The Growth Partner Role That StoreHero Is Hiring Aggressively to Support Growth Managers

In this article, we explain the growth manager role — a position that will soon become the center of a talent war in the commerce industry — and the "Growth Partner" role that supports them.

What exactly is a growth manager, and how does the role differ from a marketing manager or project manager? What skill sets are required? We hope to answer these questions through this article.

We also want to share the potential and appeal of the Growth Partner position, a role StoreHero is actively hiring for to support growth managers.

If you are interested in working in growth within the commerce industry, this is a must-read.

Scope of Responsibilities for a Growth Manager

Let's start by explaining what a growth manager does.

The scope of a growth manager covers everything related to business growth. Growth managers identify growth opportunities in a commerce business and work in coordination with dedicated specialists across a wide range of areas — including customer acquisition, CRM (Customer Relationship Management), alliances, and product development — to rapidly implement growth initiatives, evaluate outcomes, and continuously improve the growth process based on results.

In short, it is a position that touches everything necessary for a commerce business to grow.

In practice, the three skills most strongly demanded of growth managers are:

• Implementation ability to bring initiatives to life
• The mindset to repeatedly test hypotheses and find the best approach
• Communication skills to discuss and find solutions with specialists across diverse fields

How Shopify Lowered the Technical Barrier to Implementation

Shopify is a commerce platform that makes it easy to implement a wide variety of growth initiatives.

Even if a candidate lacks some implementation ability — one of the three key skills — they can still function effectively as a growth manager if they have the other two. In this sense, Shopify has significantly lowered the barrier to entry for becoming a growth manager.

Of course, even on Shopify, having a solid understanding of Shopify itself, Shopify Apps and related tools, the storefront, and API specifications will help you get more out of the platform's potential.

Shopify maintains extensive official documentation, which allows merchants and Shopify Partners to stay up to date with daily updates while exploring the best ways to build and operate their stores.

At StoreHero, we have also built setup manuals for various Shopify apps and related tools, a streamlined system for storefront implementation, and a knowledge database — creating an environment where new hires with no prior Shopify experience can onboard quickly.

The Democratization of Growth Thinking Processes

The knowledge needed for growth is actually quite easy to find. Search on Google or YouTube and you will find an overwhelming amount of blog posts and videos covering every aspect of growth. StoreHero also publishes articles introducing growth strategies and useful apps for Shopify.

Knowledge alone, however, is not enough to achieve growth. More important than knowledge is the thinking process. You need to be able to correctly decide when, which initiative, and how to execute it. Veteran growth managers have a highly refined thinking process.

That said, thinking frameworks — such as the AARRR model and Lean Startup — have become increasingly well-known and accessible to the general public.

Recently, I gave a lecture on Shopify and growth know-how to information technology students in Cambodia (see the announcement article about the lecture), but honestly, the content available on Google and YouTube far surpasses anything I could deliver in a single lecture (laughs). Today, no matter where you are in the world, you can access the knowledge and insights developed by some of the brightest minds out there.

At StoreHero, we are also developing a system that enables high-quality initiative selection even for those who are not veteran growth managers. This is a highly challenging endeavor, but if we can pull it off, it will dramatically lower the barrier to becoming a growth manager.

Growth Managers Who Solve Problems Through Communication

If that system were built and knowledge and thinking processes were no longer critical differentiators, the essential skill for a growth manager would narrow down to communication ability.

This is a fundamentally human skill that is difficult to replicate with systems or tools. In a few years, the growth managers who truly stand out will be those who can communicate with professionals across diverse fields and identify effective solutions.

While there is often talk of an engineer shortage, within the commerce industry — as long as platforms like Shopify are being used — engineers with extremely advanced skills are not necessarily required. By contrast, growth managers who can find solutions through communication are both difficult to hire and hard to train. Since every commerce business needs them, we expect to see a fierce talent war for these individuals.

The Growth Partner Job Title

To address the shortage of growth managers in the commerce industry, StoreHero has created a new job title called the Growth Partner — a role dedicated to supporting merchants' growth managers.

The job involves supporting merchants in areas where their growth managers have gaps, leading growth projects, and co-creating growth workflows together with merchants.

We use the term "Growth Partner" rather than "consultant" because our role is not simply to respond to merchant requests — it's to proactively propose and drive initiatives based on the situation. We sometimes push back on what merchants want to do. I personally oppose ideas quite often, so I suspect some merchants find me difficult (laughs).

StoreHero's Growth Partners are like the strategists of the Sengoku era (Japan's Warring States period). Working behind the scenes, they leverage StoreHero's growth support platform to strategically build commerce businesses' growth processes — all in service of realizing the merchant's vision.

Going forward, StoreHero will actively hire Growth Partners and those who aspire to become Growth Partners, as we work to make commerce businesses around the world into heroes. If you are interested, please contact us.