What I Actually Do At My Job
If you are interested in Growth or Marketing roles in tech - read about my experience
So… what do I actually do at my role?
This question comes up a lot. And early-stage startups are known for blurring roles, especially in the non-engineering department. My own work has shifted between growth, marketing, content, community, partnerships, and DevRel. A good indicator of how fluid this world is is that one of the fastest-growing developer tool startups in US was once pursuing me for two completely different roles at the same time. Even inside our team, I think some colleagues still struggle to define what exactly I do in my day (and likewise with me and them). Some people see me as “the social media person”, or even “the events person”.
So what do I do? And what could you do if you also join an early startup in a non-engineering role? In this post I break down my work into the types of tasks I own, and the reasoning behind them.
If I have to compress my work into a single line, I say growth. The longer explanation is that my work adjusts continuously to whatever will move the company forward fastest. The job changes shape depending on the obstacle in front of us.
Some weeks that means coding product examples. Other weeks it means billboards in San Francisco, coordinating 100 hackers in a single room, or pushing an integration through the AWS Marketplace process. The common thread isn’t the nature of the task, but the goal on the other side of it.
Growth isn’t a fixed function, but rather it’s a field of problems. The role overlaps with other roles (like marketing) and tries to find and remove what is slowing the company down right now, while strengthening the brand and widening the community around it.
My tasks, categorized
1. Content & education
Most of my work comes down to explaining boring or complicated things clearly.
Blog posts, examples, GitHub repos, demos, docs, videos, online, offline.
For example, I recorded a video course, coded simple examples (learned a bit of Python and TypeScript from scratch for it), and worked with contractors on articles and videos, just adjusting direction when needed.
I created growth hack projects like a database of AI agents which helped people understand the landscape; this kind of material is usually worth the time it takes to produce.
2. Programs & partnerships
I created partner program and handled the application flow when hundreds to thousands of teams applied. Some examples were the programs for early startups or research teams.
There were also smaller “partnerships” - for example product integrations with companies like Groq, Mistral, or LangChain. Some collaborations involved technical examples, others were more about the relationship or distribution.
Another one was working on getting the product to a big cloud providers marketplaces.
3. Analytics & decision making
As someone responsible for growing a startup, you will be doing the 🎨🥳🎥-type of activities, but also the 📈🧮🔍-type of activities.
The latter consist of measuring what works vs what doesn’t work and then convincing leadership to doubling down on the activities that work and stopping activities that don’t work. The trick is that most projects do generate some non-negative result, which makes prioritization hard. We typically measure how many resources are put into the activity and what’s the outcome relative to that. I’m synthesizing data from more sources to see patterns in where are users coming from, adding UTM links, creating questionnaires and feedback forms, using enrichment tools, or watching recordings in PostHog to see how people move around on our website, what they click on the most, and where they spend time.
4. Management & communication
A large share of output comes from coordinating work with other people. Most often I work with a designer, PR agency, video teams, content contractors, sometimes with engineers too, for example when needing help with automating growth processes.
For example, for the most recent hackathon, I had a team of fifteen people working on logistics, operation, technical support, design, and content.
This is one of the most challenging but also rewarding areas where you can save tons of work for the company.
5. Launches and campaigns
A launch is a special category that requires preparation across many threads: the product explanation, messaging, visuals, website edits, social posts, timing, distribution… Sometimes there is a video script to write, sometimes a group effort to spam subreddits, socials, and forums to promote it the most. Launches are one of the most common one-time projects I’ve been doing.
It can also mean launching a billboard or public transport advertisement campaign, or announcing a big investment round in media.
6. Brand
Everything is brand. Managing brand isn’t one discrete task, it’s a thousand micro-decisions that collectively determine how credible you appear.
This means updating positioning across channels, refining our narrative, and making sure the team actually speaks about the product the same way. Sometimes the work is rewriting landing page copy word by word until it feels precise. Sometimes it is onboarding new people into the language and metaphors we’ve chosen so the story remains coherent. Part of it is collaboration with PR agencies who look for opportunities for us to appear in media. Part of it is collaborating with designer to create merch that represents us.
Part of it is also how we talk online, what we share, and what language we use.
7. Events & community
Community is the growth surface that looks insignificant but can compound to a nice PLG. We have grown community across X, LinkedIn, Discord, newsletter, and offline - we organized events in San Francisco and Prague, usually with 100–200 people.
Events are one of the things I enjoy least because I am an introvert with ADHD - which means that a day that combines coordinating 50 small things that can break while talking to people and being an event moderator can make me exhausted for a week. I enjoy the adrenaline though - events really make me feel something.
Talking about community, I also ran a few workshops, and the ambassador program which encouraged users to engage in our community.
8. Making CEO’s life easy
This is another category that deserves to be separate from others. Sometimes I make CEO’s life difficult by challenging their views, but my goal actually is to make their life easy. This doesn’t take much of my day and is usually chill and fun.
I prepare and shape opportunities such that they arrive in a decision-ready form. For example, I share a conference where they can talk, including the topics (which I often prepare together with the organizers), logistics, and talking script if needed. I check PR content that goes to media, I prepare photos, and I help with ad hoc tasks.
What I don’t do
For long time we haven’t operated a full sales or outbound GTM function - we focused on product-led-growth. Even if I created my own mini “sales deck” in early days for talking to customers, we didn’t have any process for this. Neither I run finance, legal, accounting, HR, or general operations. Even if my job might sound like a lot of diverse tasks, there is still much more to do.
When people ask what I am - marketer, DevRel, growth, partnerships, … the true answer is none of those categories hold consistently. I feel like my role was created for me, and I love to have diverse work days.
In the future I am planning to move more away from operational tasks, events, copywriting & editing, and towards tasks like scaling what I do best (content, developer relations and partnering with the ecosystem, creative growth hacks, and creating bigger pieces of content).
Great article Tereza! You are basically Head of Content & Growth for Dev Ecosystem, right?
as Always love your writing it always informative, concret and direct. Keep on pushing, thanks you for the knowledge