What makes a successful growth marketer?

There are three main components to being a successful growth marketer and kind of three things that I think most people get evaluated on in terms of their growth marketing skillset.

Channel level expertise

So number one is channel level expertise. So whether it's email marketing, Push, like SEO, Facebook ads, just understanding how the channel works and having at least some experience,I think this is probably the least important, because you can hire specialists for those tasks..Don't hire for where people are today because if they have massive growth potential or if they're fast learners and if they have proven they can learn new things in the past and they're hungry to get better,

Teaching them and like getting them that experience they lack is not that hard.

Teaching people, you can't teach people to be hungry. Like people need to be hungry.They need to like learning new things and like growing and getting better.So like channel level expertise is good.You want some but I would not over-index on expertise.

Analytical capability

The next one is analytical capability. I think this is really important, whether it's just like Excel skills or SQL skills is like the next level up. I think being able to extract data to gather insights, to analyze your own experiments, and just use data is like the lifeblood of growth. So being able to like get your hands on data and interpret it and use it to make better decisions, super important.

Strategic thinking and project management

And then lastly is the key component of becoming a leader in a growth team - strategic thinking, project management.T his is like a product manager or a growth manager. This is their sweet spot. It's being able to come up with good ideas, figuring out how do you actually pick the right experiments, how do you prioritize your roadmap, how do you actually think about your customers' experience and the customer journey to identify big opportunities.

And then also work with other stakeholders because like growth is crossfunctional and if you are not particularly good at working with creatives or an engineering team or an analytics team, you're going to have a hard time driving projects end to end.

T formation people

So it's like that crossfunctional ability and like strategic thinking that's the key for getting to the next level in growth. And generally what we look for or what my teams look for and I think is like a really good way of thinking about this is kind of people generally end up developing in like the T formation.So they go really deep on one of those things but they have a baseline in all of them.You can't have zero skill or expertise in any of those areas. Like you can't have zero analytical abilities and still be a growth marketer.Or you can't have zero channel level expertise and still be a growth marketer and you can't have zero strategic thinking ability.

You just need a baseline of those and then most people I think it's better to go deep in one of those things.Especially as teams grow and mature, you end up having more specialization,and that's how you kind of are able to pick who are the right people for what roles. Are they really, really good at a specific channel or are they really, really good at analysis and analytics? Or are they really good with strategic thinking and they should be a manager or they've got like that leadership potential.You want to probably pick one of them, maybe two of them, but usually you should pick one and try to get really good at that because that's kind of like where you're going to go long-term, is most likely in one of those specific areas.