What Does a Chief Growth Officer Actually Do?

The Chief Growth Officer is the fastest-growing C-suite title globally for good reason. It reflects a fundamental shift in how ambitious businesses operate: growth is no longer owned by marketing alone, but by an integrated function spanning marketing, sales, product, and customer success. The role did not exist in most organisations ten years ago. Today, it is increasingly the defining strategic position in competitive markets. Understanding what a Chief Growth Officer actually does - as opposed to what the title suggests - is essential for Australian businesses deciding whether they need fractional CGO services.

The CGO Role Defined

A Chief Growth Officer owns the entire revenue-generating system. This spans customer acquisition, go-to-market strategy, customer lifecycle management, and revenue expansion. Unlike a Chief Marketing Officer, whose traditional domain is demand generation and brand, a CGO unifies decisions across marketing, sales, product, and customer success. They define the customer acquisition strategy, but they also influence how the product is positioned, how the sales team is structured, what the onboarding experience looks like, and how customers are nurtured toward expansion. This integrated responsibility exists because growth is no longer achievable through marketing excellence alone. A business can generate tremendous awareness and inquiries, but if the sales process is broken, if the product does not deliver what was promised, or if customers churn before generating lifetime value, the marketing investment is wasted.

The CGO typically reports directly to the CEO and functions as a peer to the Chief Product Officer and Chief Operations Officer. They own the growth roadmap, the metrics and accountability for revenue targets, and the resource allocation across acquisition, retention, and expansion. They make decisions about which markets to enter, which customer segments to pursue, which channels to invest in, and what the unit economics need to be at each stage of growth. Unlike a CMO, they are revenue-accountable, not just demand-accountable. The distinction matters: a CMO might be evaluated on pipeline generated; a CGO is evaluated on revenue closed and customer lifetime value achieved.

CGO vs CMO: The Scope Difference

The CGO role and CMO role are often confused, yet they are meaningfully different. A CMO owns marketing strategy, positioning, brand, and demand generation. They are the expert in marketing channels, creative, messaging, and marketing operations. They influence how the business is positioned in the market and how prospects perceive the company. A CGO owns growth strategy, which is broader. They care about marketing, but they also care about sales strategy, product-market fit, customer expansion, and unit economics. A CGO might decide that the business should invest less in paid advertising and more in customer success because the revenue opportunity in expansion exceeds new customer acquisition. A fractional CMO would rarely make that decision unilaterally because it touches product, operations, and customer success. A CGO would, because their mandate is growth across all dimensions.

In practice, many organisations employ both a CMO and a CGO. The CMO reports to the CGO and focuses on demand generation excellence. The CGO has broader scope and sits at the executive table making decisions that cut across functions. This structure works well in larger organisations. In smaller organisations, the CGO often subsumes the CMO role, doing both strategic growth direction and marketing leadership.

Why the CGO Role Is Growing Fastest

The CGO title has proliferated because functional silos are expensive. When marketing owns acquisition, sales owns deals, and product owns retention, these functions optimise independently. Marketing spends on volume; sales wants to close high-value deals; product wants to deliver features that retain customers. These objectives can conflict. A CGO forces integrated optimisation. They ask: is it more valuable to acquire more customers at lower value, or fewer customers at higher value? Should we invest in expanding current customers or acquiring new ones? Is our product roadmap aligned with where customers are headed? These questions span functions, and they require someone with authority across all of them.

Additionally, growth has become materially more complex. In previous decades, growth was linear and predictable. You built a product, marketed it, and customers bought it. Today, growth requires orchestration across acquisition channels, conversion optimisation, onboarding efficiency, customer expansion, and churn reduction. No single function can solve this. A CGO brings the integrating perspective.

Which Industries Benefit Most

CGO roles are most prevalent in SaaS, fintech, and high-growth consumer technology companies because these businesses are inherently growth-dependent and have complex unit economics. A SaaS company needs to manage acquisition cost, annual contract value, customer retention, and lifetime value - metrics that require integrated decision-making. A fintech company must optimise across acquisition volume, regulatory compliance, product features, and customer lifetime value simultaneously. Consumer technology requires integrated growth because the path to profitability often depends on network effects, retention, and expansion, not just acquisition volume. By contrast, traditional manufacturing, professional services, or distribution businesses less frequently employ a CGO because their growth is often less complex or dependent on different drivers like operational efficiency or direct sales relationships.

The Case for Fractional CGOs

A fractional CGO is particularly valuable for Australian businesses between $2 million and $30 million in revenue that have achieved product-market fit but need to scale growth systematically. At this stage, growth is no longer happening by accident or founder effort; it requires architected process. A full-time CGO - someone expecting a $300,000 to $400,000 salary plus benefits plus potential equity - is often a stretch for the budget. A fractional CGO delivering the same strategic architecture on 2-3 days per week at $12,000-$15,000 per month is much more feasible. They provide the integrating perspective and growth discipline that separates intentional growth from random activity.

The fractional CGO works with the existing team - product, sales, customer success - to establish what the growth priorities are, what metrics matter, and how resources should be allocated. They help the CEO transition from founder-mode growth decision-making to CEO-mode, where growth is architected rather than ad-hoc. They establish frameworks for measuring unit economics, make explicit tradeoff decisions between acquisition and expansion, and hold the business accountable for the growth roadmap. For most businesses in this stage, a fractional CGO is more valuable than a full-time marketing manager because it solves the integration problem rather than just adding more execution capacity.

A Week in the Life of a Fractional CGO

A typical week for a fractional CGO on a 2.5-day engagement might look like this. Monday morning: executive team meeting where the CEO presents the quarter results; the CGO pushes back on channel attribution claims and questions whether the sales team is pursuing the right customer profile. Monday afternoon: one-on-one with the Head of Sales to understand what is actually selling and what is not. Tuesday morning: product strategy session. Tuesday afternoon: analysis of customer expansion data - looking at which products are being adopted, which customers are churning, and whether the roadmap aligns with what customers actually need. Wednesday morning: presentation to the board or investors on the growth roadmap and unit economics. Wednesday afternoon: working session with the marketing team to adjust campaign priorities based on sales feedback. These activities cut across all functions and require both strategic thinking and operational detail. A fractional CGO is essentially a part-time integration officer who makes sure growth happens through aligned action, not departmental silos.

When Your Business Needs a Fractional CGO

You should seriously consider a fractional CGO if your revenue is between $2 million and $30 million and multiple of these signals apply: your CEO is juggling growth strategy alongside running the business and cannot give either enough attention; sales, marketing, and product are optimising independently and pulling in different directions; you have data on acquisition, but little clarity on unit economics or lifetime value; your board is asking hard questions about the growth roadmap and whether spending is generating returns; you are thinking about entering a new market or launching a new product line and need integrated strategy; or you have tried fractional CMO work but realised you need broader growth perspective. If this describes your situation, exploring fractional CGO services is worth evaluating.