The Onboarding Playbook 8 Growth Leaders Actually Run

The conventional wisdom says new growth leaders should spend their first 90 days "listening and learning." That's terrible advice.

The best growth hires don't show up to learn—they show up to prove they belong. From Anthropic's billion-dollar sprint to HubSpot's product-led revolution, the pattern is clear: elite growth leaders take aggressive ownership from day one, often claiming problems no one asked them to solve.

What separates the executives who transform companies from those who optimize around the edges? Eight top growth leaders reveal what they actually did in their opening quarter—and the answers are far more counterintuitive than the standard onboarding playbook suggests.

Claim Territory No One Wants (Then Make It Invaluable)

Chris Miller joined HubSpot in 2016 as an individual contributor PM when the company had just launched its free CRM. No one knew what to do with it. Most teams were focused elsewhere. Miller saw an opening.

We really had an aggressive mentality, an aggressive approach. And what that looked like was at the time, a very small percentage of HubSpot's subscription revenue would be described as self-service. So we approached the team who owned it and we were like, are y'all working on this? And they were like, nah, we're working on a bunch of other stuff. We were like, can we take this? And they were like, sure, if you want it. And so we took it and immediately blew it up.

— Christopher Miller, VP Product, Growth & AI at HubSpot

Miller's strategy wasn't to wait for the perfect assignment. He triangulated where the business had untapped value and claimed it. The self-service revenue stream that most teams ignored became HubSpot's product-led growth engine. Seven years later, Miller leads both growth and AI.

Naomi Gleit took a similar approach at Facebook. She joined as employee 29 for a marketing role—a job she explicitly didn't want. But she understood what Sheryl Sandberg would later codify: when you're getting on a rocket ship, don't ask what seat.

That was my foot in the door. And here we are 19 years later.

— Naomi Gleit, Head of Product at Meta

Carolina Samsing encountered the opposite problem at HubSpot when she tried to launch Latin America expansion. The company had three clients in the region—one in Mexico, two in Chile. Leadership's directive was blunt: "figure out la pump." The internal project name said it all: "Experiment Bing Latam," because every closed deal triggered a celebration bell. Samsing was handed a problem the company wasn't sure existed and told to prove it mattered.

The pattern holds: the growth leaders who make the biggest impact don't wait to be assigned the company's top priority. They identify neglected opportunities and make them unmissable.

The 30/40/50% Rule: Most of What You Know Is Wrong Here

Elena Verna joined Lovable after building growth teams at multiple companies. She thought she understood the playbook. Then reality hit.

I feel like only 30 to 40% of what I've learned in the last 15 to 20 years of being in growth transfers here because we just need to invest in such bigger bets and innovate and create new growth loops here.

— Elena Verna, Head of Growth at Lovable

Lovable went from launch to $200 million ARR in under a year with fewer than 100 people. The velocity made Verna's previous playbooks obsolete. She now spends 95% of her time innovating on growth—the inverse of her typical 5% innovation, 95% optimization split.

Amol Avasare faced the same reckoning at Anthropic, where the company scaled from $1 billion to $19 billion ARR in 14 months. The standard growth frameworks couldn't keep pace.

You come into Anthropic, you need to understand that 50, 60, 70% of how you operate in the past, just throw it out the door.

— Amol Avasare, Head of Growth at Anthropic

Both leaders describe their roles as the hardest jobs they've ever had—not because the work is harder, but because the mental models that made them successful elsewhere actively mislead them now. The first 90 days aren't about applying what you know. They're about identifying which half of your expertise to discard.

Bangaly Kaba, who built growth teams at Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube, developed a framework for this transition. He calls it "understand work"—the anti-pattern of pulling data to justify what you already want to build. The correct sequence: understand from first principles what is actually happening, identify the right problem, then execute. Most growth leaders skip straight to execution, importing solutions from their last company.

The Cold Email That Changed Everything

Amol Avasare didn't apply for his role at Anthropic through normal channels. The company wasn't even hiring for growth. He was a Claude user who noticed obvious gaps and sent Mike Krieger, the chief product officer, a cold email.

The subject line and approach were products of years of testing. Avasare had perfected cold outreach as a founder, learning to target personal emails rather than work inboxes where everyone else competes. The message was direct: love the product, you need a growth team, let's talk.

He said I'm the only PM that he's hired from cold email. And I feel very lucky that he decided to respond to my email.

— Amol Avasare, Head of Growth at Anthropic

The timing was serendipitous—Anthropic had just started considering growth hires. But timing only matters if you take the shot. The detail that stands out: Avasare's rule is to keep reaching out until someone explicitly tells him to stop. Most people give up after one attempt.

The lesson isn't "send cold emails." It's that elite growth leaders identify opportunities before job postings exist. They create their own openings rather than waiting for companies to realize they need help.

Build Understanding Machines, Not Just Dashboards

Naomi Gleit has a strong opinion about how new leaders should document their early days: create one canonical source of truth for every project.

I work on a lot of different projects. A lot of times I'm ramping up mid-project. I'm like, where can I learn what I need to learn about this project? I ask 5 different people, get 5 different answers. That is unacceptable. Of course, I'm sure there's hundreds of docs associated with the project, but there needs to be one canonical doc. Everyone should know exactly where the canonical doc is.

— Naomi Gleit, Head of Product at Meta

This isn't about documentation for its own sake. It's about creating a shared understanding that survives beyond individual conversations. At Meta's scale, knowledge fragmentation kills velocity. The canonical doc becomes the forcing function for clarity.

Chris Miller took a different approach at HubSpot: he physically moved to where the work happened.

I used to spend a lot of time sitting on the sales floor, just going into the other buildings and talking to other folks working on different parts of the business. You might just discover something from having a casual conversation with someone at the water cooler. You absorb a bunch of context around how pieces of the business are connected and you can start to really widen your aperture in terms of the size of opportunities that might be in front of you.

— Christopher Miller, VP Product, Growth & AI at HubSpot

Miller's strategy was to understand how growth connected to sales, support, and product before optimizing any individual channel. That cross-functional context let him identify opportunities that siloed teams missed—like the self-service revenue stream no one was working on.

Both approaches solve the same problem: new growth leaders need to build mental models of how the business actually works, not just how org charts say it should work. The faster you map those connections, the faster you can identify high-leverage problems.

The Aggressive Ownership Paradox

There's a tension in how growth leaders describe their first 90 days. On one hand, they emphasize humility and learning. On the other, they describe behaviors that look like the opposite: claiming territory, pushing into conversations they weren't invited to, and immediately "blowing up" what existed before.

Chris Miller acknowledges this directly:

I was just willing to take some risks and really push for the things that I believed made sense, even though maybe based on the titles that I had at the time, I wasn't inherently given a seat at the table and really pushed my way into some of these conversations and then was eventually invited to them.

— Christopher Miller, VP Product, Growth & AI at HubSpot

The framing matters: Miller didn't wait for permission. He demonstrated value, then got invited. That's different from assuming you know better than everyone in the building.

Bangaly Kaba's framework for this balance comes from his time at Facebook and Instagram. He emphasizes that impact requires looking at two variables: the environment and your skill set. Understanding the environment deeply comes first. Only then can you identify where your skills create leverage.

There's impact that you're really trying to drive, and the impact is only achievable by looking at a set of variables related to the environment, a set of variables related to your skill set.

— Bangaly Kaba, Director of Product at YouTube

The best growth leaders thread this needle: they're deeply curious about how the business works today while being aggressive about what it could become. They listen before they act, but when they act, they move with conviction.

What No One Tells You About Velocity

The final lesson from these eight leaders: the pace at AI-era growth companies has fundamentally changed what "90 days" means.

Elena Verna describes Lovable's tempo as unlike anything she's experienced:

The pace here is insane. Everybody and their mother is starting a vibe coding business nowadays, and we need to figure out how to be ahead of them. And to be ahead of them is not optimization of the problem. It's reinvention of the solution.

— Elena Verna, Head of Growth at Lovable

At Anthropic, Amol Avasare jokes about how the team's relationship with data visualization has evolved:

The funniest thing is I've noticed internally linear charts are just not cool. Everything is log linear. It's just show me a log linear scale.

— Amol Avasare, Head of Growth at Anthropic

When your company grows 10x year-over-year and doubles revenue in four months, linear thinking becomes a liability. The first 90 days aren't about careful analysis—they're about building the muscle to keep pace with exponential change.

Nicolas Rojas, who raised $5.4 million for DAPTA after spinning it out of his development agency Imagine Apps, learned this lesson the hard way. His first venture was profitable but commoditized. The pivot to venture-backed software required a complete reset of his operating speed and mental models. The timeline that felt aggressive at the agency—quarters and fiscal years—had to compress to weeks and product cycles.

This creates a paradox for new growth leaders: you need to understand the business deeply, but you don't have time for a leisurely ramp. The solution these leaders converged on: be radically selective about what you try to understand. Learn the minimum required to identify your first high-impact bet, ship it, then learn from the results. Repeat.

The Real First 90 Days Playbook

Strip away the startup mythology and a clear pattern emerges. The growth leaders who transform companies in their first quarter do five things:

First, they identify neglected problems with outsize potential. Chris Miller's self-service revenue. Carolina Samsing's Latin America expansion. Amol Avasare's recognition that Anthropic needed growth before the company knew it. These weren't assigned projects—they were opportunities hiding in plain sight.

Second, they ruthlessly discard what worked at their last company. Elena Verna's 30-40% transfer rate. Amol's 50-70% reset. The mental models that made you successful enough to get hired are often the wrong models for your new context. The faster you identify which parts of your playbook don't apply, the faster you can focus on what does.

Third, they build understanding faster than seems possible. Naomi Gleit's canonical docs. Chris Miller's time on the sales floor. Bangaly Kaba's "understand work." They create systems to compress months of learning into weeks, then use that understanding to place precise bets rather than spray-and-pray tactics.

Fourth, they claim ownership aggressively while staying genuinely curious. The paradox resolves when you realize these leaders aren't claiming to have all the answers—they're claiming responsibility for finding them. That's different from assuming you're smarter than everyone in the building.

Fifth, they match their velocity to the company's actual pace, not to conventional wisdom about onboarding. At Anthropic and Lovable, "careful analysis" is a liability. At other companies, moving too fast breaks trust. Reading the room correctly matters more than following a generic playbook.

The conventional 90-day onboarding advice—listen, learn, build relationships, then act—isn't wrong. It's just incomplete. The growth leaders who make the biggest impact do all of that while simultaneously claiming territory, shipping changes, and proving they belong. They treat their first quarter not as a grace period to ramp up, but as a compressed timeline to demonstrate the judgment that got them hired.

The question isn't whether to be aggressive or thoughtful in your first 90 days. It's whether you can be both at the same time.