Chief Growth Officer in Europe

What a Chief Growth Officer does

A Chief Growth Officer is the executive who owns growth across marketing, sales and product and answers for it to the CEO and the investors. A VP Growth does the same job one level below the executive team, as a manager of managers across acquisition, lifecycle and product growth. Job descriptions for both ask for a growth strategy set with the executive team, the lead of cross-functional teams, KPIs, partnerships, reports to stakeholders and investors, and ten years or more in senior leadership.

My leadership experience passes the ten-year mark, and my growth work runs from consumer shops and customer portals to a data product for banks.

My executive and growth work, newest first

• Since May 2024: expert member of the Product Advisory Committee of the Digital Token Identifier Foundation, the registration authority for ISO 24165.
• 2022 to October 2024: at the Frankfurt-based company Blocksize Capital, Head of Decentralized Finance and Node Operations from January 2022, Chief Information Officer from January 2023, procuration from May 2023. I had disciplinary responsibility for business-critical teams and was responsible for the budgets and the management of information technology. Growth and marketing were part of the CIO position.
• 2016 to December 2021: Project Manager and Web Developer at Policen Direkt. I coordinated marketing, management, product development and external partners for the group’s portals.
• 2011 to 2016: Project Lead and Developer at Valentins (Burda Digital), the IT link between management and marketing for shops with revenues in the millions.

Details: Career stages.

Growth levers I have worked on, with dated results

A board that hires for growth asks which levers a candidate has pulled and what came of them. The table lists mine with the results and dates that the pages of this site state.

Lever	Where	Result
Funnel and checkout	Online shops, 2011 to 2016	Up to 22 percent more sales on mobile devices for a top e-commerce brand, through changes to the funnels
Ordering convenience	Valentins, 2011 to 2016	n-tv named Valentins the best online shop for ordering convenience
Email reminders	A date-based reminder service, 2011 to 2016	Hundreds of thousands of customers informed about holidays and recurring events
Customer portal	The insurance manager of Policen Direkt, 2016 to 2021	Thousands of customers managed their policies there and ordered products of external partners
Content	The online guide of Policen Direkt	Named insurance blog of the year by TU Dresden in 2018
Data product	A Frankfurt fintech, 2022	Hundreds of digital assets at launch; institutional and professional customers onboarded
Community	Meetups on digital assets in Frankfurt, since spring 2022	The community Finance Loop came out of them, with more than 4,000 members

Profile at a glance

Role	Chief Growth Officer, VP Growth
Engagement	Permanent, remote for the most part, on-site days in Frankfurt Rhine-Main; interim; fractional
Location	Frankfurt, Germany; remote across Europe
Executive	CIO of a Frankfurt fintech, January 2023 to October 2024; procuration from May 2023
Leadership	More than ten years, teams of up to 50 employees
Committees	Product Advisory Committee of the Digital Token Identifier Foundation, since May 2024; advisory boards in web technology
Languages	German, English

Who I am

I am Michael Wutzke. Good employees need support and guidance, and I lead as their sparring partner, with empathy and resilience. Inside a company that means knowing which people work well together; when a crisis hits, it means calling in the right experts from my network. On the technical side, I am interested in open-source AI models that a company runs on its own servers. Details: Supporting people.