Hey, I’m about to re-open my mastermind group, The Growth Council.
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.
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.
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And if you don’t have a John yet, that’s what The Growth Council is. Cohort 2 kicks off in October. Apply here.