Our first "growth hire" spent three months building dashboards nobody looked at and left for a bigger title elsewhere

★ signal-weak r/smallbusiness · ↑ 543 · 💬 149 · 2026-03-30 · kw: any tool that · open on reddit ↗

Tool

none

Issue

Hired growth manager built 17 analytics dashboards over 3 months with zero experiments run or business impact, then departed for better role, leaving wasted onboarding investment and no shipped results.

Cost

unstated

Recommendation

none

extracted with

anthropic/claude-haiku-4.5 · 2026-05-08

Body

Brought someone in specifically to own growth. solid resume, talked a good game in interviews, had experience at names people recognize. First month was research. fair enough. second month was tooling. built out an analytics stack, connected everything, created dashboards that tracked seventeen different metrics. looked impressive. Third month i started asking what we were actually going to do with any of it. got a lot of talk about needing more data before making decisions. started noticing the dashboards were getting more refined but nothing was actually being tested. Week eleven he told me he'd been approached for a VP title somewhere else and was going to take it. We had seventeen dashboards and zero experiments run. The hard lesson is that people who are good at looking busy and people who are good at doing things are very different skill sets and the interview process does not reliably tell them apart. Now i ask candidates to walk me through the last thing they actually shipped and what happened when it did. not what they planned. not what they analyzed. what they shipped. Anyone else hired for growth early and had it go sideways. curious how common this is.

Top comments (7)

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[score=422] elgarduque

This is 100% a management problem.

[score=466] freshairproject

It sounds like a managing issue, not a hiring issue. The first step after onboarding is coming up with a set of s.m.a.r.t. goals or list of tasks, roadmap and expectations. Your story sounds like you abandoned him, so he kept himself busy with no real managerial feedback… its like driving blind with the windshield completely blacked out.

[score=136] TheBlueFormula

So you hired him and then left him to his own? What was your goal? Did you walk him through your plan for the business?

[score=143] cartiermartyr

Yeah that tracks. I interviewed for a growth marketing manager but in the description it talked about building dashboards and improving the website, and I blame the corporate hyperbole bullshit. Some article just got posted inna thread that said the corporate bs leads to less effective outcomes/ decision making. Why the fuck are you making 17 dashboards though? And why aren’t you keeping communication? Not micromanaging but keeping communication in good standing?

[score=26] elephantpantsgod

I did something similar once as an employee. The job was significantly different to what we'd talked about in the interviews. I knew within the first week I wouldn't be staying. However I needed the paycheck so I had to stay until I found something else. So, rather than focus on a big project that I knew wouldn't get finished, I did a few smaller things that I knew would be useful. That way my time there wasn't a complete waste.

[score=21] kveggie1

Honestly: you are the problem. Not doing a better hire and better mentoring.