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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:
The business/ company fundamentals
The growth model and funnel (the quantitative side of the business)
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:
Have you ever worked with a growth leader/ team before?
What questions do you have for me about my role and about how I think about success?
What are the biggest growth opportunities you see from your perspective? (These could go on your quick wins list.)
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:
Learn about the business, the model, and how work gets done at this company.
Build trust with your team, your peers, and your manager stakeholder group.
Define ownership, accountability, and success before somebody else at your company defines it for you.
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.
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