Open this lesson in your favourite AI. It'll walk you through the why, explain the demo, and quiz you on the try-it list.
Conflating growth with marketing causes orgs to assign the wrong success metrics, hire the wrong people, and optimize the wrong levers. Growth is cross-functional and measured by retention and compounding; marketing is largely about top-of-funnel visibility. Getting this wrong means a team that calls itself 'growth' but only runs ad campaigns and wonders why the numbers don't compound.
Compare two team charters — one growth, one marketing — and their respective north star metrics.
Use these three in order. Each builds on the one before.
In one paragraph, explain the difference between growth and marketing like I'm new to it.
Walk me through how growth and marketing interact step by step — where they hand off, where they overlap, and where they conflict.
Given a 10-person startup where the founder is the only marketer, how would you decide when to hire a growth person versus a marketing person, and what metric would trigger that decision?
const marketingTeam = {
primaryMetric: "MQLs (Marketing Qualified Leads)",
channels: ["SEO", "paid social", "content", "PR"],
successCondition: "impression → click → sign-up",
ownedStages: ["Acquisition"],
};
const growthTeam = {
primaryMetric: "Weekly Active Retained Users",
channels: ["product", "email", "referral", "pricing experiments"],
successCondition: "sign-up → activated → retained → expanded",
ownedStages: ["Activation", "Retention", "Referral", "Revenue"],
};
console.log("Marketing north star:", marketingTeam.primaryMetric);
console.log("Growth north star:", growthTeam.primaryMetric);