The 8-12 Skills You Need to Learn as a New Head of Growth
“So what is it that you do exactly?”
If you’re a Head of Growth, you probably hear this from friends and family all the time.
Growth, unfortunately for all of us tasked with that explanation, is an incredibly grey area with vague boundaries.
Because of that, figuring out what skills you need to learn is tricky, to say the least.
Essentially, the skills you will need to learn are going to depend on multiple points. Let’s look at each one.
How to Figure Out The Skills You Might Need
Puzzling out the skills you might need will come down to four points:
- How mature is the organization?
- What functions/teams does your organization have?
- What are you responsible for?
- Where do you have influence?
Here’s why each one matters:
How mature is the organization?
This matters because the job for a Head of Growth at a Series A startup is going to be completely different for one at a Series C or D startup. Ditto for Head of Growth within a bootstrapped startup.
Your resources will be drastically different and therefore the growth levers open to you will differ as well.
What functions/teams do you already have established?
Answering this question determines how broad or how narrow your growth function will be.
If you have an established:
- Product team
- Sales unit
- Marketing team
Growth will act more as a cross-functional partner focused on experimenting across the entire product funnel. You’ll have more support. But you’ll have to do more stakeholder management and be cautious about not stepping on other teams’ toes.
If you’re a company of 5-10 in a newer or growing startup, then your role as Head of Growth will probably look very similar to the founder’s. You’ll have plenty of freedom, but it also means you’ll be wearing all the hats.
What are you responsible for?
You can’t walk into a Growth role without considering the original context of the role.
Whoever hired you had an idea in mind of what you needed to do. It’s probably influenced the job description. And while you can usually expand a role, you’ll still need to meet the expectations of the founder/head of marketing/CEO who hired you.
Where do you have influence?
This comes down to one major question: can you or can you not touch the product?
Some “growth” roles are performance marketer roles with a flourish. There’s no product work allowed.
Others require full ownership of the entire funnel.
If your Head of Growth role is in the former category, you’ll need to focus on specializing within a narrower band.
If you’re in the second, you’ll need to cover a broader set of skills.
So take a few moments to jot down your answers to these questions. As you read, you’ll naturally see which skillsets apply to your role.
The skills you will need no matter what
Fortunately, there are a handful of skills you’ll need regardless of your answers to the above questions:
Data analytics
Why it matters: Growth is grounded in data. If you’re trying to do “growth” work without data…you’re not doing growth work.
If you’re at an especially new startup with very few users or a limited tech stack, you may not have much data to work with. However, the point of a growth practitioner mindset is to work with what you do have.
What you need to know: Fortunately, you don’t have to be an analytics genius. You just need to know enough.
This includes:
- How to get around your product analytics tool(s)
- A basic grasp of stats (an understanding of sample sizes, confidence intervals, and how to recognize and distinguish correlation and causation is a good start)
- Ways to use spreadsheet tools (if you hate Google Sheets, I recommend Airtable) for grouping and visualizing data
These skills are ones you can get comfortable with relatively quickly.
Beyond that, you’ll also need to learn how to condense your findings into easy-to-digest presentations or reports and provide recommendations on next steps. Unfortunately for all of us, this is more of an art form than a skill-set, so be prepared to continually work on this area.
Who to Talk To:
Growth Analytics for Customer Acquisition & Retention, Matching, and CRO
Experimentation
Why it matters: If data is the foundation of growth, experimentation is the scaffolding. In growth, you have to let go of the “this must work” mindset and instead embrace a “let’s see if this works” mindset.
What you need to know: Just like data analytics, you probably don’t need as many skills as you think.
Understanding experimentation comes down to a few different concepts, including how to:
- Form a hypothesis
- Control for as many variables in an experiment as possible
- Analyze results
- Draw conclusions from those results
If this sounds familiar, it’s because it’s the scientific method. It’s simply applied to a different area (and at about the same level of rigor as a field-experiment would use).
Who to Talk To:
Growth & Analytics | Pricing | Ex-Piktochart
Understanding of Growth Thinking
Why it matters: Understanding growth requires a pretty big mindset shift. instead of thinking in silos and individual channels, you have to think in systems.
This is a skill that once you learn it, it changes the way you approach almost everything, but especially marketing. However, it’s also one area that there’s no clear definition of “growth thinking.”
What you need to know: In growth, systems-thinking is paramount. You have to understand how to zoom out to look at the full “machinery” of a business and understand how all the parts interconnect.
This also ties into understanding growth loops and how loops differ from funnels.
Finally, you also need to understand how to track changes across systems. A small change in variables at one point in the system may lead to huge changes in outputs further down the line. Identifying these leverage points often makes the difference in finding growth “unlocks.”
Who to Talk To:
Head of Growth & Marketing @ Mimo. Growth advisor. Product 50’s Top Growth Product Leader 2024. Reforge practitioner
Business Strategy
Why it matters: Growth is where the rubber meets the road on numbers and KPIs. It’s true that your team shouldn’t be judged on how many experiments have “worked.”
But, you still need to be able to prioritize those experiments and align initiatives based on the business’s needs.
What you need to know: You’ll need to understand your company’s monetization model, its goals (usually in the form of OKRs) and the opportunity space your product solves for.
If you have a grasp of those, you’ll be much better versed in linking the efforts of the growth team to the business’s bottom line.
Who to Talk To:
Product Leader | Enterprise SaaS | Mentor | Advisor
Organization
Why it matters: Growth constantly has its fingers in lots of pies at once. And like any good scientist, you need records on all the experiments you’re running as well as what worked and what didn’t.
Without those records, you’re not going to learn anything and you’re certainly not going to be able to share it with all the cross-functional partners you’re inevitably working with.
What you need to know: It sounds simple, but the organization side of operations is a knack few people have naturally. You’ll need to:
- Be able to keep your team’s knowledge base clearly organized
- Document initiatives and experiments in enough detail that outsiders can understand them, without being overwhelming
- Track the outcomes, learnings, and next steps your team will take
It’s easier said than done and we highly suggest finding frameworks that work for you and your team.
Who to talk to:
Remote People & Operations Specialist | fCOO, Head of Operations | Helping startups & agencies scale 🚀
Skills You Will Likely Need
For these skills, your role will determine how much you’ll need to rely on them. Regardless, having working knowledge in these areas will help you without being an unnecessary effort.
User research
Why it matters: Unless you have an incredibly mature product, product marketing, or self-contained user research function, you’ll likely need this skill for basic experimentation work.
But, even in more mature companies, it’s good form to know your users and be able to speak to them regularly. No other function is going to approach the research the way you will.
What you need to know: The list here includes understanding the spectrum of user research methods and special knowledge of one or two of those methods.
For most startups, if you understand how to run user interviews and how to run surveys, you’ll meet 80% of your research needs.
Who to Talk To:
Director of Product, Growth @ PandaDoc | Startup Advisor | PLG leader | 2x @ Unicorns
CRO
Why it matters: At some point in your role as Head of Growth, you’re going to need to optimize something. It may be an ad, it may be a landing page, it may be an onboarding flow. But at least one project will be guaranteed to need some CRO work.
What you need to know: CRO starts with identifying conversion points. From there, you’ll move into funnel analysis and segmentation. A good grasp of UX and user psychology doesn’t hurt in CRO either.
Once you understand those overarching principles, CRO begins to branch depending on what you’re optimizing. But in the beginning, learning the ropes of optimizing landing pages and webpages will teach the majority of the sub-skills you need to know.
Who to Talk To:
eCommerce Expert | Growth Marketer | Startup Advisor | Certified Conversion Optimizer
PPC
Why it matters: To be clear, growth is about more than acquisition. Growth marketing especially is about way more than PPC.
But, more likely than not, you’ll need to know some basics of paid ads, especially since they can be a quick way to run certain experiments.
What you need to know: How much you’ll need to know about PPC will depend on the maturity of your company’s paid ads function. If you already have one (or more) performance marketers, you can likely get away with baseline knowledge. If you don’t have a performance marketer, you may need to run ad campaigns yourself.
At the minimum, you need to understand what channels your company runs ads on (or which ones they should be running ads on), how to build creatives for those platforms, and a very rough understanding of campaign setup.
Who to Talk To:
Growth and Digital Marketing Consultant
Skills Dependent on Your Organization’s Structure
Think of these skills as the extra flourishes. In some organizations, you may never need them. In others, you may rely on them every day.
Product Management
Why it matters: If you’re in a growth function where you’re allowed to influence the product, product management skills can give you an edge. This goes double if you’re at a smaller company with a loosely established product function. In those cases, you’ll need PM skills simply to work with developers to get your experiments up and running.
What you need to know: For your growth PM basics, you’ll likely need to understand how to:
- Write a clear ticket
- Explain the rationale behind the work needed
- Defend why the work should be at a given priority
- Map any assumptions you and your team are making
Beyond that, learning how to work well with your company’s development team never hurts.
Who to Talk To:
Storyteller by choice, Product & Growth Manager by trade
Outreach
Why it matters: You’ll notice I said “outreach” here instead of “outbound.”
If your organization is sales-led, your growth efforts may be supporting that function. So it doesn’t hurt to brush up on your outbound skills.
But if you’re a PLG org, don’t discount this area. It can come in handy for working on both partnership and community GTMs.
What you need to know: Good outreach really comes down to three main skills:
- Researching your prospects
- Writing a short, concise outreach email
- Crafting an excellent hook
Now, if you’re doing outbound at scale, this skill set expands out to encompass a much larger area. But unless you’re direct support for Sales, you’ll likely be doing outreach at a much smaller scale.
Who to Talk To:
Founder and CEO at Skief Labs (Growth & Outbound Agency)
Content
Why it matters: As PPC becomes more expensive and outbound remains a mysterious art, organic content is one of the areas more and more growth practitioners are moving into, even if it’s from a personal branding standpoint.
What you need to know: Unfortunately, content isn’t just a rabbit hole—it’s a warren. Between the various channels and formats, it’s easy to get lost on where to start.
Your best bet? Find a format you’re comfortable with, match it to the channel that should have the best impact on your business, and brush up on your storytelling skills.
Who to Talk To:
Growth + Product Marketing Advisor and Coach, Mobile apps, B2C, Brand, Leadership
### Team Building and Leadership
Why it matters: Some Heads of Growth start as ICs and will remain that way until the end of their tenure at the role. Others walk in with fully fledged teams. Still more have to build those teams from scratch.
Learning this kind of leadership definitely won’t hurt your prospects.
What you need to know:
Your skill-set here is going to depend on your starting point. If you’re an IC, learning to manage stakeholder expectations should be your first stop.
For those building a team, learning skills around talent acquisition (like writing great job descriptions or how to interview candidates) are your best move.
And if you have a full-fledged team to work with, your focus should be on maintaining a great team culture and ironing out any wrinkles from team communication.
Who to Talk To:
Executive Coach | Former VP of Growth Marketing | 15+ years leading teams and revenue growth
And with that, you’ve got an introduction to the spiderweb of skills required to be Head of Growth.
But don’t let the breadth of this roadmap scare you. No Head of Growth starts the role having mastered ALL of these skills. Over time, your role will guide you to the natural strengths you need to lean into and the ones you can keep improving.
Now, if you’d prefer to get personalized, 1:1 guidance on how to learn each of these skills, try GrowthMentor for the mentorship you need on-demand.
