Head of Growth Job Description: what you are really hiring and how to write it

By Antoine Kotran
September 30, 2025

Founders do a lot of “growth work” before they have a growth team. You tweak the landing page, send the first lifecycle emails, jump on sales calls, and nudge onboarding flows between product releases. That scrappy season teaches you where value actually shows up for customers. It also hides a risk: the company confuses a set of tasks with a system. When growth depends on the founder’s attention, it stalls the moment priorities shift.

What you will get from this article

By the end you will have:

  • A simple way to decide if a Head of Growth is the right hire right now
  • A founder tuned job description you can copy and use today
  • Clear outcomes and KPIs to anchor expectations
  • A practical interview scorecard to align your panel
  • Stage specific tweaks so the JD fits your reality, not someone else’s

Bookmark it, skim the “Who this is for” to confirm fit, then use the copy ready JD near the end.

Who this is for (typical stage and quick variants)

Typical fit: companies between early product market fit signals and Series A through Series B. You have real users, some repeatable value, and the founder is still the glue in the growth system.

  • Seed to Series A, product led: Activation and retention are the highest leverage. You want time to first value down and a basic lifecycle spine.
  • Series A to Series B, mixed motion: Self serve plus sales assist. You need product qualified signals, clean routing, and pricing and packaging that match the two paths.
  • Series B plus, sales led: Stronger brand and demand creation tied to pipeline. You care about partner plays and conversion from marketing qualified to opportunity.

If you are earlier than this, hire a senior growth builder as an individual contributor first. If you are much later, scope this as a director or VP with a team in place.

When a Head of Growth is the right move

Three signals usually arrive together.

  1. You can describe the path to first value in plain language. New users can reach a real outcome without bespoke help, even if it is still clunky.
  2. You see the same few blockers each week. People drop at the same steps. Your pipeline has concentration in sources that could scale with care.
  3. Founder time is the rate limiter. If you stop nudging the system, numbers sag.

If those are true, you do not need a figurehead. You need a builder leader who ships and organizes the work around a simple model.

What this person will actually fix

A strong Head of Growth gives you three things fast.

  • Clarity. One dashboard everyone trusts. Fewer metrics, tighter reviews, honest baselines.
  • Speed with signal. Experiments that connect to product outcomes, not just channel volume. Faster time to first value.
  • Leverage. The team moves from ad hoc tasks to a habit: measure, decide, ship, learn, repeat.

They will not paper over product market fit. They will show where fit is weak, what to try next, and stop you burning money on channels that cannot pay back at your stage.

Ownership on day one

Ownership mirrors the funnel but starts where impact is highest. In product led startups, early wins come from activation and retention: shorten time to first value, clean up onboarding and empty states, and wire lifecycle messages to real events. In mixed motion companies, early wins often live at the handoff between self serve and sales assist: product qualified signals, cleaner routing, and better context for reps.

The operating rhythm is one weekly growth review with founder and product, a two week ship cadence, and a lean backlog that favors work in the product over surface level campaigns.

Team shape and tools without bloat

At hire, expect a small pod: the Head of Growth plus shared design and engineering time. Add a lifecycle marketer or a growth engineer when the model proves leverage. Use the tools you already have. Start with GA4 or Mixpanel or Amplitude for behavior, your warehouse and BI for truth, and Customer.io or Braze for lifecycle. Add sophistication only when it adds signal.

Outcomes, not chores

Your JD should declare outcomes first, then the work. Targets belong in the interview process, not on the public page, but the direction should be clear:

  • Faster activation and a shorter time to first value for target segments
  • Retention and expansion up and to the right
  • Two to three channels with reliable unit economics and room to scale
  • A healthy experiment cadence where winners ship to production

Copy ready job description (founder tuned)

Head of Growth
Location: [Remote or City]
Reports to: Founder CEO
Team today: Small and hands on. Borrowed design and engineering. Add specialists as the model proves out.

Role overview
Own our growth model end to end. Map the path to value, instrument the funnel, and ship the changes that increase activation, retention, and revenue. Work directly with the founder and product to compress time to value, prove two to three scalable channels with positive payback, and make growth a weekly habit.

What you will do

  • Model and measure. Define our north star and input metrics. Build simple, truthful dashboards and a weekly review rhythm.
  • Acquire and convert. Stand up channels that fit our motion: content and SEO, performance, partners, founder led distribution, and community. Improve conversion across landing, signup, pricing, and paywalls.
  • Drive activation. Redesign onboarding, empty states, and lifecycle triggers so new users reach the aha moment fast.
  • Lift retention and revenue. Identify usage patterns that predict renewal and expansion. Turn them into product nudges, lifecycle programs, and packaging improvements.
  • Run the engine. Keep a prioritized backlog, write clear experiment briefs, and close the loop every week. Share what shipped, what changed, and what we learned.
  • Build leverage. Be hands on at first. Scope the first growth hires when the model shows a need.

What success looks like in 6 to 12 months

  • A simple dashboard the exec team uses weekly
  • Higher activation and shorter time to first value
  • Retention improves in our target segments
  • Two to three channels with reliable unit economics and room to scale
  • A steady experiment cadence with shipped wins

Requirements

  • 5 plus years in growth, product, or performance with shipped wins you can show
  • Comfortable with analytics and experimentation and pulling your own data
  • Experience partnering with product and engineering to ship in product changes
  • Clear communicator who can make a messy funnel simple

Nice to have

  • Experience in our market or motion
  • SQL or Python comfort
  • First growth hire experience

How we will work
Weekly growth review with founder and product. Two week cycles. Thin process, bias to live traffic, and decisions anchored in data.

How to apply
Send two examples of growth work you shipped, a brief outline of the growth model you would start with here, and a dashboard or doc that shows how you track results.

Tune the JD by stage (swap lines, do not rewrite the whole thing)

Seed to Series A, product led

  • Add: own onboarding and empty states, set up lifecycle from day zero to day thirty, raise activation in the core use case
  • De-emphasize: heavy brand work and complex paid portfolios

Series A to Series B, mixed motion

  • Add: design product qualified signals, route to sales with context, align pricing and packaging across self serve and sales tiers
  • De-emphasize: single channel heroics

Series B plus, sales led

  • Add: demand creation tied to pipeline, partner and ecosystem plays, improve conversion from marketing qualified to opportunity
  • De-emphasize: deep in code onboarding unless activation is the main blocker

Interview scorecard that matches the role

  • Map a growth model. Can they choose a north star and counter metrics and make trade offs clear
  • Design smart tests. One deep win and one miss with effect size and what they kept
  • Partner with product. Concrete onboarding or lifecycle changes they shipped
  • Make channels work. How they proved payback and capped risk
  • Communicate simply. Can they make a dashboard useful for a small team

Red flags
All channel talk with no activation depth. Process theater. No shipped product changes. Dashboards that confuse rather than clarify.

Final check before you post

Read the page out loud. Does it sound like your company and the work waiting on day one. If it reads like chores without ownership, fix it. If it reads like a brand campaign role, fix it. If it hides the weekly review and the expectation to ship product changes, fix it.

I’m Antoine, a Growth Consultant. I led growth at two startups that exited.

Now I help other early-stage teams do the same.
Let’s talk.
“Antoine truly gets early-stage startups. He knows how to drive growth”
Justin Setzer - Co-Founder & CEO of Demand Curve
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I’ve been in startups for over a decade — across sales, marketing, growth, and operations. I’ve worn most hats, sometimes all at once.
Over the years, I’ve been everything from an individual contributor to a Head of Growth, Director, and Founder. Most often, founders bring me on as their first commercial hire — full-time or fractional — to help get traction, build a function from scratch, and scale up.
I know what it’s like to be a team of one. I’ve built the systems, run the experiments, talked to the customers, and eventually, built out the team.
And I won’t sugarcoat it: building a company is hard. It’s rewarding, but also brutal — limited resources, shifting markets, daily fires. I’ve seen the wins and earned the battle scars.
Through all of it, I’ve developed a deep understanding of what it takes to get from pre-seed to Series A — and to set things up for long-term, sustainable growth.
I’ve helped startups go from $0 to $5M ARR and raise over $50M in funding (though you won’t see those numbers plastered everywhere — I value my clients’ trust more than public bragging rights).
These days, I spend my time helping early-stage founders navigate the messy, high-stakes, high-reward early days.