What a Head of Growth Actually Does
The Head of Growth — or VP of Growth — owns company-wide strategy for acquiring new users or customers, retaining existing ones, and expanding revenue from the base. Unlike a VP Marketing who focuses on brand and awareness, or a VP Sales who focuses on closing, the Head of Growth operates across the full funnel and is accountable to a revenue or user growth metric rather than a channel-specific metric.
In practice, a high-performing Head of Growth at a Series B company will own: experimentation infrastructure and velocity, acquisition channel strategy and scaling, activation and onboarding optimisation, retention analytics and intervention design, and the growth model that informs where the company invests at scale. They typically manage a cross-functional team of engineers, analysts, and marketers rather than a single-function team.
When to Hire a Head of Growth
The Head of Growth hire is premature before product-market fit. Before PMF, what you need is product iteration, not growth optimisation — and a growth hire at this stage will optimise a funnel that does not yet have a viable product at the top of it. The signals that indicate readiness: retention curves have flattened at an acceptable level, at least one acquisition channel has demonstrated scalability, and the CEO is spending significant time on growth decisions that should be owned by a dedicated leader.
After PMF, the timing depends on what is limiting growth. If the constraint is channel diversification and experimentation velocity, a Head of Growth is the right hire. If the constraint is sales motion or product capability, it is not. CEOs who hire a Head of Growth to solve a product problem or a sales problem waste 12–18 months and a significant portion of their budget before reaching that conclusion.
Head of Growth vs VP Marketing vs VP Sales
The Head of Growth role was designed to bridge the gap between marketing, product, and data — functions that often operate in silos and produce suboptimal outcomes for growth when they do. The VP Marketing owns brand, content, and demand generation. The VP Sales owns the pipeline-to-revenue conversion. The Head of Growth owns the end-to-end funnel with accountability to a growth metric that cuts across both.
At most growth-stage companies, these roles coexist — the Head of Growth reports to the CEO or COO alongside the VP Marketing and VP Sales, and operates as a horizontal function that identifies and scales what the specialist functions cannot see. Where they conflict: a Head of Growth with budget authority and experimentation mandate will sometimes defund channels the marketing team owns. Managing that dynamic requires intentional organisational design and clear CEO alignment before the hire is made.
What Great Head of Growth Candidates Look Like
The strongest candidates combine analytical rigour with cross-functional credibility. They can build a growth model, run a rigorous A/B test, and present the findings to a board with equal fluency. They have demonstrated ability to identify non-obvious growth levers — not just optimise the ones already running. And they have a track record of building the infrastructure (experimentation platforms, analytics stacks, growth teams) that makes the organisation's growth capacity compound over time rather than depending on individual insight.
Red flags: candidates who define growth as marketing, candidates who have only optimised within one channel, and candidates whose growth outcomes cannot be isolated from broader favourable market conditions. The best Head of Growth candidates can explain specifically what they did, why it worked, and what they would do differently — not attribute their outcomes to a rising tide.
The Head of Growth Search Process
Define the growth constraint before sourcing. Is the primary challenge acquisition, retention, expansion, or experimentation velocity? The answer determines the profile. A candidate who has built world-class acquisition systems may be weak at retention — and vice versa.
Source from product and data communities, not just marketing networks. The best Head of Growth candidates often come from product management or data science backgrounds, not traditional marketing careers. Sourcing exclusively from marketing networks produces a candidate pool that skews toward channel expertise rather than the systems thinking the role requires.
Evaluate with a growth case study. Ask candidates to assess your current growth model, identify the highest-leverage lever, and design an experiment to test it. This reveals analytical depth, product intuition, and communication ability simultaneously — and produces a clear differentiation between candidates who think in frameworks and candidates who think in tactics.
Head of Growth Compensation in 2026
At a Series A–B company, Head of Growth base salary ranges from $160K–$240K, with total cash compensation reaching $190K–$300K. Equity typically runs 0.2%–0.6% over four years. At a Series C company with a well-defined growth function, total compensation including equity reaches $350K–$600K. The role is increasingly competitive with VP Marketing and VP Product compensation, reflecting the strategic weight it carries at companies where growth is the primary operating priority.
"41 days. A $275K search. Two firms failed in 60+ days. That's not luck — that's a different system."
— Majhi Group case study. Read the full case study →Why the Right Search Process Matters
Head of Growth candidates with a demonstrable track record of building growth infrastructure — not just running campaigns — are rarely in active job searches. The best operators in this space are embedded in high-growth companies where their contribution is directly visible in the metrics. Finding them requires direct, specific, peer-level outreach through product and growth communities — not a job post or a recruiter database.
Majhi Group runs a 20-minute confidential search assessment to evaluate whether your growth hire brief and timeline are calibrated to the stage you are in. We assess whether the role is correctly defined, whether the candidate profile matches the actual growth constraint, and whether the compensation is competitive in the current market.