Head of Growth vs Head of Marketing: how to choose for your stage

Founders often frame this as a title choice. It is not. Choosing between a Head of Growth and a Head of Marketing is choosing the engine you build first. One leader turns your product and funnel into a compounding system. The other shapes the story, creates demand, and orchestrates go-to-market so the market understands and chooses you. They overlap; they partner; they are not the same job.

The quick answer

If you already see signs of product-market fit and users can reach first value without a long sales process, a Head of Growth will harden activation, retention, and monetization. If your constraint sits outside the product in positioning, proof, and pipeline, hire a Head of Marketing to clarify the story and make demand repeatable.

What a Head of Growth actually does

A Head of Growth treats your product and funnel like a living system. They begin with the journey to aha, instrument it, and remove friction until more users experience value sooner. The cadence feels like engineering with weekly hypotheses, small releases, and permanent lifts.

They map the moments that matter from visit to sign up to first action to first repeat to expansion. Then they run cross-functional experiments. Think onboarding changes, data importers to speed setup, pricing and packaging tests with payback guardrails, and lifecycle nudges that appear when someone is one action short of value. Their craft is experimentation with clear counterfactuals, segment reads, and the judgment to stop scaling work that does not compound.

If they do it well, time to first value gets shorter, retention gets stickier, and expansion becomes more frequent. The system keeps improving because the team runs it like a rhythm, not a stunt.

What a Head of Marketing actually does

A Head of Marketing owns how the market understands you. They turn fuzzy benefits into a message architecture Sales can use and prospects can remember. They balance demand creation, which makes more of the right people care, with demand capture, which ensures you show up when they raise a hand. They also build a proof engine with reviews, case studies, references, and analyst coverage so trust does not depend on a heroic rep.

You will see the impact in a clearer website narrative, segmentation Sales actually follows, a channel mix that matches your motion, and a measurement model you believe. The work is orchestration. PMM for launches and win rate lift, content that moves deals forward, partners that lend trust, and paid programs that hit payback targets rather than vanity leads.

The core question is not the title

It is the work that actually needs doing and whether you have the ingredients to do it well right now.

Early companies absolutely do need someone to build funnels, instrument the path to value, and run tight experiments. The real debate is whether that should be a full Head of Growth with executive scope and people leadership or a founding growth builder who is a senior IC or hybrid PM who ships.

When an early Head of Growth makes sense

• Users can experience meaningful value quickly inside the product, think hours or a day, not weeks. In that world buyers believe what they can see and do, so there is a lot of leverage in activation, early retention, and expansion. You need someone who can orchestrate engineering, design, data, and lifecycle toward compounding lifts.
• You already have enough flow to learn. As a rough rule, at least three hundred to five hundred new signups per week or a few thousand weekly actives so experiments read in weeks, not quarters.
• Founders cannot realistically own the cadence. You have tried a weekly experiment rhythm and it keeps slipping because no one has the mandate and time.
• The role will be truly cross-functional. They will own instrumentation, activation and onboarding, lifecycle, pricing and packaging tests, and CAC payback guardrails. This is not run some ads and landing pages.

If that is you, hire a Head of Growth who both builds and leads. If you want leveling flexibility, use Founding Growth Lead with explicit authority across product and funnel.

When a founding growth IC is the better first move

• You are still working toward product-market fit and most of the work is hands on. Event taxonomy, importers and templates, onboarding rewrites, lifecycle setup, and scrappy tests.
• You do not have experiment volume yet. You need qualitative loops and directional tests more than statistically tight A/B tests.
• A Head title would be premature. It sets expectations for team size, scope, and compensation you may not need for six to twelve months.

In this case, hire a Senior Growth PM or Growth Engineer plus a Lifecycle Marketer, or one unicorn who can cover most of both, and add a fractional growth advisor to keep the rhythm sharp.

When a Head of Marketing should come first

• It takes weeks to reach meaningful value, and deals hinge on people based proof. Reviews, references, case studies, partner credibility, and analyst validation.
• Your biggest constraint sits outside the product. The story is fuzzy, proof is thin where it matters, pipeline quality is inconsistent, or sales enablement is weak.
• You need orchestration across positioning, demand creation and capture, PMM, content, comms, and partners.

Here a Head of Marketing will have more leverage than Growth in the early innings.

Stage guidance, Seed, Series A, Series B and beyond

Pre seed to Seed. Keep growth accountable at the founder level, unless users can reach value quickly and you have enough flow to learn. If so, hire a founding growth lead or Head with real cross-functional scope. In all cases invest in the product path to value and basic proof with credible logos and early case stories.

Series A.

• If your motion is self serve or sales assist and users can experience value quickly, a Head of Growth will turn sporadic wins into a system. Expect better activation, clearer upgrade moments, pricing experiments with guardrails, and lifecycle that actually drives behavior.
• If your motion is sales assist or enterprise and it takes weeks to hit value, and deals depend on external proof, hire a Head of Marketing to improve pipeline quality, tighten positioning, raise win rates, and make go-to-market repeatable.

Series B and beyond. You will likely need both. Sequence depends on today’s constraint. A common pattern is Growth under Product to keep experiment velocity high, Marketing building the market narrative, partner surface area, and field motions, and a crisp handshake at the PQL and pipeline boundary.

Org design that actually works and how to avoid turf wars

You will see three workable models.

1. Growth under Product for PLG heavy companies. Best when many wins require shipping code. Pros are experiment velocity and tight measurement. Cons appear when Marketing cannot feed qualified traffic and tests starve. Fix that with a shared funnel review and a channel roadmap aligned to growth bets.
2. Growth under Marketing for channel heavy work. Best when leverage sits in acquisition and onsite conversion. Pros include message match from ad to page to trial and shared reporting. Cons are that product changes can lag. Fix by pre-allocating engineering capacity to growth sprints.
3. Standalone Growth at scale. Scope covers activation, retention, monetization, pricing, lifecycle, and data. Pros are focus and career path. Cons are that it requires strong executive sponsorship and crisp ownership boundaries. Write the interfaces down. For example activation to a specific percentage is Growth’s goal, Sales owns MQL to SQL quality, and Product owns core value width and depth.

Regardless of the model, create two governance artifacts. A weekly time boxed growth review with hypotheses, results, and next bets. A shared dashboard that Sales, Product, and Marketing can all live with.

KPI frameworks that keep you honest

For Head of Growth, think in four lanes:

1. Acquisition efficiency
   CAC payback by channel and program, marginal versus blended CAC, PQL or PQA volume and conversion by source, and the percent of traffic that hits a qualified experience.
2. Activation and retention
   Time to first value is one signal but not the only one. Track activation to the key outcome for your product, day one and week one retention, cohort stickiness after week four, and the frequency and depth of use on the core actions that predict success.
3. Monetization and expansion
   ARPU and expansion rate, net revenue retention, time to first expansion, and the share of revenue coming from healthy upgrade paths rather than discounts.
4. Experiment quality
   Experiment velocity, the percent of tests that create a permanent lift, median size of lifts, and the ratio of experiments that ship to experiments that stall. Add guardrails for product health and unit economics so you do not chase short term wins.

For Head of Marketing, anchor on four complementary lanes:

1. Demand health
   Sourced and influenced pipeline by segment and region, pipeline coverage ratio against targets, cost per qualified opportunity, and the contribution of each channel to late stage opportunity creation.
2. Narrative and proof
   Win rate by segment linked to PMM work, proof density at the stages where deals stall, review velocity and average rating, and share of search for the brand and the category terms that matter.
3. Revenue contribution and speed
   Opportunity to close rate by segment, changes in sales cycle length after enablement or new proof assets, partner sourced revenue, and the mix of opportunities from demand creation versus demand capture.
4. Program efficiency
   Return on marketing investment by program, payback period by program, and signs of saturation or fatigue. Use attribution to inform decisions, not to settle debates it cannot truly answer.

Compensation and leveling, make it fair and sane

Title inflation creates noise. Anchor on level and scope, team size, budget authority, and cross-functional ownership, then set a range. A practical lens:

• Head or Director of Growth. Owns activation, retention, monetization, lifecycle, and experimentation cadence. Manages a small cross-functional squad and runs a budget with payback guardrails.
• Head or VP of Marketing. Owns positioning, demand, PMM, content, and comms. Manages managers, sets the measurement model, and is accountable for pipeline quality and narrative.

Use posted ranges in your region and stage as directional inputs, calibrate to internal parity, and be explicit about what Head means at your company.

How to interview like a pro and avoid shiny decks

For a Head of Growth, ask for one story that starts with a broken activation step and ends with a permanent lift six months later. Listen for hypothesis quality, experiment design, guardrails, and what they chose not to scale. Add a working session. Share anonymized funnel data and ask how they would shorten time to value in ninety minutes.

For a Head of Marketing, ask for a positioning rewrite that changed win rates. Look for crisp problem framing, the narrative work with message architecture and proof strategy, orchestration across teams, and how they measured impact beyond vanity metrics. A good work sample is a mini launch plan for a new segment with the proof points and measurement plan spelled out.

Red flags include growth candidates whose playbook is mostly ads and landing pages, marketing candidates who talk brand but never touch pipeline or enablement, and anyone treating attribution as a single source truth.

Conclusion

Choosing between a Head of Growth and a Head of Marketing is not a title exercise. Map where the leverage is today, inside the product or in the market, staff the role that moves that constraint first, and keep your scorecards honest so you know when to add the other leader.