When you’re building a business, often as the founder and/or founding team you wear a multitude of hats. You’re balancing the books, obsessing over product roadmaps, debating GTM strategies and solving for customer funnels whilst driving. Dexterity is not only beneficial but necessary in start-up culture. That said, as you move from infancy to a going concern, you will need to bring in a seasoned growth specialist to help you scale and optimise your business. This is particularly true in direct to consumer organisations where, if done well, a lot of energy is spent on optimising for circular growth. At GrowThink we have a mantra – “Don’t go in circles, grow in circles”.

Once you’ve decided to hire a head of growth, you’re going to need to ensure you’ve got a solid plan of what to ask them and how you’ll decide that they are the best fit for your organisation. 

1) Working across functions 

This is one of the most important parts of being a growth lead. Optimisation in performance marketing campaigns alone will not dramatically alter the growth path of your product. However having a bridge between tech, product and marketing, will allow you to create and bake in growth loops that one function alone could not. 

Here, you’re really looking for very strong communication skills and the ability to secure buy-in from various, and often conflicting stakeholders. They need to be able to create a robust framework for collaboration and prioritisation.

Suggested Questions 

• How do you get difficult stakeholders on your side? 
• Similarly how can you get engineering on your side?
• How do you manage individuals that do not have a direct report to you, yet you need them to help you achieve business goals?
• How do you use data to drive conversation and get buy-in?
• Have you worked across acquisition marketing, brand, CRM/CVM, data, product and engineering? Do you have deep experience in any of these areas?

2) Prioritising and growth plan

One of the easiest and most effective ways to get growth consensus is to ensure that there is a qualitative growth plan in place. There should be complete clarity on how your product/ service grows sustainably. The plan should be across multiple functions (product, marketing, engineering and finance) and it should be quantifiable. What is the measure of success and how do you calculate the effect of each test, project or initiative? 

Suggested Questions 

• What do you think makes for a successful growth plan?
• How would you usually approach determining growth targets?
• Have you run growth experiments / Run AB Testing previously and if so, can you talk through your approach, learnings and impact to the business?
• How would you prioritise the multitude of possible growth initiatives you could deploy?
• How would you get support for the growth experiments and initiatives you want to prioritise? 

3) Metrics and Data

The Head of Growth in any business should be spending the bulk of their merry day in the customer and business data. What moves retention? What moves acquisition? Where is there movement in the funnel and where are users dropping off? How do you know? Based on what data? By no means do they need to be a Harvard mathematician, but a solid understanding of (and passion for!) metrics that move the needle, how to track them and how to influence them is critical.  

Suggested Questions 

• How do you typically approach understanding movements in customer growth?
• What growth tools and platforms do you have experience with? Do you have a preference and if so, why?
• How do you go about extracting the data you need from the tools available?
• Who do you believe should own customer data? (This is important! Their answer will give you great insight into their style of working and if/how they will empower the organisation through shared visibility and accountability to growth) 

4) Their Questions to you 

Have you ever interviewed someone who asked you no questions about the business? That’s an immediate no. An interview is an exchange and for it to be valuable, it needs to help determine if it’s a good fit for both parties. Whilst the right skills in a candidate can help accelerate your customer growth in the short term, the wrong culture fit can destroy teams, momentum and long-term growth. This is what we’d usually expect a Head of Growth in a digital business to probe:

• Business Strategy and Prioritisation 
• Culture and values
• Data, Metrics and the exec dashboards that are already used in the teams
• Tech Stack in Place 
• Product & Marketing Roadmaps 
• Revenue Accountability 
• Team Org and Structures 

5) Assignments/Further Checks 

We are big fans of having the head of any role present back to the organisation to check for thinking, approach and ability. A good way is to ask the candidate to put together a quick 15min presentation on one of the following topics:

• 30/60/90 day plan highlights 
• Ten best growth levers to implement and how to rank them 
• High level growth plan (no modelling unless they’d like to themselves)

We spoke a lot about having a robust plan in place, but the reality is always messy. If you’re hiring for a head of growth it means there is a dire need for one. The first month is going to be a culture and personality fit with the new candidate as they will need to get to know everyone in the business and vice versa. They will also have to figure out which part of the house is burning and where to find the water to put it out.

So as much as we love a robust plan, we have to be realistic and take into account that these roles are a balancing act of having the dedication and the planning as well as making sure that the plan can be executed on the ground.