I was at a coffee shop in Tribeca last month when I overheard two founders arguing about a job posting. One wanted to hire a growth marketer. The other kept asking, But what will they actually do? Twenty minutes later, they still hadn’t figured it out. They just knew they needed someone to handle growth.
This confusion is everywhere in New York’s ecommerce scene. I see it in Slack groups, at meetups in SoHo, in panicked DMs from founders who just raised seed rounds and suddenly need to build a growth function. Everyone wants growth marketing. Almost nobody can define what a growth marketer actually does all day.
Here’s the problem: growth marketing in ecommerce isn’t a job title borrowed from SaaS and dropped into online retail without translation. The role looks different. The priorities shift. The boundaries matter. If you hire someone to do growth without defining what that means for your ecommerce business, you’ll end up with expensive confusion and a lot of unfocused experiments.
This article breaks down what growth marketing actually means in ecommerce—the real scope, the daily work, the boundaries that keep it functional, and how the role fits into your broader team structure.
Growth marketing isn’t just running Ads
Walk into any ecommerce office in Manhattan and ask what the growth marketer does. Half the time, someone will say paid ads. The other half will say everything related to revenue.
Both are wrong.
Growth marketing in ecommerce is the systematic work of improving how people move through your funnel. That’s acquisition (getting people in), activation (converting visits to purchases), and retention (bringing customers back). Notice what’s missing: brand strategy, content marketing, customer service, product development, operations.
I worked with a DTC skincare brand in Williamsburg last year. They hired a Head of Growth and immediately assigned her everything the founders didn’t want to do: fix the Shopify theme, handle influencer outreach, manage the email calendar, coordinate with their 3PL, and figure out TikTok. Six months later, she quit. Nothing improved. Why? Because she was doing seven jobs, none of them growth.
Growth marketing has boundaries. It’s not all marketing and it’s definitely not anything revenue-adjacent. It’s the repeatable process of testing, measuring, and optimizing the specific steps that turn strangers into customers and customers into repeat buyers.
When you blur these boundaries, growth work becomes reactive and diffuse. Your growth marketer spends Tuesday troubleshooting Klaviyo, Wednesday in a photoshoot, Thursday arguing about brand voice, and Friday wondering why they haven’t run a single experiment this month.
Clear scope keeps the role functional. Your growth marketer should know exactly what they own, what they influence, and what they don’t touch. Everything else is someone else’s job.
The daily work: metrics, experiments, and systems
So what does a growth marketer in ecommerce actually do between 9 AM and 6 PM?
They live in metrics. Not reporting metrics—decision metrics. Every morning starts the same way: check the North Star, usually something like Monthly Active Buyers or Gross Profit from New Customers, and the 3–5 input metrics that drive it. Traffic quality. Add-to-cart rate. Checkout conversion. CAC. Repeat purchase rate within 90 days. If something’s off-threshold, they know what action to take because the decision rules are already defined.
I know a growth marketer at a home goods brand in Brooklyn who runs this review in twelve minutes every morning. She’s not exploring dashboards or building new reports. She’s checking predefined thresholds and executing predefined responses. That’s the system working.
They run structured experiments. Not random A/B tests. Not let’s try TikTok because everyone’s talking about it. Structured hypothesis-driven tests with clear prioritization. They maintain an experiment backlog scored by Impact, Confidence, and Effort. They run one clean test per funnel stage at a time, never testing acquisition and activation simultaneously because that destroys signal. They document every result in a learning log so knowledge compounds instead of evaporating.
A founder in the Flatiron District told me her growth marketer runs about four experiments per month. That sounds low until you realize each one is clean, well-documented, and actually teaches them something they can use. Compare that to running twelve messy tests that produce inconclusive noise.
They build and maintain systems. The weekly growth review. The experiment pipeline. The decision framework for channel allocation. The scaling checklist. These aren’t glamorous. They don’t make good LinkedIn posts. But they’re what separates reactive chaos from compounding progress. A growth marketer who isn’t building systems is just a tactician with a fancier title.
The work is disciplined, repetitive, and often invisible. It’s not about being clever or creative. It’s about being systematic. That’s why the role is so hard to hire for most people want the growth part; exciting! scaling! viral! without the marketing operations part; spreadsheets, thresholds, cadence.
Where growth marketing fits in your org structure
Here’s where founders in New York mess this up constantly: they hire a growth marketer before they have anything to grow.
Growth marketing is an optimization function, not a creation function. You need a working funnel first. You need product market fit. You need at least one profitable acquisition channel, even if it’s small. You need baseline conversion rates that aren’t completely broken. If you don’t have these, you don’t need a growth marketer you need a general marketing operator who can build the foundation.
I see this at early stage DTC brands all the time. Pre-revenue or just launched, they hire someone senior with growth in their title and expect magic. Three months later, the growth marketer is writing product descriptions, designing email templates, and coordinating photoshoots because there’s no funnel to optimize yet. That’s a $50K+ strategy mistake.
Growth marketing sits between marketing and data. In a functional org structure, you have brand/content marketing creating awareness and demand. You have growth marketing optimizing the funnel from awareness to purchase to retention. You have ops/finance managing economics and infrastructure. These are distinct functions with clear handoffs.
At a $5M+ ecommerce brand, this might mean a CMO overseeing brand and growth as separate tracks. At a smaller operation, it might mean a marketing generalist handling brand and a growth contractor handling optimization. The structure scales, but the boundaries stay consistent.
The growth marketer reports up through marketing or directly to a founder/GM, never through product or ops. Why? Because their job is to move people through an existing funnel, not build new features or manage inventory. Reporting structure reveals what the role actually does. If your growth marketer reports to your COO, you’ve probably mis-scoped the role.
I know a menswear brand in NoHo that runs about $10M annual revenue. Their growth marketer reports to the founder, owns acquisition and retention, and has a clear collaboration protocol with the brand team, who owns creative, messaging, and content, and ops, who owns fulfillment and CX. It works because everyone knows where growth starts and stops.
What growth marketing doesn’t own, and why that matters
Let me tell you what broke at a home fragrance brand I advised last year. They hired a VP of Growth and gave her a massive mandate: Own revenue. Sounds empowering, right?
Within two months, she was in meetings about packaging design, wholesale partnerships, manufacturing timelines, customer service ticket escalation, and brand positioning refresh. Revenue touches all of these. None of them are growth marketing.
Growth marketing doesn’t own brand. Brand is how people perceive you. Growth is how people move through your funnel. These are related but distinct. Your growth marketer should work with brand guidelines, not create them. They test messaging variants within the brand framework, they don’t redefine the brand because an A/B test showed a 3% lift.
I’ve seen growth marketers in Chelsea push to change brand positioning because their Facebook ads performed better with a different angle. That’s a category error. Performance data informs brand strategy, but growth doesn’t override brand. If your growth marketer is arguing about brand voice or visual identity, your boundaries are broken.
Growth marketing doesn’t own product development or merchandising. They can provide data on what’s selling and what’s not. They can flag conversion issues related to product pages or pricing. But they don’t decide what to launch next, how to price it, or when to discontinue a SKU. That’s product/merchandising’s job.
A jewelry brand in the West Village learned this the hard way. Their growth marketer kept pushing to launch lower priced items because CAC was too high for their current range. Technically true. Also not her call. The founders wanted to stay premium. The growth marketer’s job was to find profitable ways to acquire customers for premium products, not pressure the company to change its entire product strategy.
Growth marketing doesn’t own customer experience or operations. If your checkout is broken, growth can identify the problem through conversion data. They can’t fix the Shopify code or renegotiate your payment processor contract. If customers are complaining about shipping times, growth can measure the impact on repeat purchase rate. They can’t manage your 3PL relationship.
The best growth marketers I know in New York are extremely clear about what they don’t own. They flag problems. They provide data. They collaborate with the teams who can actually fix infrastructure issues. But they don’t try to own the entire customer experience end-to-end. That’s a recipe for burnout and organizational chaos.
Clear boundaries make the role sustainable. When growth marketing has a defined scope funnel optimization through metrics and experiments the person in that role can actually succeed. When it becomes own all revenue outcomes, it becomes impossible.
How to structure the role for your stage
If you’re running an ecommerce business in New York and thinking about adding growth marketing to your team, here’s how to think about structure based on stage.
Pre-$1M revenue: You probably don’t need a dedicated growth marketer yet. You need a marketing generalist who can set up your tech stack, launch ads, build email flows, and create content. Growth marketing is premature optimization. Focus on finding product-market fit and getting your first profitable channel working.
$1M–$2M revenue: Growth becomes a part-time specialization. Maybe your marketing generalist starts dedicating 50% of their time to optimization work. Or you bring in a fractional growth consultant for 10–15 hours per week to build systems and run experiments while your full time person handles execution and brand. This is the stage where you’re professionalizing your approach moving from trying things to testing things.
I know a cookware brand in Dumbo that hit $3M last year. They have one full-time marketing person handling brand, content, and partnerships. They have a fractional growth marketer (15 hours/week) who owns the metrics framework, experiment pipeline, and weekly reviews. It works because the scope is right-sized.
$3M–$5M revenue: You can support a full-time growth marketer. At this stage, you have enough volume for clean experimentation. You have budget for multiple channels. You have complexity that requires systematic management. The role should own acquisition efficiency, conversion optimization, and retention mechanics. They should collaborate closely with brand, ops, and finance, but have clear decision rights within their scope.
$5M+ revenue: Growth becomes a team, not a person. You might have a Head of Growth overseeing specialists in acquisition, CRO, and lifecycle marketing. You might have a growth analyst supporting experiment design and data interpretation. The function scales, but the core job systematic funnel optimization stays the same.
The mistake I see constantly in New York: companies hiring for the stage they want to be, not the stage they’re at. A $2M brand doesn’t need a VP of Growth with a team of three. They need someone senior enough to build the systems and scrappy enough to execute them. Hire for your current reality, not your investor pitch.
Frequently asked questions
Should a growth marketer in ecommerce also handle email marketing?
Depends on what you mean by handle. Growth should own the strategic side of lifecycle email what triggers to set up, which cohorts to target, how retention emails tie to repeat purchase goals. But they probably shouldn’t be designing templates or writing every email from scratch unless you’re very early stage. Execution can sit with a marketing coordinator or agency. Strategy and optimization sit with growth. If your growth marketer is spending 20 hours a week in Klaviyo building emails, you’ve mis-scoped the role.
How do I know if someone is actually qualified for growth marketing in ecommerce?
Ask them to walk you through their metrics framework for a past role. Not their results their framework. What was the North Star? What were the input metrics? How did they prioritize experiments? How did they document learnings? If they can’t articulate a system, they’re a tactician, not a growth marketer. Also ask about boundaries: what did they explicitly not own, and how did they collaborate with teams that owned those areas? The best growth marketers are extremely clear about where their responsibility starts and stops.
Can I hire a growth marketer from a SaaS company for my ecommerce brand?
Maybe, but they’ll need to translate their experience. SaaS growth is heavily product led (onboarding flows, feature adoption, expansion revenue). Ecommerce growth is heavily funnel led (traffic quality, conversion rates, repeat purchase behavior). The discipline transfers hypothesis driven testing, metrics rigor, systematic optimization. But the tactics and mental models are different. If you hire from SaaS, make sure they understand they’re not building product features or optimizing in app experiences. They’re optimizing a purchase funnel with different constraints and levers.
Conclusion
Growth marketing in ecommerce has a clear definition: systematic funnel optimization through metrics, experiments, and repeatable processes. It’s not all marketing and it’s not anything that could theoretically help revenue. It’s a specific function with specific boundaries.
When you define the scope clearly what growth owns, what it influences, what it doesn’t touch the role becomes functional and sustainable. When you blur the boundaries, you get expensive confusion and burned out people.
If you’re building or hiring for this role, start by mapping where growth fits in your broader marketing system. Define the metrics, the decision framework, the collaboration points, and the explicit non-responsibilities. Make the job real and specific, not aspirational and vague.
Then find someone who actually wants to do that job not someone who wants the title, but someone who gets energized by building systems that compound small wins into meaningful momentum. That’s the person who’ll make growth marketing work for your ecommerce business.
Ready to build the operating system that makes growth marketing functional? Define your North Star Metric, set up your weekly review, and establish clear boundaries for what growth actually owns in your business.
