Growth is eight jobs, not one
When a small team says it is "doing growth," it usually means one person is doing a little of everything. But growth done well draws on distinct skills that rarely live in one head: setting strategy, instrumenting a funnel, running paid channels, designing retention flows, testing pages, reading cohorts, and writing copy. Map those onto the funnel and you get roughly eight roles. This is the foundation of an AI growth team — it mirrors the same division of labor.
The eight roles
There is no single industry-standard org chart — growth teams are built differently at every company. The split below is how we cut it: eight roles that, between them, cover the whole funnel.
| Role | What they own | A task they ship |
|---|---|---|
| Growth Lead | Strategy and the North Star metric | Pick the activation metric for the quarter |
| Growth PM | The experiment roadmap | Spec and prioritize the next A/B test |
| Growth Engineer | Tracking and funnel plumbing | Add the missing subscription_started event |
| Performance Marketer | Paid channels and audiences | Pause the audience with weak ROAS |
| Lifecycle Marketer | Onboarding, retention, win-back | Ship the 5-email onboarding sequence |
| CRO Specialist | Experiments on pages and journeys | Split-test the pricing-page CTA |
| Data Analyst | Cohorts, forecasts, weekly insight | Forecast next month's churn |
| Copywriter / Designer | Every email, SMS, and in-app message | Rewrite onboarding emails in your voice |
Two roles steer; six ship
The Growth Lead and Growth PM set direction — what to chase, what to test next, in what order. The other six execute against it. Keeping the two apart is the point: when strategy and execution collapse into the same vague to-do, both get worse. (More on the first job in what a growth lead does.)
Small teams compress this — at first
You do not hire eight people on day one. Andrew Chen's growth-team guide and Brian Balfour's account of building one from zero to fifty both describe a viable starting team of three — a product-minded lead, an engineer, and a designer — that only splits into specialists as it scales. The eight roles are the skills the work needs, not a headcount you must hit.
Hire it, or run it as software
Hiring all eight is out of reach for most small teams — loaded salaries for eight senior specialists run comfortably past $1M a year, which is our own estimate, not a published figure. The alternative is to cover the roles with software: an AI growth team that does the role-specific work while you approve it. If you are sizing that against a suite you know, see fromHello vs HubSpot.