Last updated: September 2026
Who are the best Heads of Growth in Australia?
It sounds like a relatively simple question until you actually try to answer it.
Growth is one of those jobs that can mean almost anything depending on the company.
At one business, the Head of Growth owns paid acquisition and conversion. At another, they sit somewhere between product, marketing, data, customer experience, and revenue. At an early-stage startup, they might do all of the above before lunch.
The title itself isn't particularly helpful either.
Some of Australia's best growth operators have literally held the title Head of Growth. Others have been Country Leads, Heads of Ecommerce, Heads of Marketing, or senior leaders who were effectively responsible for the same thing: figuring out how to make a company grow.
So rather than rank people based on job titles, LinkedIn followers, or who happens to be the loudest online, I've looked for Australian growth leaders with evidence of actually building something.
That might mean customer acquisition, product-led growth, international expansion, ecommerce, audience growth, retention, lifecycle marketing, or building an entire growth function from scratch.
Here are 10 Australian growth leaders worth knowing.
The best Heads of Growth in Australia
| Growth leader | Best known for | Growth speciality |
|---|---|---|
| Anna Cheng | Spaceship, Curious Thing | Startup growth and GTM |
| Jessica Box | Linktree | Product-led growth |
| Andre Pinantoan | Canva, Airtasker | Product and acquisition growth |
| Michelle Battersby | Bumble | Consumer and market expansion |
| Junia Ooi | Canva | International growth |
| Jocelin Abbey | Are Media, Guardian Australia | Audience and subscription growth |
| Natalie Miller | ReadyTech | B2B SaaS and GTM |
| Heather Earl | Nutrition Warehouse | Ecommerce and lifecycle growth |
| Dan Siepen | Tractor Ventures | Startup and venture growth |
| Emma Sumner Smith | Adore Beauty, Kmart Australia | Acquisition, loyalty, and retail growth |
A quick caveat before getting into the list.
This isn't a scientific ranking, and I've deliberately avoided giving people arbitrary scores out of ten. Instead, I've looked at publicly available evidence across four broad areas:
measurable growth outcomes
experience leading growth or growth-related functions
the scale and complexity of the businesses involved
breadth across acquisition, product, retention, ecommerce, international expansion, audience, and revenue
Not everyone on this list currently has the literal title Head of Growth.
What connects them is that they've led a meaningful growth function and have a track record worth studying.
1. Anna Cheng
Known for: Spaceship, Curious Thing AI, Brighte
Growth speciality: Startup growth, go-to-market, acquisition, and experimentation
Anna Cheng has one of the clearest growth backgrounds in Australia's startup ecosystem.
She joined superannuation startup Spaceship as employee number three and worked on its early growth strategy. One of the most notable outcomes was its pre-launch waitlist.
Cheng created and implemented a strategy that attracted 40,000 potential investors before Spaceship's fund launched. UNSW Founders credits that early momentum with helping Spaceship reach $100 million in funds under management within its first few months.
She later became Head of Growth at conversational AI startup Curious Thing, where she managed the launch of two products, before moving through other growth roles including Brighte.
What makes Cheng particularly interesting is the variety. Building a viral waitlist for a consumer financial product requires a very different playbook from launching an AI product or scaling a startup through paid acquisition. That ability to move between categories is one of the clearer signs of someone who understands growth as a discipline rather than a collection of channel tactics.
Why she's on the list: Few Australian growth marketers have such a strong combination of early-stage experience, experimentation, product launches, and documented commercial outcomes.
2. Jessica Box
Known for: Linktree
Growth speciality: Product-led growth, acquisition, retention, and international scale
Jessica Box has one of the strongest documented Head of Growth tenures in Australian technology.
Box joined Linktree around the start of the pandemic and became Head of Growth during an extraordinary period of expansion. During her first two years leading growth, Linktree's user base increased from approximately 4 million to more than 24 million users. Her role wasn't simply about buying more traffic.
Box described the job as being responsible for both expanding the product and bringing new customers onto the platform, using a combination of data, experimentation, product development, and identifying opportunities in new markets.
Linktree's growth organisation itself gives a good indication of how broad modern growth can become. It included product growth, analytics, customer experience, CRO, CRM, SEO, and regional growth.
That's important because the best growth functions rarely operate as isolated performance marketing teams. They connect acquisition, activation, retention, monetisation, and product.
Linktree is also a particularly interesting case because the product itself creates distribution. Every Linktree shared publicly potentially exposes another user to the product. That's a very different growth mechanism from simply increasing an advertising budget.
Why she's on the list: Helping scale Linktree from roughly 4 million to more than 24 million users represents one of the clearest examples of Australian product-led growth at global scale.
3. Andre Pinantoan
Known for: Canva and Airtasker
Growth speciality: Product growth, SEO, content, acquisition, and experimentation
Andre Pinantoan is one of the foundational names in Australian growth marketing.
He is best known as Canva's first Head of Growth. That's significant because Canva's early growth machine became one of the best-known examples of product-led and organic growth to come out of Australia.
Pinantoan was involved in building the systems that helped Canva expand through search, content, templates, product loops, and acquisition rather than relying entirely on paid advertising. He has subsequently held senior growth and product roles at Airtasker.
Early-stage growth means identifying which channels can compound, which experiments are worth scaling, and which should be abandoned quickly.
Pinantoan's experience across both Canva and Airtasker also matters because it shows an ability to operate across more than one major Australian technology business.
Why he's on the list: Being Canva's first Head of Growth puts Pinantoan at the centre of one of Australia's most successful technology growth stories, while his later work at Airtasker adds marketplace and product experience.
4. Michelle Battersby
Known for: Bumble Australia
Growth speciality: Consumer growth, community, brand, and market expansion
Michelle Battersby's work launching and scaling Bumble in Australia is a great example of how brand and community can become growth channels.
Battersby joined Bumble and became its Australian Country Lead during a period when the dating app was still establishing itself in the local market.
Australia subsequently became Bumble's fastest-growing market, with downloads reportedly quadrupling during Battersby's time leading the market.
The interesting part of the strategy was that it wasn't built purely around performance marketing.
Bumble used events, partnerships, ambassadors, media, community, and cultural positioning to create awareness and word of mouth. That matters because growth is sometimes reduced to dashboards, CAC, attribution, and A/B testing.
Battersby subsequently worked across other consumer businesses and entrepreneurship, giving her experience that extends beyond a single company.
Why she's on the list: She helped turn Australia into one of Bumble's major international markets and demonstrated that community, events, partnerships, and brand can be genuine growth levers.
5. Junia Ooi
Known for: Canva
Growth speciality: International marketing and global expansion
Few Australian companies have had to solve international growth at the scale Canva has.
Junia Ooi has been one of the people responsible for doing it.
Canva identifies Ooi as its Head of International Marketing, with international marketing teams operating across regions including South East Asia, Latin America, and Europe. International growth sounds relatively straightforward when written into a strategy document.
Find a market.
Translate the product.
Run some ads.
Reality is considerably messier!
Different countries have different levels of category awareness, languages, cultural norms, media environments, competitors, price sensitivity, and customer behaviour. A campaign that works in Sydney can fail completely in Jakarta or São Paulo. The challenge for an international growth function is working out what should remain globally consistent and what needs to be rebuilt locally. That's a very different discipline from optimising acquisition within one mature market.
Why she's on the list: International expansion is one of the hardest growth problems to solve, and Ooi has helped build the marketing organisation supporting one of Australia's most globally successful technology products.
6. Jocelin Abbey
Known for: Are Media, Guardian Australia, Mamamia, and ABC
Growth speciality: Audience development, subscriptions, memberships, and content growth
Jocelin Abbey represents a type of growth that gets less attention in startup circles: audience growth.
In June 2026, Are Media appointed Abbey to the newly created role of Director of Content and Consumer Growth. Her remit includes content, audience development, subscriptions, memberships, partnerships, affiliate, video, and vodcasts.
Before taking the role, Abbey had held senior audience and marketing positions across organisations including Mamamia, The Guardian, and the ABC.
The economics of audience businesses make growth particularly interesting.Acquiring someone's attention isn't enough.
You need to turn a visitor into a repeat reader, a reader into a subscriber or member, and an audience into revenue without destroying the experience that attracted them in the first place. That makes the growth function a combination of content strategy, product, customer experience, distribution, monetisation, and retention.
It's a useful counterpoint to the classic SaaS interpretation of growth.
Why she's on the list: Abbey has spent her career working at the intersection of audience, content, product, and commercial growth, and now has direct responsibility for consumer growth across one of Australia's largest media businesses.
7. Natalie Miller
Known for: ReadyTech
Growth speciality: B2B SaaS, go-to-market, brand, and customer experience
Most growth lists skew heavily towards consumer technology.
Natalie Miller adds an important B2B SaaS perspective.
At ReadyTech, Miller has held senior responsibility across marketing, customer experience, and corporate communications, and is now identified as General Manager, Group Marketing. ReadyTech itself operates across complex software categories including workforce management, education, government, and justice.
That's a very different growth environment from a consumer app.
The buying cycle is longer.
The number of potential customers can be much smaller.
Multiple stakeholders influence the purchase.
Sales and marketing need to work closely together.
Brand, pipeline, customer experience, and expansion all matter.
In these environments, growth isn't about finding a clever viral loop.
It's usually about creating a repeatable go-to-market engine that combines demand generation, sales enablement, customer experience, brand, and retention.
Why she's on the list: Miller brings a B2B and enterprise dimension to Australian growth leadership, demonstrating what growth looks like in complex SaaS markets rather than only high-volume consumer products.
8. Heather Earl
Known for: Nutrition Warehouse Group
Growth speciality: Ecommerce, lifecycle marketing, personalisation, and retention
Heather Earl represents another important growth discipline: ecommerce.
As Head of Ecommerce at Nutrition Warehouse, Earl works across a business that combines ecommerce with physical retail. The company's lifecycle results are particularly interesting.
A Klaviyo case study reported that Nutrition Warehouse generated more than 160,000 email and SMS sign-ups during 2024. Its automated flows recorded 47% year-on-year growth in placed order rate, while the platform generated a reported 50x ROI. Those numbers illustrate one of the most overlooked parts of growth marketing.
Acquiring another customer is usually expensive.
Getting more value from an existing audience through segmentation, retention, personalisation, lifecycle campaigns, and better customer experiences can be significantly more efficient.
Ecommerce marketers have understood this for years. The best ecommerce operators think beyond traffic and conversion rate. They think about repeat purchase, customer lifetime value, merchandising, loyalty, CRM, personalisation, and the relationship between online and physical retail.
Why she's on the list: Earl brings a strong lifecycle and ecommerce perspective to the list and demonstrates that growth isn't only about acquiring more customers. It's also about getting better at serving the customers you already have.
9. Dan Siepen
Known for: Tractor Ventures, Wellshare, and the Australian startup ecosystem
Growth speciality: Startup growth, acquisition, automation, partnerships, and growth operations
Dan Siepen is one of the more recognisable growth operators in Australia's startup ecosystem.
He currently leads growth marketing initiatives at Tractor Ventures, working across acquisition, sales operations, automation, analytics, and content. Tractor describes his role as helping scale its growth efforts across multiple functions.
Siepen also describes his role with Tractor as Growth Consultant and Head of Growth and has previously held a Head of Growth and Marketing role at Wellshare.
Siepen's work across startups, consulting, education, and venture gives him exposure to that problem repeatedly rather than within only one company.
Why he's on the list: He represents the generalist side of growth particularly well: acquisition, automation, content, analytics, partnerships, and operations working together rather than sitting in separate silos.
10. Emma Sumner Smith
Known for: Adore Beauty and Kmart Australia
Growth speciality: Customer acquisition, performance marketing, loyalty, retention, and retail growth
Emma Sumner Smith brings another useful perspective to the list: customer growth inside large-scale retail.
Her background spans growth, acquisition, loyalty, performance marketing, and customer strategy, including senior work at Adore Beauty before moving to Kmart Australia.
At Adore Beauty, Sumner Smith worked across areas including paid media, search, affiliates, partnerships, and customer growth.
She was involved as Adore Beauty brought more of its performance media capability in-house and expanded its acquisition organisation.
She was also connected to the development of Adore Rewards, the retailer's revamped loyalty program.
The broader Adore Beauty results show why this area of growth is worth paying attention to. For FY26, Adore Beauty reported new customer acquisition up 14.4% while digital acquisition spend fell 37.4%. Reported return on ad spend increased from 9x to 14x. Those are company-level results and shouldn't be attributed to one individual, but they illustrate the environment Sumner Smith was operating within: a retailer trying to acquire customers more efficiently while simultaneously investing in loyalty, omnichannel growth, and lifetime value.
Why she's on the list: Sumner Smith brings experience across acquisition, performance marketing, loyalty, and customer strategy, giving the list another example of growth happening outside traditional startup and SaaS environments.
Is Head of Growth the same as Head of Marketing?
Not usually.
A Head of Marketing will generally own areas such as brand, campaigns, positioning, communications, demand generation, and the marketing team.
A Head of Growth is typically more directly accountable for a measurable growth outcome and may work across marketing, product, sales, data, customer success, and revenue.
But the boundary is messy.
A Head of Growth at a 30-person startup might work on paid advertising on Monday, onboarding experiments on Tuesday, pricing on Wednesday, and lifecycle email on Thursday.
At a larger company, each of those functions might have its own team.
This is also why some of the people on this list don't currently have "Head of Growth" in their title.
Their work still sits squarely within the discipline.
What skills does a Head of Growth need?
A strong Head of Growth usually needs a combination of analytical and creative skills.
They should understand acquisition economics, conversion, retention, experimentation, customer behaviour, positioning, analytics, and the commercial model of the company.
They also need to know enough about multiple disciplines to connect them.
A paid acquisition problem may actually be a positioning problem.
A retention problem may actually be a product problem.
A conversion problem may actually be a customer experience problem.
There's another skill that gets discussed less often: prioritisation.
There are always hundreds of things a company could do to grow.
The job isn't generating another 100 ideas.
It's working out which three actually matter.
Who is the best Head of Growth in Australia?
There isn't an objective answer.
There is no single "best" type of Head of Growth.
If you're looking for classic product-led growth experience, Jessica Box and Andre Pinantoan offer two of the strongest Australian examples through Linktree and Canva.
If you're interested in early-stage startup growth, Anna Cheng's work building Spaceship's 40,000-person pre-launch waitlist is particularly relevant.
For consumer growth and market expansion, Michelle Battersby's work helping Bumble make Australia its fastest-growing market stands out.
For international growth, Junia Ooi provides a window into what global expansion looks like at Canva.
For audience growth, Jocelin Abbey brings experience across media, subscriptions, memberships, and content.
For B2B SaaS, Natalie Miller offers a very different model of growth through go-to-market, customer experience, and marketing leadership.
And in ecommerce and retail, Heather Earl and Emma Sumner Smith demonstrate the importance of lifecycle marketing, loyalty, retention, acquisition efficiency, and lifetime value.
The best Head of Growth is usually the one whose experience matches the growth problem you're actually trying to solve.
Methodology
This list was compiled using publicly available information as of September 2026.
I looked primarily at:
documented growth outcomes
experience leading growth or growth-related functions
scale and complexity of the companies involved
breadth across acquisition, product, retention, internationalisation, ecommerce, audience, and revenue
publicly available evidence connecting the individual to meaningful growth work
The list deliberately uses a slightly broader definition of Head of Growth than a job-title database would.
Some people included have formally held the Head of Growth title.
Others have led functions that are fundamentally responsible for growth under titles such as Country Lead, Head of International Marketing, Director of Consumer Growth, Head of Ecommerce, or senior marketing leadership.
The objective isn't to decide who has the best LinkedIn headline.
It's to identify Australian operators whose growth work is worth paying attention to.
Frequently asked questions
Who are some of the best Heads of Growth in Australia?
Australian growth leaders worth following include Anna Cheng, Jessica Box, Andre Pinantoan, Michelle Battersby, Junia Ooi, Jocelin Abbey, Natalie Miller, Heather Earl, Dan Siepen, and Emma Sumner Smith.
Does a Head of Growth need to be a marketer?
No.
Some growth leaders come from marketing, while others come from product, analytics, operations, sales, or entrepreneurship.
The role is defined more by ownership of growth than by the person's original discipline.
What should you look for when hiring a Head of Growth?
Look for evidence that the person has solved a growth problem similar to yours.
The most famous growth operator isn't necessarily the right hire.
A company looking for enterprise SaaS pipeline needs a different skill set from a consumer marketplace trying to improve product-led acquisition.
An ecommerce retailer with millions of existing customers needs something different again.
The business problem should determine the growth leader you hire, not the job title.
