Director of Growth

The Director of Growth owns the growth marketing function within the marketing org - the department that runs experimentation and compounding growth loops to move the business's funnel: acquisition, activation, retention, referral, and revenue (the AARRR frame). They report to a VP of Marketing / CMO and are accountable for the whole function: a growth model with a clear North Star metric, an experiment roadmap that attacks the highest-leverage parts of the funnel, an experimentation velocity and quality bar that turns tests into learning, growth loops and lifecycle programs that compound, a growth model and forecast leadership can plan against, and a team and budget that deliver it. They lead through a manager or lead layer where the function is large enough - growth marketers who run experiments, lifecycle marketers who own activation and retention, and growth analysts who own the measurement - and reach the individual contributors through that layer, not around it. The distinguishing altitude is that this is a function owner and a systems operator, not a single-experiment runner. A growth marketer designs and analyzes an individual test; the Director owns the model that decides which tests are worth running, the prioritization that orders them, the velocity that makes the program compound, the cross-functional relationships with Product, Data, and Engineering that let experiments actually ship, and the case for growth as an investment. The Director rarely writes a single variant or runs a single significance test - their leverage is the growth model, the prioritized roadmap, the experimentation system, the partners they align, and the team they develop. Growth is also inherently cross-functional: unlike a pure marketing function, growth reaches into the product (activation surfaces, onboarding, in-product loops), which is why product-led growth is co-owned with Product - the Director brings the growth and experiment lens; Product owns the product and what ships. What separates great from average is running growth as a disciplined, compounding system rather than a stream of clever tactics. A mediocre director chases whatever tactic is trending, runs tests with no hypothesis or guardrail, reports win counts, and treats growth as a bag of hacks. A great one builds a growth model that names the few levers that actually move the North Star, runs a prioritized portfolio of experiments with real statistical rigor and guardrails, invests in the loops and lifecycle programs that compound (so growth is not rented one campaign at a time), partners cleanly with Product and Data so experiments ship and are measured honestly, develops the team into owners, and walks into the exec room able to say what growth returned and what the next dollar or head buys. The output is never a list of tests run - it is a growth engine the business can forecast and invest in on purpose.