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20VC: When to Make Your First Growth Hire? Senior or Junior? How To Onboard Them? How To Monitor Their Progress? from Growth Leaders @ Facebook, Instagram, Lyft, Instacart, Miro and more

Nov 25, 2022

Growth leaders share insights on making the first crucial growth hire for startups. They discuss the timing and position level needed to scale effectively, emphasizing the significance of onboarding practices. The conversation dives into the transition to growth after achieving product-market fit and the role of company culture. Strategies for aligning goals in the new hire’s first month highlight the importance of collaboration and establishing a North Star metric. Early growth strategies are advocated, even before product-market fit, to build a solid foundation for sustainable success.

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ADVICE

Prioritize Growth Post Product-Market Fit

Prioritize growth after achieving product-market fit, but don't create a large team immediately.
Demonstrate growth's importance by assigning engineers, PMs, or designers to growth-focused tasks.

ADVICE

Attract Senior Growth Talent

Show potential hires that you value growth by having a team dedicated to it.
Early success and rewarding growth efforts can attract senior growth leaders.

ADVICE

Effective Onboarding for Growth

Effective onboarding involves deep data dives, allowing new hires to explore data models and metrics.
Encourage direct customer interaction to understand core product value and user needs.

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Casey Winters is the Chief Product Officer at Eventbrite. Prior to Eventbrite, Casey led the growth product team at Pinterest. Before Pinterest, Casey started the marketing team at Grubhub and scaled Grubhub’s demand-side acquisition and retention strategies.

Elena Verna is the Interim Head of Growth at Amplitude. Former exec @ Miro, Netlify, SurveyMonkey. Growth Advisor to companies including Krisp, MongoDB, Ledgy, Builder.io and SimilarWeb.

Kieran Flanagan is SVP Marketing at HubSpot, where he has helped the business grow internationally, move to a product-led business, quadrupled its marketing demand, and built out its media team, including the acquisition of ‘The Hustle.’

Andy Johns career started in growth at Facebook when the company scaled from 100M-500M active users. Since he has worked in some of the leading growth orgs at companies like Twitter, Quora and more recently at Wealthfront as Head of Growth and President.

Bangaly Kaba is the Director of Product Management @ Youtube. Prior to Youtube, Bangaly led the product growth and consumer product orgs at Instacart and before Instacart was Head of Growth @ Instagram, helping grow Instagram from 440M to > 1B monthly actives in 2.5yrs.

Ed Baker is a growth advisor to various startups including Lime, Zwift, Whoop, Crimson Education, GoPeer, and Playbook. Ed was the VP of Product and Growth at Uber from 2013-2017. Prior to Uber, Ed was the Head of International Growth at Facebook.

Adam Fishman was the Chief Product and Growth Offer @ Imperfect Foods. Before Imperfect, Adam was VP of Product and Growth @ Patreon, Before Patreon, Adam was the Head of Growth @ Lyft, Adam was the first growth and marketing employee hired and grew the team to 18 people.

In Today's Discussion on When To Hire a Head of Growth:

1.) When is the right time to hear your first growth hire?

2.) Is this hire a senior growth leader or a more junior growth engineer?

3.) What can early-stage startups do to entice senior growth leaders to their early-stage company?

4.) What data infrastructure should be in place prior to hiring your first growth hire?

5.) What does the optimal onboarding process look like for all growth hires?

6.) What can founders and CEOs do to set their growth hires up for success?