VP of Growth Job Description is more than a title—it’s the blueprint for sustainable, scalable company success. Hiring the right VP of Growth can be the difference between building a business engine that compounds over time or watching your resources drain away with little return. It’s a strategic, high-impact role that operates at the intersection of performance marketing, product experimentation, analytics, and customer experience. In many companies, it’s become the role most tied to results—not just in theory but in measurable, month-over-month improvements.

Over the past few years, the role has evolved drastically. Once treated as a glorified marketing title, the VP of Growth is now expected to think like a founder, move like a product leader, and analyze like a data scientist. They must juggle rapid-fire tests, resource constraints, and cross-team collaboration while keeping an unshakable focus on the North Star Metric. From my own career—both as a VP of Growth and as a growth consultant—I’ve seen that misalignment in job descriptions is one of the top reasons growth hires fail. When the description is vague, the wrong people apply. When it’s too narrow, you miss strategic thinkers who could have scaled you up.

What Is a VP of Growth?

A VP of Growth is not just a senior marketer. It’s a high-level operator tasked with unlocking predictable, sustainable growth across acquisition, retention, and monetization. They build systems, design experiments, iterate quickly, and ultimately turn insights into revenue. They work closely with marketing, yes—but also with product, data science, engineering, sales, customer success, and even finance.

This executive typically reports directly to the CEO or COO and frequently has board-level visibility. In startup environments, they might wear multiple hats, jumping from running paid acquisition campaigns to building referral programs or reworking the onboarding experience. In growth-stage companies, they’ll lead teams, develop full-scale growth strategies, and bring structure to experimentation across departments.

Their mission is simple to articulate but difficult to execute: discover and scale the growth levers that move the business forward. That could mean cracking a new acquisition channel, increasing LTV by improving upsell flows, launching a new feature to boost engagement, or slashing CAC by 50% through better funnel efficiency. They don’t just aim for growth—they architect it.

Core Responsibilities of a VP of Growth

Strategy & Planning Growth leaders aren’t just visionaries; they are builders. They set strategic direction, but they also roll up their sleeves and work side by side with the team to deliver. Planning happens in sprint formats, with tangible deliverables shipped every week.

• Creating data-driven growth strategies: Effective VPs of Growth use a blend of analytics and intuition. They focus on what actually moves the needle—not vanity metrics. They build flexible, data-backed strategies and use dashboards not as vanity mirrors, but as steering wheels.
• Identifying new market opportunities: A big part of growth is identifying blue oceans. This includes everything from new customer segments and geographic expansions to underserved verticals or feature-led niches. Instead of doing massive rollouts, they prefer lean MVPs to validate ideas quickly and cost-effectively.

Cross-Functional Leadership The VP of Growth is an organizational glue. They speak engineering and empathize with sales. They advocate for customer insights in product meetings and push creative boundaries in marketing brainstorms.

• Coordinating across departments: They break silos by running cross-functional growth squads. A typical growth experiment might require alignment between product for UX changes, engineering for implementation, design for assets, and marketing for amplification. Without solid leadership here, growth experiments stall.

Customer Lifecycle Management Retention is the real multiplier. Great VPs of Growth understand the importance of the post-acquisition journey—onboarding, activation, engagement, and monetization.

• Overseeing the full funnel: This isn’t just about traffic. It’s about flow. From first touch to lifetime value, the VP maps, measures, and optimizes each step. And they know that small changes in churn can unlock bigger gains than massive changes in top-of-funnel impressions.

Experimentation & Innovation Their toolset includes A/B testing, cohort analysis, user segmentation, and more. But their mindset is what matters: bias for action and hunger for learning.

• Running structured tests: They run multiple concurrent tests per week, using ICE (Impact, Confidence, Ease) scoring, proper documentation, and post-experiment reviews. Success isn’t always a winning test—it’s speed of iteration and learning.

Performance Monitoring They use dashboards strategically. Instead of looking at hundreds of metrics, they define a North Star Metric and 1-2 supporting ones. This keeps teams focused and avoids wasting time on irrelevant data.

• Setting and tracking KPIs: The right metrics will vary depending on the growth model, but common ones include CAC, LTV, retention rates, payback periods, and revenue per user. Metrics must be tied to hypotheses and tested continuously.

Budget & Resource Allocation Spending money doesn’t equal growth. They allocate resources where returns are highest, even if that means going against conventional wisdom.

• Managing growth budgets: Whether it’s deciding between scaling Facebook ads or investing in a referral engine, the VP of Growth models potential ROI, aligns stakeholders, and reallocates fast when something doesn’t work.

Partnership Development Sometimes the fastest path to growth is through collaboration.

• Building alliances: From co-marketing partnerships and API integrations to affiliate programs or influencer campaigns, they assess ecosystem value and structure win-win deals.

Key Skills and Qualifications

Strategic Thinking: Vision is critical. But strategy without execution is hallucination. The VP of Growth must chart a roadmap while also seeing where the roadblocks lie.

Analytical Depth: They need to be hands-on with data. SQL fluency, funnel analysis, cohort tracking, and behavioral segmentation are not nice-to-haves. They’re core.

Leadership & Team Building: Growth only happens when the team is empowered to take action. Great VPs attract, retain, and grow talent. They create incentive structures and feedback loops that reward experimentation.

Cross-Team Collaboration: Silos kill growth. This role must unify product, sales, marketing, and engineering around shared goals.

Persuasive Communication: From pitching experiments to the CEO to writing documentation for engineers, the VP must tailor their message to the audience. Clarity is currency.

Operational Management: They must manage time, budget, and people efficiently. Prioritization is key.

Founder Mentality: They take ownership. They look at cash flow, not just growth curves. They treat the business as their own.

What Makes a Great VP of Growth?

There’s no single mold, but top-tier growth leaders have several patterns in common:

• They’ve been battle-tested. They’ve launched MVPs, tested dozens of hypotheses, and survived the pressure of early-stage ambiguity.
• They talk about systems, not just tactics. They know one-off wins don’t scale—but good systems do.
• They ask sharp questions. Why is churn high for this segment? What was the activation rate after this feature release? How did CAC change after the last creative shift?
• They think like behavioral scientists. They use psychology to design pricing, craft messaging, and build sticky products.
• They fail fast, document learnings, and keep the experimentation engine running.

When hiring, resist the urge to hire for pedigree or past job titles. Instead, look at portfolios of work, real results, and the thinking behind experiments. Tailor the job description to reflect the stage your company is in. If you’re pre-PMF, you need a lean, scrappy optimizer. If you’re post-Series B, you need a leader who can scale systems and teams.

Sample VP of Growth Job Description Template

Job Title: Vice President of Growth Reports To: CEO / COO

Summary: We’re looking for a data-obsessed, results-oriented VP of Growth to lead acquisition, retention, and monetization initiatives. You’ll develop and execute our growth roadmap, run high-velocity experiments, and work closely with cross-functional teams to uncover new revenue opportunities and drive sustainable growth.

Responsibilities:

• Define and align teams around the North Star Metric and supporting KPIs
• Create and manage an experimentation framework with ICE scoring and weekly sprints
• Oversee cross-functional execution across product, marketing, engineering, and data
• Own full-funnel analysis and optimization from awareness to upsell
• Identify and validate new market opportunities, including new segments and channels
• Structure and manage growth budget to prioritize ROI-positive initiatives
• Build growth partnerships and referral loops to amplify reach
• Monitor and report on growth performance, adapting strategies based on real-time data

Qualifications:

• 8+ years in growth, performance marketing, product, or strategy
• Proven track record of driving measurable, scalable growth
• Strong analytical and experimentation skills; fluency in tools like Google Analytics, Amplitude, Mixpanel, SQL
• Demonstrated experience leading teams and aligning cross-functional stakeholders
• Exceptional written and verbal communication
• Founder-like mindset: you see opportunities, not just problems

Success Metrics (KPIs):

• CAC and LTV (and ratio between the two)
• Retention, activation, and engagement rates by cohort
• Revenue per user
• Payback period for acquisition channels
• Number of validated experiments per quarter

Final Thoughts

Hiring a VP of Growth isn’t just filling a role. It’s placing a strategic bet on your company’s future. The right person can unlock new revenue streams, double your user base, and even reorient your product roadmap around what actually converts.

But to get the right hire, you need a sharp, honest job description. One that reflects your current challenges, your organizational culture, and your future ambitions. And one that makes room for the type of person who thrives in ambiguity and makes growth happen in measurable, repeatable ways.

And if you’re navigating this search or need help shaping the strategy, feel free to connect with me or explore ROIDrivenGrowth. It’s the consulting approach I built to bring clarity, systems, and momentum to growth-driven companies.