What profile should a company's growth and marketing hires have?

Luke Harries · May 23, 2025

A company's first growth hire should be a single generalist growth marketer owning everything from messaging and positioning to channel setup and testing

Hiring only a product marketer gives good positioning nobody hears about; hiring only a quantitative channel person gets reach that doesn't convert or resonate

Scope: they must deeply understand the product — technical for technical products, consumer-native for consumer products

15:54 20VC: ElevenLabs Head of Growth on Why You Do Not Need PMs | The 7-Part Launch Playbook That Gets 700K+ Views Per Product | The Truth About CAC, Payback & Performance Marketing in AI with Luke Harries

Kieran Flanagan · Jul 11, 2025

The core characteristics of a great growth hire — curiosity, willingness to experiment, relentless persistence toward an outcome — are unchanged by AI; what changes is that one AI-enabled person can now cover onboarding, monetization and the other growth functions that previously required separate hires

AI expands the surface area a single growth person can own, but the underlying traits that make someone effective at growth are the same

Scope: contrast drawn with larger companies that hired one growth person per function

67:24 20Growth: The Death of Growth Teams? | How Hubspot Use AI to Triple Email Conversion | The Future of AI SEO | Why Prompt Engineering is the New Coding | What Every CMO Needs to Know About AI in 2025

Harry Stebbings · May 9, 2026

You should hire 'barrels, not ammunition' — full-stack people who can take something from one to ten on their own

You don't want someone who can only do part of a task and needs someone else for the rest; you want one person who can shoot, edit and post

12:17 20VC: What I Learned from 100 of the Best CEOs in the World | What I Learned from Staying with Mr Beast for 3 Weeks | How We Will Spend More on Tokens than Salaries with Cliff Weitzman, Speechify

Matt Swulinski · Aug 15, 2026

A growth leader should be able to execute themselves, not just direct others — having done everything from zero is what makes a good growth leader

He learned by founding an agency where he had to do everything himself across e-commerce, SaaS and enterprise B2B, so he knows how to launch a Meta ad rather than being a CMO with no execution ability

Scope: drawn from his own career path

50:02 20Growth: How to Build a $100M Growth Engine: Lessons from Wispr Flow and Superhuman | Why You Should Do Paid Ads Today and How To Do Them | How to Build the Best Referral Programs and How to Crush UGC with Matt Swulinski

Harry Stebbings · Aug 15, 2026

It has never been more important for young marketers to be full stack — writing creative, shooting, editing and running the media themselves — rather than specializing in just creative or copywriting

Scope: advice aimed at university students and young people

50:45 20Growth: How to Build a $100M Growth Engine: Lessons from Wispr Flow and Superhuman | Why You Should Do Paid Ads Today and How To Do Them | How to Build the Best Referral Programs and How to Crush UGC with Matt Swulinski

Matt Swulinski · Aug 15, 2026

Hyper-specialists are dying a slow death; the winning profile is a specialized generalist who is best at one thing but gets hands dirty across everything

Growth leaders who don't understand fundamentals like marketing analytics and conversion tracking don't know what makes the system tick; and with ChatGPT and Claude anyone curious can learn any skill step by step

51:04 20Growth: How to Build a $100M Growth Engine: Lessons from Wispr Flow and Superhuman | Why You Should Do Paid Ads Today and How To Do Them | How to Build the Best Referral Programs and How to Crush UGC with Matt Swulinski

Zaria Parvez · Jan 19, 2024

Duolingo's TikTok succeeded because she came in as a new grad without advertising expertise and looked at the brand with fresh eyes

Not knowing the conventions of advertising let her see an odd thing (the owl suit in the office) as content instead of a recruiting prop

Scope: her own account of Duolingo's specific case

4:50 20VC: How Duolingo Scaled to 8M TikTok Followers, How to Create Viral Content, Why Most Companies Suck at Content Marketing and How to Change & Why You Should Not Work with Content Agencies with Zaria Parvez, Global Social Media Manager @ Duolingo

Zaria Parvez · Jan 19, 2024

Advertising experience and agency pedigree are irrelevant when hiring social media people; the real test is whether they can execute a concept into entertaining content

What matters is whether, given a concept, they can find a trending audio, direct the shoot, and write punchy caption and on-screen copy that lands in five seconds

Scope: describes how her own team hires

7:46 20VC: How Duolingo Scaled to 8M TikTok Followers, How to Create Viral Content, Why Most Companies Suck at Content Marketing and How to Change & Why You Should Not Work with Content Agencies with Zaria Parvez, Global Social Media Manager @ Duolingo

Raaz Herzberg · Dec 12, 2025

Marketing's jargon of pipelines, MQLs and SQLs obscures the actual problem, and being untrained in marketing is an advantage because it lets you ask what you are really trying to solve

The real problem is simple — explain a product you can articulate clearly to an audience you already know is buying — and not knowing marketing let her stay removed from the scary terminology

9:53 20Growth: How Wiz Built a $30BN Brand in Enterprise | What Worked vs What Was a Mega Failure: Lessons Learned | Why Marketers Make the Worst CMOs & What To Look for in Growth with Raaz Herzberg

Raaz Herzberg · Dec 12, 2025

Marketing is not a deeply complex domain the way engineering is, and companies should therefore be more open about who they hire into marketing roles

Marketing is intuitive — any human can look at a piece of marketing and correctly judge whether it grabs attention, unlike code or a security product, which requires deep domain knowledge

Scope: people over-complicate it

57:27 20Growth: How Wiz Built a $30BN Brand in Enterprise | What Worked vs What Was a Mega Failure: Lessons Learned | Why Marketers Make the Worst CMOs & What To Look for in Growth with Raaz Herzberg

Harry Stebbings · Jun 20, 2026

Marketing and HR are the hardest functions for startups to hire for, and hiring a big-company enterprise CMO is a red flag

He cites a fast-growing company that hired an ultra-enterprise CMO who doesn't even have a Twitter account

39:55 20VC: Why Remote Work is White Collar Fraud | Why Revenge and Patriotism are the Best Founder Traits | Two Questions Every Founder Needs to Ask | The Wild Story of Raising $1BN from Masa Son in an Hour Long Meeting with Ryan Peterson, Founder @ Flexport

Zaria Parvez · Jan 19, 2024

Companies should staff TikTok with whoever genuinely loves and consumes the platform, even if they're outside marketing, rather than a trained marketer

Marketing training can be taught, but the natural ideation instinct for video content often comes from someone who doesn't even know what marketing is

43:17 20VC: How Duolingo Scaled to 8M TikTok Followers, How to Create Viral Content, Why Most Companies Suck at Content Marketing and How to Change & Why You Should Not Work with Content Agencies with Zaria Parvez, Global Social Media Manager @ Duolingo

Severin Hacker · May 19, 2025

Companies must hire from their target demographic; Duolingo's social media success would have been impossible without Gen Z hires

He personally doesn't understand why Duolingo's own TikTok content is funny, yet it is extremely popular — you need people who know the demographic

19:02 20VC: Duolingo Co-Founder on Why $3M is Harder than $100M to Raise | Why You Should Always Take Tier 1 VCs Even at Worse Terms | Why Europe Can't Win Unless the US Screws Up | How AI Impacts the Future of Work and Education with Severin Hacker

Luke Harries · May 23, 2025

Hiring an in-house creator who can speak to your creator audience as a peer will significantly accelerate growth on short-form video platforms

The person they hired already had the most-viewed ElevenLabs video on YouTube, above the company's own, so he already knew how to make content that audience wanted

32:40 20VC: ElevenLabs Head of Growth on Why You Do Not Need PMs | The 7-Part Launch Playbook That Gets 700K+ Views Per Product | The Truth About CAC, Payback & Performance Marketing in AI with Luke Harries

Hila Qu · Jan 18, 2023

For a first growth hire, early-stage founders should hire an experienced growth PM or growth marketer from the middle layer — not a VP of Growth and not someone junior who hasn't done it before.

A mid-level experienced hire brings depth in at least one area plus analytical skill and the drive to grow into head of growth, which preserves optionality: you can promote them, or later hire an external head of growth to partner with them

Scope: early-stage companies; hire should be very analytical and data-driven with ambition to become head of growth

18:54 20Growth: When To Make Your First Growth Hire? How To Structure the Hiring Process for Growth? Five Core Things the Best Growth Hires Do in the First Week? What to Expect New Growth Hires to Achieve in the First 30 and 90 Days with Hila Qu, Growth Advisor

Sri Batchu · Jul 26, 2023

A director-plus growth leader is only worth hiring once multiple growth programs are showing traction; before that a biz ops profile can run growth

Once paid marketing and product-led growth show initial traction you need someone to run multiple programs; before that the work can be managed by many types of people

18:27 20Growth: Biggest Growth Lessons from Instacart and Opendoor, Why 70% of Growth Experiments Should Fail and How to Fail Fast, How to Hire a Growth Team; Secrets and Tips & Why Operator Investors WIll be the Best Investors in 10 Years with Sri Batchu @ Ram

Sri Batchu · Jul 26, 2023

The biggest founder mistake in hiring growth teams is mismatching seniority to stage — hiring too senior or too junior rather than matching the skill set to the company's growth stage

A three-person growth team needs someone who can coach and get into the weeds rather than a VP; conversely, hiring purely for slope can underestimate the scope of the problem

Scope: he is generally a fan of hiring for slope over intercept

52:42 20Growth: Biggest Growth Lessons from Instacart and Opendoor, Why 70% of Growth Experiments Should Fail and How to Fail Fast, How to Hire a Growth Team; Secrets and Tips & Why Operator Investors WIll be the Best Investors in 10 Years with Sri Batchu @ Ram

Kieran Flanagan · Aug 10, 2022

People who scale from playbook to playbook can distill any operation into a simple framework of the few inputs that truly matter and then build systems to scale those inputs

Most people answer 'how is this team working' with a long-winded list of everything they do rather than the couple of things that matter

21:02 20 Growth: Why You Need a Growth Hire Pre Product-Market-Fit? Why Every Company Will Be a Media Company and How To Do It | Communities; What Really Are They? How To Build Them? What Makes The Best? Why Do Many Not Work? | Kieran Flanagan, SVP Marketing @

Adam Grenier · Mar 15, 2023

The biggest red flags in growth candidates are not talking about the customer and their problem, and copy-pasting exactly what they did at a previous company

Copying a previous playbook signals someone was taught a method rather than holding a framework they can apply to a new business and customer

Scope: he admits this is his marketing hat showing

21:39 20Growth: The Inside Story to Uber's Hypergrowth Scaling; What Worked, What Did Not? | Spending a $1BN Budget at Uber and Why China was the Wild West for Uber | Why You Do Not Need a Growth Team with Adam Grenier

Matt Lerner · May 31, 2024

The behaviours that earn promotion in big-company product and marketing — doing more of the prescribed work faster, managing bigger teams and budgets, making good decks — are useless in an early-stage startup, so you must screen for playbook writers rather than playbook runners

At an early-stage startup you don't want to do most of the things, can't spend most of the money and can't hire the people, so a candidate who arrives to execute their existing playbook will fail

Scope: early-stage startups

33:52 20Growth: The Six Channels Startups Need to Dominate to Grow, Why the Best Growth Talent Never Comes from Marketing or Product, Who and How to Hire Growth Leaders and Teams and Why in a World of AI, Growth is More Science than Art with Matt Lerner

Omer Shai · Jan 31, 2026

For AI-era marketing teams you should hire students and new graduates with zero marketing knowledge but genuine AI passion

Marketing, listening and storytelling can be taught; passion and being AI-first cannot

Scope: marketing is not rocket science; also values giving chances to people no one else would hire

35:42 20Growth: How Wix Built a $100M Marketing Machine | Why LTV is BS and Why Time Return On Investment is the Most Important Metric | How to 10x Your Growth: What is the Next Great Channel with Omer Shai, CMO @ Wix

Matt Swulinski · Aug 15, 2026

What he looks for in growth talent has completely flipped: an AI-native systems thinker with some experience will outcompete a world-class specialist who is not AI native

Someone who can deconstruct what makes their job work can apply AI to it; pure historical experience is no longer the differentiator

Scope: compared to hiring criteria a year ago

52:15 20Growth: How to Build a $100M Growth Engine: Lessons from Wispr Flow and Superhuman | Why You Should Do Paid Ads Today and How To Do Them | How to Build the Best Referral Programs and How to Crush UGC with Matt Swulinski

Matt Swulinski · Aug 15, 2026

Systems thinking — the ability to map your job's inputs, outputs and interrelationships so you can decide what to hand to an agent — should be the hiring bar, tested like an engineering interview

Most people query ChatGPT then go back to doing the job manually; if asked to describe fully automating their job, it turns out they don't understand their own job's inputs and outputs

53:15 20Growth: How to Build a $100M Growth Engine: Lessons from Wispr Flow and Superhuman | Why You Should Do Paid Ads Today and How To Do Them | How to Build the Best Referral Programs and How to Crush UGC with Matt Swulinski

Adam Grenier · Mar 15, 2023

A growth CMO is really a full-stack CMO who brings data, experimentation, product and engineering to drive the whole system from performance media through brand and PR

The growth skillset of leveraging data, flexibility of real-world economics and technology applies to brand, story and content, not just paid channels

11:00 20Growth: The Inside Story to Uber's Hypergrowth Scaling; What Worked, What Did Not? | Spending a $1BN Budget at Uber and Why China was the Wild West for Uber | Why You Do Not Need a Growth Team with Adam Grenier

Harry Stebbings · Oct 22, 2025

Alex Schultz of Meta is the best CMO in the world because he combines an engineering/analytics mind with genuine creativity

He is simultaneously VP of analytics, a physicist, and an artist/visionary creative — a unicorn combination of growth engine and creativity

28:14 20VC: Deel CEO Alex Bouaziz on Raising $300M+ at a $17BN Valuation | Deel vs Rippling: WTF is Going On | Management Lessons from Ben Horowitz and Nik Storonsky | Deel's M&A Playbook: Lessons from 13 Acquisitions: What Works & What Doesn't

Sri Batchu · Jul 26, 2023

You do not need to hire someone who has previously been a head of growth; hire a T-shaped candidate with a deep spike in one growth discipline and invest in scaling them into the others

The function hasn't existed long enough for there to be a large pool of good experienced heads of growth to hire from

Scope: spike can be in product, a marketing function, or analytics and data

19:18 20Growth: Biggest Growth Lessons from Instacart and Opendoor, Why 70% of Growth Experiments Should Fail and How to Fail Fast, How to Hire a Growth Team; Secrets and Tips & Why Operator Investors WIll be the Best Investors in 10 Years with Sri Batchu @ Ram

Matt Lerner · May 31, 2024

The right growth hiring strategy is to select for raw talent and ability, put people in the role, and let them grow, rather than seeking proven growth experience

Every great growth person started as an SEO person, analyst, content marketer or engineer and grew quickly by learning

47:35 20Growth: The Six Channels Startups Need to Dominate to Grow, Why the Best Growth Talent Never Comes from Marketing or Product, Who and How to Hire Growth Leaders and Teams and Why in a World of AI, Growth is More Science than Art with Matt Lerner

Sean Murray · Jan 24, 2024

The best CMOs know the buyer better than anyone else and spend real time with customers, deeply understanding the buyer's pains, what makes them tick, and what drives business and personal value for them

Knowing the buyer deeply is what makes you a great seller, because people don't want to be sold to but do want to buy

9:25 20Sales: How to Scale Into Enterprise Effectively and the Biggest Mistakes Made When Making the Move From PLG to Enterprise, Why Discovery Today is F***** & The Biggest Lessons on How to Do Sales Team Compensation with Sean Murray, CRO @ Greenhouse

Sean Murray · Jan 24, 2024

Marketing should own customer-facing forums like the customer advisory board and routinely listen to customer and prospect calls via conversation intelligence

It keeps marketers genuinely in touch with what's going on and with the personas they engage

10:14 20Sales: How to Scale Into Enterprise Effectively and the Biggest Mistakes Made When Making the Move From PLG to Enterprise, Why Discovery Today is F***** & The Biggest Lessons on How to Do Sales Team Compensation with Sean Murray, CRO @ Greenhouse

Harry Stebbings · May 31, 2024

A disproportionate number of great growth people started their careers in SEO

A pattern he notices from interviewing growth leaders on the show

47:48 20Growth: The Six Channels Startups Need to Dominate to Grow, Why the Best Growth Talent Never Comes from Marketing or Product, Who and How to Hire Growth Leaders and Teams and Why in a World of AI, Growth is More Science than Art with Matt Lerner

Matt Lerner · May 31, 2024

SEO produces great growth people because the work forces you to think constantly about customer intent — what people are looking for and trying to do

You literally cannot do SEO without spending all your time on what customers are searching for and trying to accomplish

47:52 20Growth: The Six Channels Startups Need to Dominate to Grow, Why the Best Growth Talent Never Comes from Marketing or Product, Who and How to Hire Growth Leaders and Teams and Why in a World of AI, Growth is More Science than Art with Matt Lerner

Alex Bouaziz · Oct 22, 2025

Your CMO should be an engineer rather than someone from a traditional CMO background

The best CMOs he has encountered reason from first principles and go deep into the data instead of accepting superficial marketing conventions — e.g. one CMO halved spend while increasing leads by digging into how the system actually works; people who deeply understand systems are the right hires for all roles but especially marketing given how much money flows there

27:34 Engineer minded cmo over traditional marketing background

Zaria Parvez · Jan 19, 2024

Social content teams should hire 'troublemakers' rather than conventional marketers

Troublemakers are the ones who cause seismic cultural shifts

0:00 Unconventional troublemakers over conventional marketers

Raman Malik · Nov 15, 2024

The right first growth hire depends on the existing team; if top-of-funnel is already healthy and the funnel is complex and cross-device, hire a product person who has built those funnels rather than a marketer

The two archetypes — marketer who can juice top of funnel and a product person who can run campaigns — solve different gaps, so the choice follows the current team and founders' makeup

43:23 Choice between marketer and product person follows existing team gaps

Harry Stebbings · Jan 18, 2023

A rigid mindset is a red flag in growth leaders — those who insist on a playbook that worked in a prior era, such as 2018 Facebook ads, fail because the world has changed

The environment has changed since the playbook worked

30:51 Rigid insistence on a prior eras playbook is a red flag in growth leaders

Martin Gontovnikas · Feb 14, 2024 · hedged

Marketing ops and engineering will become the key functions in marketing and will change the entire landscape

AI and automation let you scrape sites for intent data, fine-tune models to personalize outbound in an SDR's name, and even generate deepfake CEO videos — all of which requires ops and engineering rather than human SDRs

62:52 Marketing ops and engineering become the key marketing functions as ai automation advances

Sri Batchu · Jul 26, 2023 · hedged

More growth leaders will come from investing and analytics backgrounds rather than the traditional product or marketing path

Growth is increasingly a discipline of making a portfolio of bets, thinking about ROI, and treating data and experimentation rigorously — which maps to an investor/analyst skill set

3:45 Investing and analytics backgrounds will increasingly produce growth leaders

Harry Stebbings · Jul 26, 2023

The best growth and marketing leaders operate like venture capitalists — placing many bets, analyzing what works, and doubling down efficiently

4:50 Growth leaders should operate like venture capitalists placing many bets

Guillaume Cabane · Nov 29, 2023

The first growth leader should be a former founder rather than a senior experienced growth executive

Most startups fail for reasons unrelated to founder quality; failed founders know how to bounce back, pivot, and stay focused on long-term revenue outcomes — exactly the attributes needed to lead growth

47:29 Former founder not senior growth executive should be the first growth hire

Kipp Bodnar · Sep 28, 2022

The candidate founders really want is someone with multiple spikes of excellence across different marketing disciplines plus demonstrated team building — a single spike may only suffice in an average organization.

Stacking eighteen-month runs of measurable success in different areas, plus a story about how you built the teams that did it, is what makes the ideal candidate.

41:43 Candidates need multiple spikes of excellence plus demonstrated team building not just one spike

Antoine Le Nel · Oct 18, 2024

The role of 'growth manager' is meaningless because growth is not one discipline — it could be virality, performance marketing, brand, or pricing

Nobody can say what a growth manager actually manages, since growth spans wholly different functions

43:15 Growth manager title is meaningless since growth spans many distinct disciplines

Antoine Le Nel · Oct 18, 2024

The biggest mistake founders make when hiring growth teams is hiring generalists to do a bit of everything instead of focused specialists

52:36 Focused specialists beat generalists doing a bit of everything

Mike Duboe · Feb 15, 2023

The first growth hire should be an analytics person — a business-context-aware, SQL-proficient analyst rather than a data scientist

Analytics is the necessary foundation for growth, and analytics debt is as common as tech debt; these people lay the analytics engineering foundation

14:27 First growth hire should be a business context aware sql analyst not a data scientist

Luke Harries · May 23, 2025

Someone starting a new growth role should above all get great at copywriting

Writing engaging copy that gets your message across underpins every growth activity — ads, organic posts, blog posts, tweet threads, landing pages

63:36 Copywriting is the single most important skill for a growth hire

Matt Lerner · May 31, 2024

The best growth people come from scientific backgrounds rather than marketing or product

The best he hired at PayPal were former scientists with no marketing or product experience; they understood data, first principles, causation vs correlation and experimentation, and scientists carry the curiosity and humility of knowing what they don't know

31:24 Scientific background not marketing or product experience produces the best growth hires