A few weeks ago, my friend Daphne Tideman and I ran a live workshop on the rise of the one-person growth engineer.
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.