The job in one line
A growth lead decides where growth effort goes. They own the metric the team is trying to move, the model of how the product grows, and the order in which the team places its bets. They are one of the two steering roles on a growth team — the other being the Growth PM, who turns that direction into a concrete experiment roadmap.
Strategy and the North Star
The lead picks what the team optimizes — a single North Star metric that stands in for delivered value, and a growth model that explains which inputs move it. This is upstream of any campaign: get the metric wrong and a quarter of good execution still points the wrong way.
Prioritization is the real work
Most of the job is choosing what not to do. Brian Balfour frames growth as a repeatable process — set a goal, generate ideas, prioritize, ship, analyze, repeat — and Andrew Chen's guide describes ranking experiments by effort, probability of success, and upside. The shorthand "the 20% that drives 80%" is a mental model for the same instinct: back the bet with the biggest impact for the effort, right now.
Tempo and coordination
The lead sets how fast the team tests — learning compounds, so a faster, disciplined tempo beats occasional big swings — and keeps a cross-functional team pointed the same way: a PM, an engineer, marketers, an analyst, a designer. They rarely run a single channel themselves; their output is the system's output.
Different titles, same job
"Growth lead," "head of growth," and "chief growth officer" overlap and are used loosely across companies. Some lean toward product, others toward channels. The constant underneath the title is the steering: set the metric, prioritize the bets, set the tempo, keep the team aligned.