Why all the marketing roles are turning into growth roles.

And why that's probably not a bad thing.

I got laid off last week and so I’m deep into the job hunt.

I’ve been exploring different options in different departments, I have some experience in a lot of roles.

As I’ve explored product roles and marketing roles I’m finding a really interesting trend:

I’m seeing many fewer “marketing” roles and many more “growth” roles.

The growth of growth in the job market

Growth in a job title is a newer development, that likely started with “growth hacker” roles. And these roles were probably not as legit as a growth product manager role is today, but that seems to be where they started.

As growth hacking came and went as a fad, real roles that included growth in the title started popping up.

That takes us to the rise of the Growth Product Manager, which in itself is still a new role.

But the GPM role actually has a lot of purpose and validity to it, so much so that several tech startups and full-blown companies are hiring for different levels of growth product management. Reforge even offers multiple courses (which I’ve taken and I actually highly recommend).

Is growth a marketing role or a product role?

One of the common questions I get is exactly that:

Is growth a marketing job or a product one?

The answer can depend, but in my experience, it can be both.

More and more I’m seeing growth marketing roles where the title is something like this:

This role is specifically focused on SEO but seems to be somewhere in between product and marketing.

Another note to add is that the growth marketing roles seem to be focused on user acquisition, lifecycle, and retention.

So what does a growth person do?

I’ve worked in multiple growth roles now on the product and marketing side and in my experience they all focus on basically the same thing:

User acquisition and retention.

As a product manager, I focus on improving the website as a conversion tool.

As an SEO, I focus on content and organic traffic conversion.

As a paid media specialist or demand generation manager, I focus on paid tools to acquire users.

So at the end of the day I actually like that these titles are changing to growth. I think it makes sense.