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Welcome 20Growth: How To Hire a Head of Growth? What are Signs of World-Class Talent? How To Structure the Process? How To Onboard Growth Teams? The Relationship Between Head of Growth and CEO and more with Casey Winters, Chief Product Officer @ Eventbrit

Sep 22, 2021

Casey Winters, Chief Product Officer at Eventbrite and former growth leader at Pinterest and Grubhub, shares his expertise in scaling growth teams. He defines what makes a great Head of Growth and reveals the right time to hire one. Casey discusses the importance of a data-driven approach in the hiring process and the initial tasks vital for onboarding new growth teams. He emphasizes the dynamic relationship between a growth leader and the CEO, providing tips on effective communication and collaboration for success.

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ANECDOTE

Casey's Career Journey

Casey Winters began his career analyzing marketing channels at Apartments.com, leading to entrepreneurial projects.
His experience led him to Grubhub, Pinterest, and Eventbrite, focusing on growth strategies and scaling businesses.

INSIGHT

Defining Growth

Growth connects people to existing value created by a business, focusing on product market fit and acquisition.
Growth leaders must understand the business's growth model, constraints, and how to alleviate them.

ADVICE

Growth Team Structure

Prioritize cross-functional growth teams integrated within product, engineering, design, and analytics.
This fosters collaboration, shared goals, and addresses skepticism around growth's long-term value.

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Casey Winters is the Chief Product Officer at Eventbrite where he leads the PM, product design, research, and growth marketing teams. Prior to Eventbrite, Casey spent close to 3 years at Pinterest where he led the growth product team. At Pinterest, Casey turned SEO into a scalable acquisition strategy, increasing conversion to signups 5x. Before Pinterest, Casey started the marketing team at Grubhub and scaled Grubhub's demand-side acquisition and retention strategies. Casey played an instrumental role in scaling Grubhub from 3 cities to 1,000+ and from a $1 million series A to an IPO and $7.3 billion exit. If that was not enough, Casey has also advised the likes of Canva, Hipcamp, Reddit, Faire and Career Karma to name a few.

In Today’s Episode with Casey Winters You Will Learn:

1.) How Casey made his way into the world of startups and came to lead some of the most powerful growth orgs in the world from Pinterest to Grubhub to Eventbrite?

2.) How does Casey define "growth" and "Head of Growth"? When is the right time to start thinking about implementing a growth team? When should one hire a growth leader? How should founders structure the process of hiring a Head of Growth? What do the stages look like? What signals suggest A* talent? What questions does Casey always ask? What tests does Casey do?

3.) What does the optimal onboarding process look like for growth teams? What tasks should a growth team perform in their first few months? What are clear signs you have an amazing candidate in place? What are some obvious red flags? How do the best growth teams approach post-mortems? How are they structured? Who attends them? How often?

4.) What is the ideal relationship between the Head of Growth and the CEO? How often do they meet? What do the best CEOs expect from their growth teams? How does Casey approach the relationship between growth teams and product teams? How does one know when to have an independent growth team vs within the product or marketing team?

5.) Casey AMA: What has been a decision that Casey made without data to back it up? How did it go? What were Casey's lessons? How does Casey prevent past experiments from impacting his future tactics? How does Casey's management style differ when managing larger vs smaller growth teams? How has angel investing impacted his approach to scaling growth teams?