The $350k job that's replacing "growth hackers" 🧱

Is growth hacking finally DEAD??

The “growth hacker” is becoming extinct. 🦖

LinkedIn, Citi, and Nasdaq have quietly replaced them with a new breed of marketer: Marketing Innovation leaders - and they’re paying $150-350k in annual salaries.

📊 I’ve analyzed 30+ job postings for “Marketing Innovation” roles.

The message is clear: Companies want marketers who combine (1) AI skills, (2) technical know-how, and (3) creative experimentation.

And they’ll pay anything to get them.

That leader could be you.

Here’s exactly what these companies want + how to position yourself for these jobs before everyone else figures it out. Let’s start 👇

Your boss is secretly scared of missing the AI revolution 🤫

AI terror keeps CMOs awake at night.

Your executives are 24/7 terrified of the possibility that competitors have found some secret AI tool to 10x their growth and you guys didn’t.

Marketing Innovation roles directly address this fear:

1. LinkedIn wants a Marketing Innovation Group Manager to “orchestrate AI first audience technology, ad operations, and measurement techniques”

2. Dogs Inc seeks a Marketing Innovation Manager to “lead the integration of emerging AI technologies into our marketing strategies”

3. Fiverr’s Associate Director of Marketing Innovation is asked to “continuously explore new trends, tools, and platforms”

AI is central in these roles, but companies need MORE than just AI knowledge.

This creates an opportunity.

Here’s what companies are looking for 🎯

After analyzing those 30+ job descriptions, I’ve found 3 skills that every single Marketing Innovation role requires:

Each overlap is an “old world” role. All three together create the Marketing Innovation role.

1. AI fluency (not just awareness)

Companies aren’t looking for AI researchers who build models from scratch. They need practical AI translators who can:

• 🧩 Find places where AI can fix broken marketing processes

• 🛠️ Write prompts that automate real tasks

• 📚 Teach teammates how to use AI in their daily work

• 🗞️ Always stay “in-the-know” of new tools and news

The difference is “practical fluency” - the ability to apply AI to solve real marketing problems rather than just discussing them in meetings. Your value comes from finding problems, implementing AI solutions, and then teaching others to do the same.

TL;DR: Find problems → solve them with AI → then teach the team.

2. Technology orchestration

You don’t need to code, but you need to speak tech:

• 📊 Have a rough idea of what marketing tools are available to you

• 🧪 Evaluate and select new marketing tech

• 🤝 Work directly with engineering and product teams

• 💻 Understand just enough data architecture to get things done

This shows up in job descriptions at companies of all sizes:

1. Nasdaq seeks a Director of Marketing Innovation to drive “innovative projects and systems within Nasdaq’s technology stack”.

2. Wolt requires its Head of Marketing Innovation to have “deep understanding of CRM and AdTech systems” and “strong expertise using SQL to extract, clean, and transform data”.

3. AAA needs a Marketing Innovation Strategist to “ensure the successful adoption of new technologies”.

4. Citi wants a Head of Marketing Innovation to “develop a scale marketing technology and data infrastructure”

3. Creative experimentation

Test-and-learn mindset. Great marketers aren’t afraid to:

• 🧠 Run small creative tests of big ideas

• 📈 Look at results and know what matters vs. what doesn’t

• 🚀 Scale winners immediately

• 🧮 Trust data, but also their gut

This shows up in job descriptions at companies of all sizes:

1. Fiverr wants an Associate Director of Marketing Innovation to “conceptualize and execute Guerrilla Campaigns”

2. Flora Foods seeks a Marketing Innovation Manager who will “challenge the thinking, pushing for entrepreneurial way in (‘what if we were a start-up?’)”.

3. Molson Coors needs a Director of Marketing Innovation to “identify white space opportunity” and build “ideas that drive incremental growth”.

4. Agoda looks for a Director of Marketing Innovation “who think critically, test, learn from mistakes, and adapt quickly”.

Five ways to prepare yourself (right now) for these $350K jobs 💎

You don’t need a fancy title or permission to develop these skills. Whether you're an intern, specialist, or CMO - the path is the same.

Here are five things you can do right now:

1. Build a shared AI prompt library for your team

Last year, I made a simple Notion doc where our marketing team shares ChatGPT prompts. I added five to start - email subject lines, social media ideas, and research summaries.

Two weeks later, we had 42 prompts. Team members improved each other’s work. Our content creation speed doubled.

⚡️ Quick win action: Make a doc called “Marketing AI Prompts” with 3-5 prompts you use. Share it with your team tomorrow. Offer to keep it organized as it grows.

2. Solve a marketing bottleneck with AI (today)

I recently noticed our research team was stuck spending hours brainstorming graphs for blog posts.

I found Napkin.ai, and got it running in just 15 minutes. Now they quickly generate visualization ideas with AI, then hand these mockups to our designers who create proper (branded) versions.

This tiny win accomplished two things: it saved the team time AND gave me a practical AI implementation story for my resume.

⚡️ Quick win action: Find one task your team struggles with. Visit taaft.com to find an AI tool that solves it. Set it up this week and document the results.

3. Bridge the marketing-engineering language gap

At my last job, marketing and engineering couldn’t communicate. Projects stalled for MONTHS because marketers asked for things in ways engineers didn’t understand.

So I started having coffee with senior engineers twice a month.

I asked about their projects and how they think about marketing problems. Then I also made a one-page “translation guide” for the marketing team to use.

⚡️ Quick win action: Take Khan Academy’s free SQL basics course this weekend (it takes 2-3 hours). Then have coffee with an engineer and ask what they’re working on right now.

4. Start a cross-team ideas channel

Marketing ideas can come from anywhere. But with no place to capture them? → Poof. They’re gone.

Create a simple #marketing-ideas Slack channel and invite people from every department—engineering, product, customer support, even finance.

The rule: share any cool marketing concepts you’ve seen, no matter how wild. Your VP of Engineering might share a competitor’s demo they love. Customer support might share emails that drove them to purchase.

⚡️ Quick win action: Create a #marketing-inspiration Slack channel today. Invite 5-10 people from different teams. Seed it with 3 examples of great marketing you've seen recently. Ask for contributions weekly.

5. Run one unconventional marketing experiment per month

Marketing innovation thrives on experimentation. The most successful marketing leaders build experiment engines (NOT one-off campaigns).

Start by creating a simple table. Dump every wild marketing idea you have (source ideas from the #marketing-ideas channel you’ve created), no matter how unusual. Rate each experiment on potential impact, implementation difficulty, and measurement clarity. Then run one new test every month.

What matters isn’t just the experiments themselves but building a system to capture ideas, test them quickly, and document both wins and losses.

⚡️ Quick win action: Block one hour this Friday. Design some experiments. Then throw them onto a table, categorize them by goal, give each one a score of one to five on the ICE scale (Impact, Confidence, and Ease), and prioritize them accordingly.

How this table looked at one company I’ve worked with

The money follows the skills gap 💰

These salaries tell the whole story:

• LinkedIn: $224k

• Fiverr: $160k

• Citi: $500k

Ridiculous numbers? No. Supply and demand.

Almost no marketers have all three required skills. Most have one. Some have two. But the true unicorns who master all three? Companies will fight for them. 🦄

What to do next?

Start small with the 5 action steps above. Build your evidence. Connect the dots between AI, technology, and creativity. The future belongs to those who can bridge the gap. Be one of them.

See you next Friday ✌️

Tom

P.S. I wrote about this trend on LinkedIn a few days ago and it sparked some really insightful discussions in the comments. Check it out here.

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