What Does a Head of Growth Actually Do?
With a team of 1, 10, and 25
I have 1 coaching spot opening up in August. If you work in growth and want support increasing your impact and influence in 2026, 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:
You create the growth strategy.
You execute that strategy as the main IC.
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:
Who are the customers, and are there any inklings of product market fit?
Are there 1 or 2 channels worth scaling?
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.
You can list all the work you don’t like doing and hire someone junior to absorb it.
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:
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.
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.
Your growth strategy: what you’re doing, why, and what it looks like when you get there.
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 —>