a project: strategy, execution, or analysis.

The people work can also become heavy around this team size.

Coaching, hiring, firing, figuring out what to do when someone isn’t performing. This is the size where managing humans becomes a real, weekly part of the job, and when it’s going badly, it travels home with you.

A lot of new leaders are caught off guard by how much of the role this becomes.

The director breaking point

Somewhere around the director level, everything that made you an A player starts working against you.

Your instincts, your rules, your SOPs all live inside your head, which means you can’t scale them to your team. You’re still the most talented person on the team, and you can’t teach anyone how to become you.

The fix is 2 artifacts.

1. Your growth strategy: what you’re doing, why, and what it looks like when you get there.

2. Your growth operations manual: how the work actually gets done. Repeatable processes, the KPIs you track and when you act on them, your operating principles, key meetings, how you work cross-functionally.

You can skip this and keep your job. But the people who skip it are the ones I end up talking to about burnout, weekend Slack messages, and late night emails. The stuff has to come out of your head and into a document before you can train others on it.

The 25 person growth team

At the top of the mountain, the job changes shape one more time. You’ve graduated from managing programs and experiments to managing an ecosystem.

This is a coach-first job.

What you produce now is other leaders, and that changes where the constraint shows up. Because most people assume the bottleneck at this size is headcount: more people, more output. What I actually find with teams that scaled fast is that the bottleneck is leadership density.

“Ryan” runs a growth team of 22 people split across 3 pods: acquisition, activation, and monetization.

Only 1 pod has a true leader running it. So Ryan spends his weeks jumping in to problem solve for the 2 pods with nobody at the helm. The team is big. The leadership layer isn’t there yet.

The other thing that surprises people at this level is where the rest of your time goes.

Directors tell me all the time: “Once I’m a VP with a big team, the execs will finally listen to my ideas and I can stop selling and just do the work.”

In practice I find the opposite to be true.

The bigger your team gets, the more of your job is advocating for the work. The most senior growth leaders I know, including the C-level folks I’ve coached, spend way more time selling, reselling, and pre-setting meetings than the other operators do.

At this level you should be doing basically zero IC work.

If you’re still doing a meaningful amount, that’s a red flag. Either the team has the wrong focus, or you’ve got the wrong team.

Which stage is right for you?

My friend Adam Fishmam (former Head of Growth at Lyft, now at Mozilla) describes 3 growth archetypes, and they map pretty well to team size here.

The builder goes zero to one with the growth model. The first channels, the first onboarding flow, the first conversion path. That’s the solo head of growth, up to a team of about 3.

The optimizer makes the model better. Testing, segmentation, breaking through plateaus. That’s roughly the 7-12 person team.

The innovator layers on new stuff once you hit diminishing returns. This looks like unlocking new channels, new loops, maybe a second product or a new go-to-market motion. That maps nicely to your 20-plus team.

It’s easy to glamorize any of these stages, or talk yourself into one sounding fun. Energy is the better guardrail. Which of these jobs would you be excited to spend all day, every day inside of?

It’s extremely rare to be great at being a 1 person growth team and managing a 25 person team.

Because each size forces you to give away the things that made you successful at the last one. Going from 1 to 10 means giving away most of the IC work. Going from 10 to 25 means managing managers and giving away even more.

Once you know where you thrive, you've got 2 ways to spend more of your career there.

• Job hop: find a company at the stage that gives you energy, help them win, and when they outgrow that stage, go find the next one. Wash, rinse, repeat.

• Grow with the same company, and commit to growing your skillset at least as fast as the business does. If you pick the second path, get yourself some support. Growing that fast is uncomfortable, and doing it alone makes it harder.

Remember the growth leader from the top of this post?

They were great at running a 7-person team in the optimization stage. Then they took a solo building-stage role without realizing the job had changed underneath the title.

That's the mistake I hope this post helps you avoid.

I filmed a full video going way deeper on each stage, including the management frameworks I teach at every level

I have 1 coaching spot open for August

I coach Directors, VPs, and Heads of Growth through these transitions: stepping up a stage, getting out of the weeds, building the leadership layer.

And I have 1 roster spot open as we enter August. If you’re looking to level-up in 2026, apply here —>

“Tessa” is the Director of Member Growth at a large subscription business that’s been through a lot of changes.

• An acquisition

• A restructuring

• Hiring new execs

• Changes in strategy

• Multiple rounds of layoffs

And every time the company goes through another big shift, she gets a new manager.

She’s understandably exhausted. Every new manager means a new beginning. Someone new to clarify her responsibilities with, build trust with, get some W’s on the board with.

That process takes a few months.

Which means right when she’s hitting a groove, her manager changes and she starts over. But she likes the energy of early-stage companies. So this probably won’t be the last time she has to do this.

On a recent call, she mentioned wanting a system to onboard a new manager.

Something repeatable she could do every time this happens instead of waiting and hoping it goes well. We built one together.

This post is that system.

And before we walk through it, it’s worth sharing how I know this plan solves the right problems. Because for the past 6 months, I’ve also been coaching someone in her bosses position.

I’ve been supporting her new manager too

Not Tessa’s actual boss.

Someone different, but in a similar situation to her boss. “Jamie” is an SVP of Marketing who was hired to replace a previous team lead.

She walked in as the new leader and inherited a large team of direct reports. Her CEO wanted asked to evaluate everyone and decide who stayed. The unspoken expectation was half might go as she reworked her strategy and operating system.

From the outside looking in, it’s easy to look at a new executive like Jamie and think, “this person wants to fire everyone and bring in their own people.”

But the truth is she wanted to keep as many people as possible.

In fact, she showed up planning to win them over. Because she needed to show results fairly quickly to the board and her CEO. And it takes a long time to let people go, to scope out new roles, to hire and onboard great people. Those are all things that limit your ability to get quick wins on the board today.

The best option was to increase the impact with the team that she inherited.

Then 4 months in, her CEO turned up the heat.

Leads were still down. Her CEO called a meeting and said, “this is my biggest problem, so it’s your biggest problem.” She called it the most tense leadership conversation of her career.

She told me she was worried she was failing.

That maybe she’d get cut.

Your new manager is also someone who’s being evaluated by someone above them.

I share all this to illustrate the context that a “new boss” usually doesn’t share with their direct reports. They’re not walking in looking for people to fire. They’re looking for people who make their job easier.

It’s understandable to be worried about losing your job.

Stanford research found that when the new leader comes from outside the company, the odds a senior manager ends up leaving roughly double. Sometimes you might not be a fit for their future, and other times you might not like the future.

But your boss wants a reason to keep you.

Managing people out takes time. Hiring is slow. And ramping someone new is slower. and all of this stuff is time spent not making progress on your goals

Here’s how you give them one.

The system: 4 conversations for your first 30 days

Each one makes you easier to manage and makes it easier for your new boss to see how you fit into what they’re building. The last one plants a win that plays out over the next couple of months, but the conversations start now.

1. Clarify and verify your role and responsibilities

Don’t open the relationship by asking how they see you fitting into their future (they don’t know yet). Tell them what you’ve owned.

“Historically, here’s the business result I’ve been accountable for. And here’s the surface area I’ve been focused on.”

Most new managers can’t fill this in for you.

They know your title. They might have a rough idea of what you do. They don’t know why you do it, what your role means at this company, or how much rides on it. So fill it in for them, before they guess.

Here’s the risk if you skip this.

A manager who can’t explain what you do or why it matters can’t go to bat for you when it counts.

Jamie saw this on the team she inherited. They’d been told what to do every minute of every day by the old leader, so when the instructions stopped, most of them couldn’t tell her what they actually owned.

They knew their tasks. But they couldn’t explain their impact on the business or why it mattered.

She couldn’t go to bat for them.

2. Walk them through your strategy and how it ladders up

Once you’ve clarified your role, show them what you’re working on and why.

Two things have to come through.

1. You have an actual strategy, not a task list.

2. It ladders straight up to the business outcomes (and surface area) you just clarified.

Talk through the assumptions you used to build it, and what you’d change if their priorities shift.

That does the boss’s job for them.

And if they do decide to re-scope your role, they’re doing it knowing how thoughtfully you approach the current one.

If you need some support, here’s the strategy guide I use with clients.

Here’s the risk if you skip this.

When your boss asks what you’re working on and you hand them a task list, you’ve told them you’re a doer.

When Jamie asked her team what the growth plan was, she got to-do lists. Plenty of activity. Almost no case for why the activity was the right activity, or how it laddered to the number their team was accountable for.

Hand your boss a real strategy instead, and you’ve told them you’re someone worth keeping.

3. Get explicit on decision rights

Ask which decisions your boss wants a say in, and which ones they’d rather you just run with.

You’re doing this for 2 reasons.

1. It shows you’re easy to manage.

2. Their answer tells you what’s on their mind right now and where you can start collaborating.

When they flag the decisions they want in on, they’re handing you their focus areas without meaning to.

Here’s the risk if you skip this.

Either you move too fast on something they wanted involvement in. Or you ask permission for something they expected you to handle, and it reads as someone who needs their hand held.

Either one chips away at the trust you’re trying to build.

4. Find their early win(s), and help them get it

Most of the time, you won’t know your new boss’s priorities yet.

They’ll tell you they’re in listening mode for their first couple of months while they figure things out behind the scenes.

Part of what they’re figuring out is whether you’re part of the future they’re building. They’re hoping you are. Your job is to get them talking sooner. The faster you understand what a quick win looks like to them, the faster you can start having an impact in their new world.

So ask.

“What are you hoping to show progress on in the next 60 to 90 days?”

Then whatever they share, help them.

New leaders are under more pressure to show progress fast than you’d guess, often from a boss or a board they haven’t fully won over yet either.

Nothing builds trust faster than helping them get some early wins.

These 4 moves are really you taking ownership

Every one of these conversations is you deciding to own the transition instead of waiting for someone else to manage it.

You showed up with answers before they had to go looking. You made yourself easy to manage instead of something to figure out. All of this is part of managing up.

Tessa meets her next boss next week.

This time she’ll start with a plan to run the transition, instead of waiting and hoping it goes well.

—

And if you’re interested in getting some support navigating situations like these:

I help senior growth leaders navigate new bosses, new mandates, and the shift from operator to leader.

• Applications for the next cohort of the council open in a few weeks. Join the waitlist here.

• I have 1 coaching spot available in July. Apply here.

Every week I talk to 10 or 15 heads of growth. Most of them are stuck in the same spot right now.

The goals they’ve been handed are the most aggressive of their careers. The budgets are some of the tightest. Their headcount’s frozen but they’re being told to increase output using AI. And they’re staring at a roadmap they have no realistic way to execute on.

So they do what most A-players do.

They take on more themselves, get deeper in the weeds, and try to fix everything. And in the process, become the bottleneck.

I had a former client who did something completely different.

He inherited a big job with a hard constraint

His name is Philip. And when we first met, he was the head of growth at a Series A startup called Rupa Health.

He’d just been handed the job.

The previous head of growth, his manager, had left, and Philip got tapped to take over the entire growth + marketing function. His background was running media and content. Suddenly he owned the entire growth engine.

And it was a lot to own.

The company was doing 8 figures in revenue. He inherited an 11-person team. A growth budget around $7 million a year. He was also the youngest person on the team, now managing people who used to be his peers.

And he had one constraint that’s going to sound familiar:

he couldn’t add full-time headcount.

New full-time hires were hard to get approved. The bar was high and the process was slow. But contractors were the opposite. A $2,000 to $3,000 a month contractor sailed through with barely a question.

So that’s the direction he got nudged. He built out a large team of effective contractors instead.

The team most of the company didn’t know about

He’d run this playbook before.

Years earlier he ran a small content agency with 13 video editors in the Philippines cutting his clips. When he joined Rupa, he brought his 5 best with him.

Then it snowballed. His boss would ask, “can you find someone to do X?” Philip would post a job, run a quick test project, and hire. Over and over.

Until one day he gave a presentation to the company that included a line nobody saw coming: “we’ve got 20 people overseas who help us do basically everything.”

Most of the company had no idea.

They handled SEO, landing pages, design and creative, content, and customer support, plus a layer of VAs and EAs across the whole team.

A Series A company, running like one several times its size.

Here’s how he made it work, and what you can actually steal from it.

He’d found a different playbook

The usual worry with an overseas team is the management overhead. The training, the meetings, the hand-holding, the constant check-ins.

Philip ran into almost none of that.

His playbook came down to two things.

First, he paid for output. Most of the work had a clear deliverable attached. He’d write a tight brief, set the bar, and judge the result. No daily syncs, no babysitting.

Second, he vetted on proof of work. Every new hire did a small paid homework assignment first, and he watched what they actually produced. “Hire someone for 48 hours,” he says, “and you know if they’re good.”

Proof of work beats the resume, the interview, and the polished portfolio every time. It’s the single biggest predictor he’s found.

He got specific about what “great” looked like

The standard he set is what made the whole system run.

Every contractor wrote a 30/60/90 day plan. What they’d do, what success looked like, and what exceptional looked like in their role.

A lot of these folks had never worked somewhere that told them what good actually meant. Give people a clear picture of excellent, plus a way to check their own work against it, and you don’t have to hover.

What I actually helped him with

I can’t take credit for any of the overseas stuff. That was all Philip. He’s the most resourceful growth leader I’ve ever worked with.

What he and I worked on was the other half of the problem: pointing all that horsepower at the right targets.

When Philip took over, the strategy was “paint the wall.” IE, do everything, everywhere. Some of it worked great. A lot of it had no measurable return.

So we worked on strategy, prioritization, and focus.

Killing the good ideas to protect the great ones. He had a huge team and still couldn’t do everything, which is its own lesson.

We also reframed his metric.

He’d been holding himself accountable to GMV, a number he didn’t actually control. His teams real job was signups. Impressions to signups was the one thing he owned, so that became the north star.

Then every person on that team got pointed at it.

The hires gave him capacity. The focus increased their impact.

Why direct beat the agency every time

Philip’s a former agency owner, and has strong opinions about why direct contractors beat agencies.

An agency has to stack clients to make margin. One person might carry 5 to 7 accounts. They know clients churn in a few months, so they spread everyone thin and ration effort toward whoever’s most at risk of leaving. You get two good months, then a worse one.

I lived this in-house and hated it. The person who sells you is somebody great. The person who actually does your work is junior and brand new to the seat.

With a direct contractor, the incentives line up. If they do bad work, they lose the gig.

It worked

In October 2024, Rupa got acquired by Fullscript.

That 25-person growth team was a huge part of how a small company punched that way above its weight.

And Philip liked the model so much he turned it into his own company, Hire Overseas, helping other teams run the same play. (If you actually want to do this, that’s a solid place to start. He knows this playbook better than anyone else.)

The constraint did him a favor

The reason I think this story is so fascinating is the constraint.

Philip couldn’t hire. On paper, that’s a tough spot to be when you’re trying to hit more aggressive goals. But in practice, it pushed him into a more resourceful model that probably beat the traditional one he’d have built with a fat headcount budget.

Most of the growth leaders I talk to are sitting on that same constraint right now. Frozen headcount, rising goals, a roadmap they can’t staff.

You can add real capacity without a single full-time hire. Contractors who deliver on output. Held to a clear bar. Pointed at the one metric you actually own. That’s how Philip built a 25-person team with no new full-time headcount. And it’s part of how a small company ended up getting acquired.

There’s more than one way to build a team.

This came out of my full conversation with Philip on the Growing Forward podcast. If you want the whole story (including the part where I yelled at him on our first call, and the $4,000 in CVS gift cards), the episode link is below.

Philip and I worked together while he was building all of this. If you're a growth leader facing your own challenges: a team to build, hard calls to make, goals that outrun your budget, that's what I coach on 1:1. Grab a time at deliveringvalue.co/coaching

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 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.