I have been in marketing for over 10 years.

Music. B2B field sales. Insurance. Agency. Two-sided marketplaces. Consumer brands. Right now I run paid search* and lifecycle marketing* at a company that matches young women from Sweden, South Africa, Mexico, Brazil, and a dozen other countries with families in the US.

In all that time, no job title has confused people more than "growth marketer." Everyone wants to be one. Almost nobody can define what one actually does.

This post tries to fix that.

If you are already in the job, treat it as a checklist. See where you stand.

If you are 19 or 22 and thinking about it as a career, treat it as a preview. The real one. Not the LinkedIn version.

// Reader Qualification

Like every post on this site, the qualification section is up top. Decide if the next ten minutes are worth your time.

Still here? Good.

What a growth marketer actually does

Walk into most companies with a growth marketer on staff. Watch them for a week. The job looks like this:

• Running paid ads on Google, Meta, sometimes TikTok or LinkedIn
• Owning a marketing automation* tool like HubSpot, Marketo, Braze, Iterable, or ActiveCampaign
• Writing email campaigns and nurture sequences*
• Editing landing pages and running A/B tests*
• Pulling numbers into a weekly slide deck
• Sitting in cross-team meetings about launches

That is the floor. The work is mostly executional. Strategy lives in the cracks.

Nothing wrong with this. It pays well. The work is real. Most companies need exactly this person.

But it is not all the job should be.

People who define it this way will hit a ceiling they did not see coming. I have watched it happen to friends in their early 30s. Great executors. Never got promoted to senior. The work they were doing did not separate them from anyone else doing the same work.

What a growth marketer should do

The bar should be higher than "good executor."

Here is the checklist I run on myself every year. I'd want anyone with five years in the role to be able to check most of these honestly.

If you cannot check 7 of these 10 with real examples, you are an executor, not a growth marketer. Both jobs are valid. Only one should command the title.

If you are a student thinking about this work

Here is the thing nobody tells college students. The marketing courses in your major teach you almost nothing about the actual day to day.

You will spend two semesters on textbook frameworks like 4Ps and STP. You will spend zero hours learning what a UTM parameter* is or how to read an event log.

That gap is a problem if you ignore it. It is an opportunity if you do not.

If I were 20 again, here is what I would actually do:

• Take a stats class. One that covers regression, basic probability, and confidence intervals. You will use this every week if you do the job right
• Take a SQL or Excel-heavy data class. Or teach yourself. Free certifications from Google, HubSpot, and Hex are real and useful
• Learn one ad platform well. Pick Meta or Google. Run $200 of your own money through it on a small project. A Substack you are trying to grow. A friend's restaurant. Anything. Losing your own money on bad ad creative is more educational than any textbook
• Write a newsletter. Anything. Watch your open rates and click rates. Learn what moves them. ConvertKit and Beehiiv have free tiers
• Get good with one CRM. HubSpot has a free version and free certifications. Knowing HubSpot well is a hireable skill for early-career roles
• Build one thing end to end. A Shopify store. A side project with real users. A small content site with a working email funnel. The thing matters less than the experience of owning the whole loop

The hiring market for entry-level "growth marketers" is harder than people will tell you. The hiring market for someone who can actually do the work in the checklist above is wide open and pays well. The gap between those two markets is bigger than the credential.

The honest part

If you are in the job and the checklist made you uncomfortable, that is the most useful outcome. Pick two items you cannot check yet. Learn them this quarter. Read the documentation. Build the small project. Run the audit on yourself.

The tactics will keep evolving. The shape of the work will not.

If you are thinking about this as a career, the work is rewarding in ways most marketing is not. You get to be analytical and creative in the same day. You see results inside a week. You argue with engineers, designers, and finance about the same problem from different angles.

The downside is real too. When growth is down, you do not get to point at anyone else. You carry the number.

If you want to compare notes on any of this, message me on LinkedIn. The conversation I have most often is with marketers two to five years in who feel stuck. There is usually a clear next move once we look at the checklist together.