The counterintuitive truth about hiring for growth: the person who looks perfect on paper—the one with the blue-chip resume, the growth PM title from a top company, the polished case study—often fails spectacularly. Meanwhile, the unconventional candidate who cold-emails the CPO or pivots from an entirely different function sometimes becomes the highest performer on the team.
Eight growth leaders who have collectively built teams at Meta, Anthropic, Instagram, YouTube, HubSpot, and high-growth startups across Latin America sat down to dissect what actually separates growth hires who scale companies from those who flame out. Their answers reveal a hiring playbook that contradicts much of the conventional wisdom.
The Aggressive Hunger Test Most Interviews Miss
Chris Miller, VP of Product for Growth and AI at HubSpot, pinpoints the trait that separated his early growth team from everyone else: aggressive ownership mentality. When HubSpot's initial growth team was just getting started, they didn't wait for problems to be assigned.
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.
— Chris Miller, VP Product at HubSpot
This kind of hunger can't be taught in onboarding. Miller describes it as "radical accountability"—the willingness to claim every problem as yours even when it's not explicitly in your scope. The team that exhibited this trait looked for opportunities the business wasn't asking them to solve, triangulated why those opportunities mattered, then seized them without permission.
The result? HubSpot kept feeding them more. Miller's career trajectory—from IC PM to VP in seven years—came from demonstrating this quality early and consistently.
But here's where it gets tricky: this trait is nearly impossible to spot in a standard interview loop. Most candidates have learned to perform well in structured interviews. They've practiced the right frameworks, memorized growth loop diagrams, and can recite textbook answers about North Star metrics. What they can't fake is the instinct to grab work that isn't theirs.
The Pattern-Matching Trap
Bangaly Kaba—who led growth at Instagram to over 1 billion users and now directs product at YouTube—has watched countless companies make the same mistake: hiring someone who succeeded at Company X and assuming they'll replicate that success at Company Y.
The trap is seductive. A PM who scaled growth at a marketplace will bring that playbook to your SaaS company. Someone who crushed it in consumer social will port those tactics to B2B. The resume checks every box.
Then reality hits. The playbook doesn't transfer. The candidate struggles. Performance reviews turn awkward. Exits happen.
Kaba has developed a framework he calls "understand work" to diagnose this early. Too many teams operate in what he calls an "identify, justify, execute" mode: someone decides what to build, pulls data to justify it, then ships. The person who thrived in that environment at their last company often can't operate any other way.
What I call the anti-pattern of what we want to do. Someone says, hey, you know what, this would be great to build. Then you go pull data to go justify why that would be great to build. First, you have to really understand from first principles what is actually going on. So understand, identify, execute.
— Bangaly Kaba, Director of Product at YouTube
The best growth hires, Kaba argues, spend disproportionate time in the "understand" phase. They resist the urge to ship fast. They question assumptions. They dig into user behavior patterns before proposing solutions. This is a learnable skill, but it requires a fundamentally different orientation than what most high-performing execution-focused PMs have built their careers on.
Companies hiring for growth rarely test for this. They ask about metrics moved, experiments run, wins delivered. They don't probe how the candidate approached ambiguity or how they decided what not to build.
Why Top Company Pedigree Doesn't Predict Performance
Amol Avasare landed his role as Head of Growth at Anthropic by cold-emailing Mike Krieger. No referral. No recruiter. No application through the website. Just a perfectly crafted cold email that got Krieger's attention.
I sent Mike Krieger a cold email saying like, hey, love what you guys do. Love the product. I think you guys badly need a growth team. Want to chat. And I didn't expect he would respond. He responds and says, hey, yeah, I'm interested. Let's talk. I'm the only PM that he's hired from cold email.
— Amol Avasare, Head of Growth at Anthropic
Avasare's trajectory—from Mercury to MasterClass to leading growth at one of the fastest-growing companies in history—didn't follow the traditional path. He had to perfect cold email over years as a founder. He learned to test subject lines, find personal emails instead of work addresses, keep messages ruthlessly short. These are not skills taught in growth PM bootcamps or developed at well-funded startups with inbound interest.
The broader point: the person who can navigate constraints, hustle their way into conversations, and create opportunities where none existed often outperforms the person who had every door opened for them. Yet most hiring processes optimize for the latter.
Elena Verna, Head of Growth at Lovable, sees this play out constantly. Lovable scaled from launch to over $200 million ARR in under 14 months—one of the fastest growth trajectories in history. The team is fewer than 100 people. They don't have time for hires who need structure handed to them.
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. I usually spend maybe 5% innovating on growth in my previous roles. Right now I'm spending 95% innovating on growth and only 5% on optimization.
— Elena Verna, Head of Growth at Lovable
Verna's point cuts deep: the skills that made someone successful in a traditional growth role—running experiments, optimizing conversion funnels, iterating on messaging—represent a small fraction of what's needed in a fast-moving environment. The candidate who aced growth interviews by discussing their experimentation rigor and statistical significance thresholds might be utterly lost when the job is inventing new distribution channels or building growth loops that don't yet exist.
The Skills Gap No One Talks About
Carolina Samsing led growth and expansion across Latin America for HubSpot, then scaled Nubox and Nowports. She's seen a pattern repeat across geographies and company stages: founders conflate the skills needed to start a company with the skills needed to scale it.
Los skills que se necesitan para hacer una startup y para crecer esa startup son muy distintos a los skills que se necesitan para hacer una escala.
— Carolina Samsing, VP of Growth at Nowports
Translation: the skills required to launch and grow a startup are radically different from the skills needed to scale. This isn't just about company stage—it's about the mental model the candidate brings.
Samsing points to the difference between "push" and "pull" strategies. Early-stage companies often succeed through push: aggressive outbound, founder-led sales, brute-force hustle. Scaling requires pull: building systems that attract users, creating content engines, establishing repeatable playbooks.
The person who thrived in push mode often struggles to build pull systems. They're uncomfortable stepping back from tactics to design strategy. They want to keep doing what worked before, even when the company has outgrown that approach.
This gap shows up in hiring all the time. The scrappy growth marketer who helped a seed-stage company find its first 1,000 users gets hired by a Series B company expecting them to build a scalable acquisition engine. They don't have the skills. The company didn't test for them. Everyone is frustrated within six months.
Where Growth Leaders Actually Disagree
The consensus around hunger, first-principles thinking, and skills-stage fit breaks down when it comes to one question: should you hire specialists or generalists?
Naomi Gleit, Meta's longest-serving executive other than Zuckerberg and current Head of Product, champions extreme clarity and documentation. Her philosophy: frameworks drive clarity, canonical docs eliminate confusion, and specialization allows people to go deep.
I really believe in frameworks for things. That helps drive extreme clarity. 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.
— Naomi Gleit, Head of Product at Meta
Gleit's approach optimizes for scale. At Meta, with thousands of employees and hundreds of concurrent projects, you need specialists who own clear domains and document ruthlessly. The growth hire who thrives here can operate independently within well-defined guardrails.
Chris Miller at HubSpot takes a different stance. He emphasizes curiosity across functions—spending time on the sales floor, understanding how other parts of the business operate, widening your aperture beyond your immediate team's scope.
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 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.
— Chris Miller, VP Product at HubSpot
Miller's hire is a generalist who connects dots across teams, spots opportunities others miss, and thinks a level or two above their current role. This person struggles in Gleit's environment—they're not following the canonical doc, they're wandering into other teams' territory, they're asking why things work the way they do instead of executing the plan.
Both leaders have built extraordinary growth functions. Both approaches work. The failure mode is hiring the wrong type for your environment. Bringing Miller's generalist into Gleit's specialist-optimized system creates friction. Dropping Gleit's framework-driven specialist into Miller's cross-functional exploration culture leaves them paralyzed.
Neither leader screens for this explicitly. They assume culture fit will surface it. It often doesn't.
What the Data Doesn't Show
Nicolas Rojas founded DAPTA after running Imagine Apps, a software factory he started at 17 that grew to serve clients across the US and Latin America. He's raised $5.4 million in venture capital, primarily from American investors. His insight about hiring cuts against the metrics-obsessed culture of growth teams.
When Rojas hires, he's looking for something specific: people who build in public, who create content, who have audiences. Not because it's a nice-to-have, but because it's become DAPTA's core growth engine.
Gran parte de mi estrategia y como mi ventaja competitiva ha sido que puedo generar mucho interés en redes para llevarlo y canalizarlo a nuestros productos de software.
— Nicolas Rojas, Founder at DAPTA
Translation: a huge part of his strategy and competitive advantage has been generating interest on social networks and channeling it to software products.
This reveals a hiring gap most growth teams miss: they evaluate candidates on hard skills—SQL proficiency, experiment design, funnel optimization—while overlooking the soft skill that increasingly drives distribution. Can this person build an audience? Do they have a voice? Will people pay attention when they ship something?
The traditional growth hire has none of this. They're optimizing your funnel, not creating top-of-funnel awareness through their personal brand. Yet in markets where paid acquisition costs are skyrocketing and organic reach is fragmented, the person who can generate attention becomes exponentially more valuable.
Jeremy Goillot, former Head of Growth at Spendesk, makes a related point about mobile-first acquisition. Most of Spendesk's ads were viewed on mobile, yet the product experience and growth tactics were still desktop-optimized. The hire who understood mobile-first user behavior from lived experience—not from a case study—could spot opportunities the rest of the team missed.
La majeure partie de mes publicités chez Spendesk, elles étaient consultées sur mobile. Le mot mobile first, il est de se dire qu'aujourd'hui la manière d'acquérir des utilisateurs, ça va être sur mobile parce que le temps d'écran où on passe la majeure partie de notre temps, c'est sur téléphone.
— Jeremy Goillot, Fmr Head of Growth at Spendesk
The pattern: the best growth hires often have an asymmetric insight about user behavior, distribution channels, or market dynamics that comes from being a power user themselves. They're not studying the market—they are the market. This doesn't show up on a resume. It's not tested in interviews. But it predicts impact.
The Takeaway: Hire for the Inflection You Need, Not the One You Had
The common thread across these eight leaders isn't a shared playbook for who to hire. It's a shared recognition that the wrong hire happens when companies optimize for pattern-matching instead of the specific inflection point they're navigating.
Bangaly Kaba's framework for choosing where to work and what to work on applies equally to hiring. Impact comes from the intersection of environment and skill set. The candidate who was perfect for Instagram's growth from 100M to 1B users might be entirely wrong for a pre-product-market-fit startup trying to find its first repeatable channel.
The failure mode is hiring the person who succeeded at the stage you just left instead of the person who can navigate the stage you're entering. Companies interview for past performance when they should be screening for future adaptability.
What would that look like in practice?
Stop asking candidates to walk through their greatest hit—the experiment that moved the North Star metric by 23%. Start asking how they'd approach a problem they've never seen before, in a market they don't understand, with tools that don't exist yet.
Stop optimizing for candidates with the right company logos on their resume. Start looking for the person who cold-emailed their way into an opportunity, who taught themselves a new skill to solve a problem, who built something from nothing because they had to.
Stop hiring for skills that match your current playbook. Start hiring for the hunger that creates new playbooks when the old ones stop working.
The growth leaders building the fastest-scaling companies in history—from Anthropic to Lovable to HubSpot—aren't finding perfect candidates. They're finding people who are scrappy enough, curious enough, and hungry enough to figure it out as the company evolves.
That quality can't be taught. But it can be screened for—if you know what to look for and have the courage to ignore the polished resume in favor of the unconventional story.