Torchora
Back to Home

Key Responsibilities and Required Skills for Director of Growth

💰 $ - $

MarketingGrowthProductRevenue

🎯 Role Definition

The Director of Growth is a senior cross-functional leader charged with developing and executing a comprehensive growth strategy that accelerates user acquisition, conversion, engagement, and monetization. Reporting into the executive team, the Director of Growth builds and leads a high-performing growth organization — spanning performance marketing, product growth, lifecycle and CRM, analytics, and experimentation — to deliver measurable lifts in traffic, activation, retention, and revenue. This role requires strong analytical rigor (A/B testing, funnel analytics, cohort analysis), hands-on experience with acquisition channels (paid search, social, programmatic, SEO, partnerships), and the ability to translate insight into scalable campaigns and product changes that improve core growth metrics (CAC, LTV, ARPU, churn, conversion rates).

Keywords: Director of Growth, growth strategy, user acquisition, retention, growth marketing, performance marketing, A/B testing, CRO, product-led growth, lifecycle marketing, analytics, SEO, paid acquisition, demand generation, revenue growth, funnel optimization.

📈 Career Progression

Typical Career Path

Entry Point From:

  • Senior Growth Manager or Head of Growth at a mid-stage startup
  • Head of Performance Marketing or Demand Generation
  • Senior Product Manager with product-led growth responsibilities

Advancement To:

  • VP of Growth or VP Marketing
  • Chief Revenue Officer (CRO) or Chief Marketing Officer (CMO)
  • General Manager / Head of Business Unit (P&L responsibility)

Lateral Moves:

  • Head of Product (product-led growth)
  • Head of Revenue Operations / Revenue Strategy

Core Responsibilities

Primary Functions

  • Own and define the end-to-end growth strategy and roadmap for acquisition, activation, retention, monetization, and referral — setting measurable OKRs and KPIs tied to MRR/ARR, CAC, LTV, churn, retention cohorts, and conversion rates.
  • Lead the cross-functional growth organization including performance marketing, product growth, lifecycle/CRM, analytics, and experimentation teams; recruit, coach, and retain top growth talent while building a high-velocity experimentation culture.
  • Design, prioritize, and run a rigorous experimentation program (A/B tests, multi-variant, holdouts) across marketing and product to validate hypotheses and drive statistically significant lifts in activation, conversion, and retention.
  • Develop and execute acquisition channel strategies across paid search (Google Ads), paid social (Meta, LinkedIn, TikTok), programmatic, SEO/organic, content marketing, affiliate/partnerships, and channel partnerships to sustainably scale qualified user acquisition at target CAC.
  • Partner closely with Product, Engineering, Design and Data teams to implement product-led growth initiatives such as onboarding flows, feature gating, upgrade prompts, pricing experiments, and viral mechanics to increase activation and reduce time-to-value.
  • Define and optimize funnel stages, instrumentation, and event tracking across web, mobile, and owned channels using analytics tools (GA4, Mixpanel, Amplitude, Segment) to ensure reliable growth metrics, cohort analysis, and attribution.
  • Own growth forecasting, budget allocation and channel ROI; build and manage growth spend across paid channels, Martech, and experimentation tooling while continuously optimizing for ROAS and unit economics.
  • Establish and iterate on retention and lifecycle strategies including onboarding, personalized email/SMS flows, in-app messaging (Braze, Iterable), push, and re-engagement campaigns to improve retention curves and reduce churn.
  • Lead pricing and packaging experiments in collaboration with Finance and Product to optimize ARPU and conversion to paid plans, including commercial offers, trials, freemium-to-paid journeys, and enterprise GTM tweaks.
  • Create and own the growth analytics & reporting stack (dashboarding in Looker/Tableau/Power BI) to deliver weekly and monthly insights for exec leadership and cross-functional stakeholders that inform prioritization and resource allocation.
  • Build strategic partnerships and channel marketing agreements (platforms, marketplaces, resellers, channel partners, OEMs) that create scalable top-of-funnel sources and co-marketing revenue streams.
  • Implement a rigorous CAC/LTV monitoring cadence, unit-economics modeling, and cohort-level performance reviews to ensure acquisition efficiency and long-term profitability.
  • Translate market research, competitive intelligence, and customer feedback into hypothesis-driven growth initiatives and product improvements that address acquisition barriers and retention pain points.
  • Own lifecycle segmentation and personalization strategies to deliver tailored upsell, cross-sell, and retention offers informed by behavioral data and propensity models.
  • Serve as a core member of the GTM leadership team, partnering with Sales, Customer Success, and Product Marketing to coordinate launches, feature adoption plays, and cross-sell motion for maximum impact.
  • Define SLAs for campaign execution, lead quality, and conversion handoffs between marketing and sales while implementing lead scoring and attribution models in CRM (Salesforce, HubSpot).
  • Drive international expansion of growth programs by localizing acquisition creatives, content, SEO, and paid strategies while aligning with legal and privacy requirements (GDPR/CCPA).
  • Manage and optimize the Martech stack (CDP, CRM, analytics, experimentation, adtech) to reduce friction, improve data quality, and automate growth workflows.
  • Maintain a continuous competitive testing agenda to iterate on landing pages, pricing pages, CTAs, and signup flows using CRO tools (Optimizely, VWO) to maximize on-site conversion.
  • Present growth performance, insights, and strategic roadmap to the executive team and Board, articulating progress against OKRs, channel attribution, and investment recommendations.
  • Create repeatable playbooks for scaling successful experiments and campaigns across products, markets, and segments to accelerate time-to-impact.
  • Define hiring plans, career paths, and performance metrics for growth team members, including individual goals tied to growth KPIs and professional development.
  • Ensure data governance, measurement integrity, and experimentation best practices are applied across A/B tests and production analytics to reduce false positives and bias.
  • Drive cross-functional change management to ensure adoption of growth-driven product modifications, feature launches, and lifecycle campaigns by coordinating training, comms, and stakeholder alignment.

Secondary Functions

  • Support ad-hoc data requests and exploratory data analysis.
  • Contribute to the organization's data strategy and roadmap.
  • Collaborate with business units to translate data needs into engineering requirements.
  • Participate in sprint planning and agile ceremonies within the data engineering team.

Required Skills & Competencies

Hard Skills (Technical)

  • Expert-level competency in analytics and experimentation platforms: GA4, Mixpanel, Amplitude, Optimizely/VWO, and programmatic testing frameworks.
  • Strong SQL skills for cohort analysis, conversion funnel queries, attribution modeling, and data validation across product and marketing datasets.
  • Experience with business intelligence and visualization tools (Looker, Tableau, Power BI) to create executive dashboards and self-serve reporting.
  • Hands-on experience managing paid acquisition channels and ad platforms: Google Ads, Microsoft Advertising, Meta Ads, LinkedIn, TikTok, programmatic DSPs.
  • Knowledge of SEO best practices and content-led growth strategies including keyword research, on-page optimization, and measurement of organic traffic impact.
  • Familiarity with marketing automation and CRM platforms (HubSpot, Salesforce, Marketo, Braze, Iterable) to build lifecycle and nurture campaigns.
  • Working knowledge of CDPs and event tracking solutions (Segment, mParticle) and experience owning data layer instrumentation.
  • Ability to design and interpret A/B and multivariate experiments, including power calculations, significance testing, and guardrails to avoid statistical pitfalls.
  • Competence with pricing experiments, revenue modeling, and unit-economics analysis to evaluate CAC, LTV, payback period, and ARR/MRR impact.
  • Basic scripting or data science familiarity (Python, R, or advanced Excel/Looker functions) to prototype models and automate analyses.
  • Experience with attribution modeling (multi-touch, last-click, MMM) and channel mix optimization for scaling spend efficiently.
  • Hands-on experience with CRO tools and landing page optimization, including UX testing and heatmap tools.

Soft Skills

  • Strategic thinker with strong business acumen and the ability to translate metrics into timely decisions that impact company growth and revenue.
  • Exceptional leadership and people management skills with a track record of building, mentoring, and scaling high-performing teams.
  • Highly analytical and data-driven, comfortable making decisions under uncertainty using experiments and incremental learning.
  • Excellent cross-functional communicator who can align stakeholders across Product, Engineering, Sales, and Finance.
  • Strong prioritization and product sense to balance quick wins with longer-term architectural and product-led growth investments.
  • Comfort presenting to executives and Board members with clear storytelling around metrics, experiments, and investment needs.
  • Customer-centric mindset with empathy for user journeys and a focus on reducing friction and improving time-to-value.
  • Adaptable and entrepreneurial — thrives in fast-paced environments and can pivot strategies based on performance signals.
  • Project and program management fluency to run simultaneous campaigns, experiments, and cross-functional launches.
  • Ethical and privacy-aware approach to user data, consent, and compliant data practices (GDPR/CCPA considerations).

Education & Experience

Educational Background

Minimum Education:
Bachelor’s degree in Business, Marketing, Economics, Computer Science, Engineering, or a related quantitative field.

Preferred Education:
MBA or advanced degree in Business, Data Science, Marketing Analytics, or a related field is a plus.

Relevant Fields of Study:

  • Marketing, Business Administration, or Management
  • Data Science, Statistics, Computer Science, or Engineering
  • Economics, Applied Mathematics, or Analytics

Experience Requirements

Typical Experience Range:
8–12+ years of experience in growth marketing, performance marketing, product growth, or related functions, with progressive ownership of channel strategy and analytics.

Preferred:
10+ years of experience including 3–5+ years in a leadership role (Director level or higher) managing multi-disciplinary growth teams; demonstrated success scaling revenue in SaaS, marketplace, consumer tech, or B2B environments; proven record of designing experimentation frameworks, optimizing CAC/LTV, and taking data-driven initiatives from hypothesis to measurable, repeatable outcomes.

Explore More Careers