The first 90 days as Head of Growth

Month one: setup, and one visible ship

Month one is setup, and everyone knows it, which is exactly why you should also ship one visible thing. My cadence, run across four versions of this role: instrument the funnel so there is one source of truth, audit every channel that has ever been tried, interview the people who tried them, and pick the single channel where the company has unfair advantage. Then ship something small in it before the month ends. Setup earns you patience. A ship earns you believers.

The trap in month one is inheriting the previous strategy by default. Channels calcify around a founder's instincts, and your job in the first thirty days is to decide which of those instincts were right, not to assume all of them were. Whether you are full-time or fractional, this month looks identical.

Month two: leading indicators, honestly read

Month two is when leading indicators appear if you picked well. In my organic playbook that means content indexed and impressions rising, even though rankings and traffic are still months out. Every channel has an equivalent: paid has CPA on cold audiences, lifecycle has open and reply rates, partnerships has qualified conversations. Report these as what they are, evidence of direction, never as results.

This is also the month to set the experiment cadence that will outlast you. My process is sharing weekly numbers with the whole team, and using them to decide whether a strategy graduates to business-as-usual or dies. Growth experiments without a public scoreboard degenerate into activity theatre, which is the failure mode the experiments page exists to prevent.

Month three: first compounding results, and the investor translation

Month three is when the first real results land: first-page rankings and rank traffic in organic, stable CPA at spend in paid, a repeatable motion in whatever channel you chose. Not the hockey stick, the first evidence of compounding. If nothing is compounding by day 90, the channel choice was wrong, and saying so out loud is the job.

The part nobody tells you: translate the results into the language your board actually reads. Growth strategy has to align with investor goals, whether they want paid acquisition for pro plans, B2B pipeline, or usage activity, and a Head of Growth who cannot make that translation gets reorganised under a CMO within the year. The difference between those two seats is its own page, what the role should be paid is on the salary page, and how the people who do this best operate is documented in the best heads of growth in Australia. The full role definition lives at what a Head of Growth actually does.

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