Start with the business job
A business with a proven offer and a healthy conversion journey may need someone to improve paid acquisition efficiency. A business attracting trials that never experience value needs product and onboarding work as well. Calling both problems “performance” can hide the different skills and access required.
Do not treat a broad growth role as a reason to make one person responsible for everything. A marketer can identify onboarding friction, but engineering still needs to implement product changes. Agree who owns the diagnosis, who can approve changes and who is accountable for the customer outcome.
Compare responsibilities, not prestige
| Question | Performance emphasis | Growth emphasis |
|---|---|---|
| Where is the work? | Campaigns, audiences, creatives and landing pages. | The connected acquisition, activation and retention journey. |
| What is reviewed? | Campaign cost and conversion quality. | Customer progression and sustainable economics. |
| Who must collaborate? | Creative, analytics and sales. | Those teams plus product, support and lifecycle owners. |
| What is the risk? | Optimizing a cheap but low-quality conversion. | Spreading effort across too many disconnected experiments. |
Write a useful scope
- Name the stage that needs improvement and the current obstacle.
- Define the business outcome alongside the platform conversion event.
- State which systems and teams the person can influence.
- Decide which work needs a specialist rather than the main owner.
For a campaign specialist, specify whether landing-page testing and conversion tracking are included. For a growth lead, specify whether retention, product analytics and pricing research are responsibilities or advisory inputs. Ambiguity often becomes visible only after the contract starts.
Worked example: the wrong title can hide the wrong problem
Illustrative example: an app doubles inexpensive installs while the proportion of users completing a first useful action falls. A performance review might focus on cost per install; a growth review adds activation and retained usage by acquisition cohort. Both reviews need campaign quality data. The solution could be an ad promise mismatch, an onboarding problem or a new audience that the product does not serve well.
Neither job title identifies the cause. The useful distinction is whether someone is authorized to investigate and coordinate across those stages.
Avoid a false choice
Acquisition and retention are not competing philosophies. A well-defined performance program can contribute to a wider growth plan. The handoff matters: the person buying traffic needs feedback about the people who become valuable customers.
Which role should an early business hire first?
Hire around the strongest unresolved constraint and the founder's own skills. If nobody understands the audience or offer, campaign execution alone is unlikely to solve that uncertainty.
Can one consultant cover both?
Sometimes, within an explicit scope. Ask for the working process, team dependencies and reporting definitions rather than a promise to own every stage.
Put this into practice
Replace the title at the top of your brief with a sentence describing the business behavior you need to improve. Then list the decisions, systems and collaborators required to do that work.
Primary-source reading for platform details: Paul Graham: Startup = Growth.
Related foundation: SaaS growth strategy: build acquisition around activation. How these guides are prepared.
Ayoub Mouhachtt
Growth & performance marketing. Explore the portfolio and working background.
Related portfolio work: eGrow. The worked examples in this guide are illustrative and are separate from the portfolio’s project evidence.