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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:
List out the handful of metrics we’re going to prioritize tracking.
Define who owns each one of those metrics.
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:
Get into a great rhythm.
Refine your growth model and your growth dashboards.
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.