So You Want To Be A Growth Hacker? Here’s What You Need To Know

In the tech industry, a lot of jobs have been created in the past decade. Job titles such as app developer, data scientist, UX designer, cloud specialist or growth hacker didn’t exist before. Today, I want to share with you what exactly a growth hacker job description is because this is what we do at Growth Hackers: growth hacking (If you are not 100% sure what growth hacking is, have a look at our growth hacking definition).

In the startup world, growth hacking skills are in very high demand and it’s not surprising to see many resumes, LinkedIn or Twitter profiles mentioning that people are growth hackers or growth hacking experts. Also, a lot of these jobs start spreading on the web, especially in startups and small businesses. If you are looking to hire a growth hacker or if you want to become one, you are going to discover what a growth hacker’s skills and mission should be.

The Growth Hacker Job Description

Below, we are going to give you all the profile characteristics of a growth hacker. There are so many successful growth hacking examples and entrepreneurs often believe this is either luck or easy. But, you will discover that being a growth hacker requires skills, experience and resilience.

Gender

A growth hacker can be a he or a she. Even if I met more growth hackers that are men than women, women are at least as skilled as men for being growth hackers, if not more as I think analysing people’s behaviour is important for a growth hacker. (In fact, Growth Hackers’ has a female co-founder, Irene!)

Age

Even if I am tempted to say that you can be a growth hacker at any age, I don’t think that’s true. You cannot be too young to be a growth hacker because you need experience in several fields (Data, marketing, engineering…). You might be a growth hacing intern maybe. I’d say you cannot be too old either as you need a lot of energy to be a growth hacker. Growth hacking really requires a lot of stamina. I believe the best age for a growth hacker is between 25 and 40. It doesn’t mean that you cannot be a growth hacker or you cannot get a job as a growth hacker if you are not in this age range, but just that you have less chance of becoming one.

In What Department Works A Growth Hacker?

A growth hacker neither belongs to the IT department, nor do they work under the marketing or engineering department. They have a cross-functional role where they work closely with the marketing team, the sales team, the engineering department and the product management team. If you really want to give growth hackers a department, give them the Growth department.

Job responsibilities

Here is a list of responsibilities a growth hacker should take:

– Choosing in accordance with the other departments which metrics/KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) to focus on.
– Bringing traditional and creative ideas how to grow those KPIs.
– A/B testing those ideas.
– Analysing the data and users’ feedback.
– Exchanging ideas/data/feedback with other departments (Product, marketing, top management) in order to present results and make the product more user-centric.
– Driving traffic to your website, landing pages, social media, apps.
– Working on a lean startup process.
– Working with the AARRR Sales Metrics Diagram (Acquisition – Activation – Retention – Referral – Revenue).
– Prioritising growth channels.
– Optimising channels.
– Scaling and Automating the growth processes.
– Creating viral growth.

Requirements

What are the requirements to fit the job description perfectly?

– Being data-driven and kind of a data-geek: clear understanding of data, analytics, metrics and statistics.
– Being social and understanding users’ behaviour. Having great customer relations skills (Note: being a people’s person should be part of the growth hacker’s capabilities but is also part of the the anatomy of an entrepreneur.
– Willing to learn.
– A/B testing and data analytics experience.
– Editing and copywriting skills.
– Not being scared of pivoting .
– Knowledge about both inbound and outbound marketing.
– Programming knowledge: even if it’s not compulsory, it is recommended.
– Being performance and results-oriented.
– Being curious and creative.
– Being relentless in pursuit of growth.
– Having experience with growth hackings tools such as Optimizely for A/B Testing, MailChimp for email marketing campaigns, HubSpot for CRM, sales and marketing purposes, Zapier to automate workflows…

How To Recognise One?

Growth is a mindset – Same as growth hacking. Therefore, hackers see the world in a different way. You might not notice that you are in the presence of one, so I am going to give you a few tricks to recognise one. Here are how growth hackers answer the following questions.

– Entrepreneur: Here is my new idea, what do you think? Will it work?
– Growth Hacker: Did you test it or did you talk to people about the idea? What did they say? We have to test the idea. This is the only way to know if this is going to work.

– Entrepreneur: Here is how we are going to get growth, it will work for sure!
– Growth Hacker: How did you get this assumption? From data or just from feeling? It’s not because it worked with another startup that it will work for yours, you need to test it.

– Entrepreneur: How will your strategy impact growth?
– Growth Hacker: I don’t know the future, what we can do is that we will do A/B Testing, analyse data, optimise and bring you growth from then.

I am not going to go further but I guess you see the pattern. They will always answer you that you need to test and you won’t know the future without testing. This is what they do: he/she is testing without making assumptions, which are not based on data. This is the closest you can get from the growth hacker definition.

So, What Is The Growth Hacker Job Description Really?

This was our growth hacker job description. To summarise, I can say that a growth hacker is a cross-functional multi-tasking crazy person. This individual will focus on the growth of your acquisition channels but also on retention by assuring that your product fits the market requirements. In order to do so, a growth hacker will use marketing channels, A/B Testing, data analytics, users’ feedback, prioritisation, optimisation, engineering and automation. They don’t obviously work with startups. Growth hacking can be used by many other industries; you can check how Donald Trump used growth hacking in politics to win the US elections 2016.

A growth hacker has entrepreneurial DNA and will always search to create a growth engine that is predictable, sustainable, repeatable and scalable. Having one to help your startup or company grow is essential to give your startup less chance to fail and more chance to succeed. They can help you in all stages of your business – no matter if you are just building your startup from scratch or if you are in business for years.

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[This post by Jonathan Aufray first appeared on GrowthHackers and has been reproduced with permission.]