Work

4 min read

How I Work Across Growth and Operations

How I Work Across Growth and Operations

I work across creator partnerships, community, content, product, and operations because growth rarely breaks in only one place.

I work across creator partnerships, community, content, product, and operations because growth rarely breaks in only one place.

In this piece
In this piece

I do my best work when the goal is clear but the path is not.

Give me a growth target, a partnership opportunity, or an operational problem, and I rarely see one isolated task. I see a connected journey: who the audience trusts, what message earns their attention, what happens after they click, whether the product keeps the promise, and whether the team can tell what worked.

That is why my experience looks broad. I have worked across creator partnerships, community, content, websites, purchase journeys, payment systems, analytics, no-code tools, and automation. The range is useful because growth rarely breaks in only one place.

I take ownership of the outcome

At Gradly, I worked on growth for a product serving international students in the United States. Reaching students was one part of the challenge. Helping them make a confident health-insurance decision was another.

Students had university-specific requirements, waiver deadlines, unfamiliar terminology, and reasonable questions about whether a plan would work for them. A creator partnership could generate attention, but the work could not stop at publishing content.

It continued into creator briefs, webinars, WhatsApp communication, university-specific pages, purchase flows, lifecycle messages, and attribution through tools such as UTMs and PostHog.

Looking at the full journey changed the questions I could ask. Did the creator reach the right students? Did the content answer the concern preventing them from buying? Did the landing page continue the same message? Where did people hesitate or leave? What should we repeat, improve, or stop?

My responsibility was not to protect the boundary around a task. It was to help the outcome move forward.

I look for the real problem, not the most visible one

Teams often work hard on the symptom they can see.

If subscriptions are not growing, the first response may be more content. But the problem could be unclear positioning, a confusing payment flow, weak onboarding, or no reliable follow-up. Producing more content would create more activity without fixing the constraint.

At Unshackled, I worked across the website, subscription journey, payment infrastructure, newsletter, social content, and the systems supporting a paid immigration community. These were not separate projects from a member’s perspective. Together, they formed the path from discovering the community to understanding its value and becoming a paying member.

Rebuilding the website mattered. Making sure the offer, payment experience, content, and operations worked together mattered more.

I use the same approach at Stixe. A founder may begin by asking for a website or marketing help, but the work often reveals a deeper question about positioning, the offer, the customer journey, or the way the business explains its value. I can move from that conversation into copy, structure, design direction, implementation, and the operating details needed to launch.

The requested deliverable is where I start. The business problem is what I try to solve.

Being a generalist does not mean avoiding depth

There is a fair criticism of generalists: knowing a little about many things is not useful if you cannot make sound decisions in any of them.

My approach is to go deep enough to understand the mechanism, do the work, and recognise when specialist depth is required. I do not need to pretend I am the best designer, developer, media buyer, or analyst in the room. I need to understand how their work connects, give them a useful brief, and keep the larger outcome coherent.

The same applies to tools. I have worked with Framer, Webflow, PostHog, Wati, OpenPhone, Fillout, Stripe, Circle, and many others. I use AI heavily for research, troubleshooting, drafting, analysis, and repeatable workflows.

The list itself is not the advantage. The advantage is being able to learn what the problem requires without waiting for the perfect setup or a perfectly defined role.

I try to leave the work easier to run

Solving a problem once is useful. Building a way to solve it consistently is more valuable.

When a partnership works, I want to understand why and capture the process for finding, briefing, tracking, and reviewing the next one. When a campaign stalls, I look for the missing decision, unclear handoff, or absent owner. When the same judgment is needed repeatedly, I turn it into an SOP, template, dashboard, or AI-assisted workflow.

This is what ownership means to me. Stay close enough to notice the hidden problem. Do enough hands-on work to understand it. Then create enough structure that the team does not have to rediscover the answer every time.

What working with me looks like

I ask questions until the intended outcome and the actual constraint are clear. I move between strategy and execution without treating either as someone else’s problem. I communicate what is blocked, what I need, and what I think should happen next. I involve specialists when depth matters, then make sure their work connects to the larger objective.

I am probably not the right fit for a role where success means staying inside a narrow lane and waiting for a complete brief.

I am at my best in an ambitious team where growth involves several moving parts: creators, partnerships, community, content, product, conversion, and operations.

Give me the business context, the people involved, and ownership of the outcome. I will find where the work is stuck, move it forward, and make it easier to run the next time.

CONTACT

Want to work together?

If you have a role, project, collaboration, or idea you think I’d be right for, send me a note.

If you have a role, project, collaboration, or idea you think I’d be right for, send me a note.

mahantesh@stixe.in

mahantesh@stixe.in