Head of marketing vs head of growth: who to hire

Founders often hire whichever title sounds more modern. Then the new head of growth asks for engineering time nobody planned to give, or the new head of marketing writes a brand guide while signups stay flat.

The two roles overlap on acquisition, and at a small startup one person often does both. They still come from different traditions, measure success differently and need different things from the rest of the company. Once you know which part of your funnel is leaking, the choice gets much easier.

What each role is measured on

The US Bureau of Labor Statistics describes marketing managers as people who "estimate demand and identify potential markets for products and services", and who may develop pricing and ways to acquire and retain customers. That's the head of marketing's territory: who the customer is, what you say to them, and where you say it.

Growth came out of a different idea. In his widely shared essay "Growth Hacker is the new VP Marketing", Andrew Chen described growth people as "a hybrid of marketer and coder", and argued that marketing was shifting "from people-centric to API-centric activities". A head of growth today is less likely to code, but still works through experiments, data and the product itself.

How the two roles usually differ. Many startups blend them.

Dimension	Head of marketing	Head of growth
Owns	Positioning, messaging, content, brand, campaigns	A growth metric, such as signups, activation, retention or revenue
Works mostly with	Sales, founders, agencies, designers	Product, engineering, data
Method	Plans and campaigns over quarters	Weekly experiments with a hypothesis and a result
Main tools	Website, content, events, PR, social, email	Analytics, paid acquisition, onboarding flows, pricing tests
Good first 90 days	A clear position, a message that sales uses, a content engine	Measurement in place, a testing roadmap, the first wins on one channel
Typical blind spot	Can't show which work moved revenue	Optimizes clicks while the story stays muddled
Fits best	Sales-led products, crowded categories, longer deals	Self-serve products with a funnel you can measure end to end

A quick way to see which one you need is to write your funnel out with real numbers. Take an invented self-serve product: 20,000 site visitors a month, 2% start a trial, so 400 trials, and 10% of those become paying customers, so 40. Doubling visitors with more content and campaigns gets you 80 customers. Doubling trial conversion to 20% with onboarding fixes also gets you 80, without doubling the top of the funnel. The first is mostly marketing work. The second is growth work inside the product. Whichever lever looks cheaper to pull for your company tells you who to hire.

Head of marketing vs head of growth pay

Salary data separates these roles badly, because titles mean different things from company to company. Here's what was published today, in US dollars.

VP of Marketing: $159,028 average base on Payscale, with total pay from $106k to $249k, from 2,104 profiles updated in September 2026.
Marketing managers (BLS): $166,790 median annual wage in May 2025. This covers marketing managers at every level and size of employer.
Head of Growth: $117,110 average base on Payscale, but from only 13 profiles, with a range from $36k to $310k. That's too few to rely on.
Growth Marketing Manager: $104,044 average base on Payscale, from 133 profiles, with total pay from $73k to $149k.

Read these as signals, not offers. A startup's "head of" title often means the first and only person in the function, who may be paid at manager level plus equity. A VP title usually implies a team. Ask candidates which of the two they've actually done.

Before either hire: the founder-led stage

Jonathan Martinez, writing in TechCrunch, argues that founders should get their first 100 to 1,000 users themselves, "by any means necessary". He says the first growth hire makes sense after what he calls "The Missing Scale", once the target audience and product-market fit have been found. Before that, a growth expert has nothing reliable to scale.

The same logic holds for marketing. A head of marketing hired before the founders can explain who buys and why will produce polished material for a guess. Spend the early months on your first sales and on writing down the words customers use. Either hire will start faster with that in hand.

Martinez suggests a consultant or agency if you can't find the right person. That's a sensible bridge for a specific channel, such as paid search, while you work out which role you need.

Which to hire first, by business model

This is our suggested starting point. Adjust it to wherever your funnel is weakest.

First senior marketing hire by situation

Situation	First hire	Why
Self-serve SaaS with a free trial and steady signups	Head of growth	The funnel is measurable, and activation is usually the leak
B2B product sold by account executives over months	Head of marketing	Sales needs positioning, content and a pipeline of qualified leads
Consumer app that hasn't found a repeatable channel	Neither yet; founders keep testing	There's nothing proven to scale
Marketplace short on one side	Head of growth	Supply or demand acquisition is an experiment-heavy problem
Crowded category where buyers can't tell vendors apart	Head of marketing	The problem is the story, not the funnel mechanics

Martinez notes that paid acquisition specialists are common first growth hires, and that a first growth hire "doesn't need to specialize in every function of growth". He suggests asking candidates for a 30, 60 and 90-day plan. That's a good test for both roles: a marketing candidate's plan should start with research and positioning, a growth candidate's with measurement and a testing roadmap.

Signs you hired the wrong one

Your head of growth can't get product time. Experiments on onboarding or pricing need engineers. If the roadmap has no room, the growth hire ends up running ads and calling it growth.
Marketing output is high, and signups are flat. In a self-serve product, blog posts and brand work won't fix an activation problem.
Sales ignores what marketing produces. In a sales-led company, that usually means the head of marketing wasn't close enough to deals to know what buyers ask.
Every growth win is a small one. Button colours and subject lines improve while the bigger question, who the product is for, stays open.
Nobody can say what was learned. Experiments ran, but results weren't written down, so the next quarter starts from zero.

Running either role in Nautis

Nautis doesn't buy ads or track in-product events, so a growth team still needs its analytics and ad platforms. It helps with the planning and execution around them. The GTM Planner holds a strategy (customer, positioning, value, pricing), a 30/60/90 roadmap and a task board. Its Experiments tab tracks each test from Draft through Testing to Won, Lost or Learnings, and AI Suggest can propose experiments from your strategy. The Metrics tab tracks the numbers against targets.

For the marketing side, the Social Calendar groups posts into plans and campaigns and sends them through a manager's approval before they go out. The URL Shortener tracks clicks by source, device and campaign, Custom Forms capture sign-ups and event registrations, and the Leads CRM holds the pipeline those campaigns create. For the role itself, see the head of marketing guide.

FAQ

Is head of growth a marketing role?

Partly. Where the main job is acquisition, it usually sits close to marketing. Where activation and retention happen inside the product, it needs to work closely with product and engineering. Decide where the role reports before you hire, because that decides what it can change.

Should my first marketing hire be a head of growth?

Only if your product sells itself through a measurable funnel and you've already found some product-market fit. If deals close through salespeople over weeks or months, a marketer who can position the product and feed sales usually helps more.

What is the difference in head of marketing vs head of growth day to day?

A head of marketing spends the week on messaging, content, campaigns and working with sales. A head of growth spends it on experiments, data and changes to onboarding, pricing or channels, often with engineers. One builds demand, the other tunes the funnel.

Can one person be head of marketing and head of growth?

At an early startup, often yes, and it's usually the right call for budget reasons. Pick someone strong in the half your funnel needs most, and plan to split the roles once both halves are full-time jobs.

Head of marketing vs head of growth at a startup