What should a new growth leader prioritize first upon joining a company?

Casey Winters · Sep 22, 2021

A new growth leader's onboarding should carve out substantial time to go deep in the data — understanding the data model, what's captured and how — and to build their own dashboards or views of the business

That's how he built his own understanding of the business at Grubhub and Pinterest — writing SQL, tracing traffic sources, conversion, cohort retention curves by user type

Scope: easier if someone already at the company can walk them through existing dashboards

22:17 Welcome 20Growth: How To Hire a Head of Growth? What are Signs of World-Class Talent? How To Structure the Process? How To Onboard Growth Teams? The Relationship Between Head of Growth and CEO and more with Casey Winters, Chief Product Officer @ Eventbrit

Raman Malik · Nov 15, 2024

Someone starting a new head of growth role should obsess over every number in the dashboard and know the metrics better than anyone else in the company

Seeing how the numbers correlate teaches you how the growth machine works and where its friction points are, which builds the intuition for better prioritisation — and being the 'numbers person' gets you pulled into the important meetings

51:51 20Growth: Inside Perplexity's Growth Machine: What Worked, What Did Not Work | Why Paid Acquisition is a Drug and Brand Marketing is BS | The Good, Bad and Ugly of A/B Tests and Why Micro-Optimisations are Under-Rated with Raman Malik

Hila Qu · Jan 18, 2023

A growth hire's first week should be about getting the lay of the land: auditing existing tools and past initiatives, diving into historical data, meeting the CEO/manager/leaders, meeting their own team and collaborators, and sitting in on a customer call

Growth people crave data, and you need a feel for who the customers are before acting

31:17 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

Matt Lerner · May 31, 2024

Onboarding a growth hire has two steps: first become an information sponge on customers, the mathematical growth model and the team's capabilities; then decide what to prioritise and what not to do

90% of results come from 10% of the work, so with limited runway the choice of what to work on is the most important decision

Scope: core principles to be adapted to each company's level of process

40:04 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

Hila Qu · Jan 18, 2023

A growth hire should begin generating results and quick wins within the first month rather than only analysing

The quicker you generate results, the easier it is to move forward as a growth leader; analysis alone won't change results, you have to change something

32:04 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

Hila Qu · Jan 18, 2023

In the first quarter a growth hire should convert early wins into a formal, sustainable program: a growth model, a cadenced experimentation program, a system of record for learnings, a weekly growth meeting, and a growth culture

Momentum and excitement from quick wins is what lets you systematise into a process that generates wins constantly

Scope: assumes early quick wins were achieved

33:17 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

Raman Malik · Nov 15, 2024

A new growth leader's first job is building measurement infrastructure — logging, attribution, first-party cookies — before optimizing anything

When you ask what's happening across acquisition, engagement and monetization you get no answers, only more questions, so you can't understand the world without instrumentation

8:58 Build measurement infrastructure before optimizing anything

Hila Qu · Jan 18, 2023

A new growth function should first build a growth model and then formalize an experimentation program with a set weekly cadence and process embedded in the company's operating system.

Making experimentation formal and cadenced turns it into part of how the company operates rather than an ad hoc activity.

0:00 Build a growth model then formalize a cadenced experimentation program

Guillaume Cabane · Nov 29, 2023

A new growth leader should build strong connections to learn what is working for other teams, outsourcing the cost of learning

Growth success is testing and learning, so borrowing others' learnings saves enormous effort and capital and lets you deploy them to your own business

58:59 Build external peer network connections to outsource the cost of learning what works