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The growth role is one of the more unusual constructs in B2B. You're accountable for revenue growth across the full funnel: new acquisition, expansion, retention. But you control almost none of the functions that produce it. You don't own headcount decisions in sales. You don't own product roadmap prioritization. You don't own brand positioning or pricing. You don't own customer success.

You own the number. You influence the inputs. And the gap between those two things is where a lot of growth leaders spend enormous energy getting frustrated about their organizational reality instead of figuring out how to work within it.

One more AI tool that helps sales do follow ups better is a poor substitute for managing the sales team better, or hiring more A players to begin with.

The growth leaders who figures out how to treat influence as a skill worth building deliberately wins. Both in this role and future roles. While the ones who don't cycle through roles every 18 months wondering why the organizations they join never give them what they need.

Authority was never the answer

Even if you had formal control over sales, marketing, product, and customer success, you couldn't effectively manage all of those functions simultaneously.

The growth role is somewhat cross functional (especially in an organization with PLG components) and is implicitly designed for someone who can move things through alignment, shared metrics, and persuasion. Not someone who can command and control a large multi-functional organization.

Growth these days also involves a lot more activities that favor nerdiness. Building automations, managing performance campaigns, automating the creation of creative. To do the role really, really well might be to turn down more meetings–not be the guy doing shots at the bar with everyone at the company happy hour.

The people who are the best growth leaders are not necessarily the ones who would be good at running a large functional organization. They're the ones who can synthesize across functions, identify the highest-leverage constraint in the system at any moment, and get people who don't report to them to care about the same thing they care about.

That's a different skill set. And it's worth investing in deliberately.

The model is your leverage

The most powerful tool a growth leader has is a model of the business that everyone in the organization understands and feels accountable to. Not a spreadsheet you update for your own planning. A shared model: visible, regularly updated, and connected to the decisions each team is making.

A spreadsheet is fine. A claude artifact or site is probably better.

When the product team is deciding whether to prioritize a new activation feature or a new enterprise integration, if they can look at your model and see the conversion rate impact of each, you’ll have an impact on that decision wtihout having to go to another meeting.

When marketing is deciding how much budget to allocate to Meta or LinkedIn or conferences, the model should show what each dollar of spend is expected to produce downstream, not just at the top of the funnel.

Building and socializing this model is itself a form of organizational influence. Every team that starts using your model as a shared reference point is a team that's implicitly accepted that growth logic governs how they think about their decisions.

Most battles aren't worth having

Influence is a finite resource. Growth leaders who push back on every decision that affects their number get tuned out. The ones who are effective are ruthlessly strategic about where they spend their credibility.

This requires being willing to let things go. A product prioritization decision you disagree with. A marketing campaign that you think will underperform. A sales comp structure that creates the wrong incentives.

Sometimes you advocate clearly and lose. The mistake is fighting every battle. You’ll get tuned out. Being right more often than you're wrong, on the decisions that matter most, is what earns you more influence over time.

The role is often badly designed

There's an honest conversation worth having about whether the growth role is set up well at most companies, and the honest answer is often no.

At small companies the roles are clear and, with AI, a growth person might be the only person doing all of the functions. This works well if that person’s skills are well suited to the challenges that company faces.

At larger companies it becomes about influence, and system building. When the growth leader is exceptional at influence and when the leadership team is genuinely aligned on the growth model it’s much easier to hit targets.

If you're a growth leader evaluating a new role, spend as much time assessing the leadership team's actual alignment on how growth happens as you do on the comp structure or the product quality.

A great product in an organization where sales and marketing are fundamentally at odds is a harder growth job than a mediocre product in an organization where everyone is pulling in the same direction.

AI tools won’t save you

LinkedIn is full of advice on how to do this or that with a new tool. Or how to build your own using Claude, some MCPs, and a bunch of tokens.

This misses the larger challenges. Tools are only as good as the people and teams that use them. Many new AI tools aren’t really built for teams – they’re built for single players. Which is what a lot of early stage startup growth teams look like–one man bands.

Many AI coded tools won’t outlast the person who built them. Even some of my tools I created for our internal use have broken or need maintenance-maintenance I don’t always have time to do. This is true on every team I speak with. That’s fine if it was a single use, one off tool. But if it’s something a sales team of 10 relies on every day–and it breaks–that’s a structural problem.

Make sure the whole team is aligned. Just throwing tokens at everything isn’t enough. You need to align on a strategy, and that is why the best growth roles are leadership roles. Even if they don’t have any direct reports.