Hire Fractional Head of Growth — experiments that find the engine

Marketing runs channels; growth runs experiments across the whole funnel — acquisition, activation, retention, referral — with the product itself as a growth lever. Growth is the system; marketing is one input to it.

It depends on traffic and team size — the mandate sets a velocity target your data can actually support. One rigorous test beats five sloppy ones; statistical power is not negotiable.

Partially — acquisition and messaging tests do not need product work. But the biggest growth levers — activation, retention, referral — live in the product, which is why the head of growth partners with product and engineering.

Expect real learnings in the first month and meaningful wins within a quarter. Growth compounds: the first wins fund bigger bets, and the system gets smarter every sprint.

When the experimentation engine is proven and the team needs a full-time owner to scale it. The fractional mandate builds the system and writes the spec.

I work on a monthly retainer tied to a set number of days rather than a day rate you have to police. Most engagements land between two and six days a month, depending on how hands-on you need me and whether there's a team to direct. That's a fraction of a full-time head of growth's salary plus equity, and you can scale my days up during a push or down once the system runs itself. I scope it precisely after the initial audit.

I usually start with a focused 30-day diagnostic, then settle into a rolling three to six month engagement where the real compounding happens. Growth is a learning game, so you need enough test cycles to separate genuine signal from luck. I keep the contract rolling monthly so you're never locked in, and a healthy outcome is that my days taper as your team absorbs the system and eventually owns it outright.

I work in what you already have wherever it's trustworthy. If you're on Mixpanel, Amplitude or PostHog with clean tracking, I'll build on it. I only recommend changes, say moving event collection to Segment or adding GrowthBook for experiment assignment, when the current setup can't give us reliable numbers. Ripping out tooling for its own sake just burns the budget you hired me to spend on actual growth.

Yes. When you hire a fractional head of growth you're adding a leader, not replacing your doers. I direct in-house marketers and brief agencies against clear hypotheses and kill rules, which usually makes an agency far more accountable than a vague retainer ever did. I keep what's working, retire what isn't, and give everyone a shared scoreboard so we argue about evidence instead of opinions.

Both, within reason. I'll set up and run channel experiments myself early on, structuring campaigns, defining success criteria and budgets and wiring the tracking, because I don't trust a strategy I can't instrument. Once a channel proves out and needs daily management at scale, that's better owned by a specialist or agency I brief and hold to targets. My value is deciding which channels deserve real money, not babysitting bid adjustments.

An agency executes a single channel and a consultant hands you a deck; a fractional head of growth owns the outcome across the whole funnel. I sit inside your team, set the roadmap and stay accountable for the North Star metric rather than a report. Because I come from a CTO background, I can also build the tracking and data pipelines that most growth hires simply assume already exist. You get strategy, execution and the technical foundation from one accountable person.