Director, Lifecycle & Organic Growth - KOHO

About KOHO

We’re on a mission to make financial services better for every Canadian. That means no hidden fees, no predatory interest rates - just financial products designed to help our users spend smart, save more, and build real wealth. We’re a performance organization with a strong heart: we care deeply about outcomes, and everything ties back to our mission - to financially empower a generation of Canadians.

At KOHO, we believe real impact comes from people who are trusted, empowered, and supported to do their best work - without sacrificing their lives to do it. We prioritize work-life integration, not just work-life balance. That means asynchronous collaboration, flexible hours, and a remote-first setup built around autonomy and high trust.

KOHO is entering its next chapter - leaner, smarter, more AI-integrated. We’re building for impact, not bureaucracy. If you thrive in environments that value clarity, ownership, and bold thinking, you’ll fit right in.

About The Role

Lifecycle and Organic Growth own two things at KOHO: how Canadians find us without paid media, and every message they get from us after they sign up. As Director, Lifecycle & Organic Growth, you'll set the strategy for both and lead the teams that deliver it. On the Lifecycle side that means email, push, in-app, and SMS. On the Organic side it means koho.ca, SEO, GEO, the App Store and Google Play, and content marketing.

You won't be starting from scratch. Lifecycle already measures its impact with a randomized global control group, tied to company KPIs like activation, power users, retention, and contribution margin rather than open rates. It has a documented operating model, two-part peer QA on every send, a tiered legal review process, and an incident and continuity framework designed for a regulated financial institution. Your job is to scale what's working: grow incremental impact, bring the same measurement rigour to Organic, and connect the two into one owned-channel growth engine.

You'll report to the Chief Growth Officer and lead a team of seven. You'll work closely with Product, Data, Legal & Compliance, Creative, Integrated Marketing, Performance Marketing, and Engineering.

What You'll Do

Strategy and Outcomes

• Own the strategy, roadmap, and targets for Lifecycle and Organic Growth. You're accountable for business outcomes (registrations, activation, engagement, retention, and contribution margin).
• Lead lifecycle programs across the whole customer journey: onboarding, activation, cross-sell and upsell, reactivation, retention, and servicing.
• Set direction for organic acquisition across koho.ca, SEO, GEO (visibility in AI-powered search), app store optimization, and content, alongside the senior domain lead who runs it day to day.
• Bring Lifecycle-grade measurement to Organic: clear definitions, metrics anyone can reproduce, and reporting that connects organic presence to registrations and activation.
• Connect owned channels with Paid, Affiliates, and Product so the customer journey works end to end, not just channel by channel.

Measurement and Experimentation

• Steward the global control group and the incrementality program. Make sure every result the team reports is causal and holds up to scrutiny.
• Own the experimentation roadmap (A/B tests, holdouts, multivariate journeys) and turn results into decisions.
• Present performance and strategy to the executive team in regular business reviews.

Operations, Governance, and Risk

• Own the Lifecycle operating model: intake, prioritization, spec, peer QA, legal review tiering, launch, and post-launch measurement.
• Partner with Legal and Compliance so every customer communication is accurate, compliant, and auditable, in both English and French.
• Own incident response and business continuity for customer messaging, including fallback sending and escalation paths.
• Own website governance: who can publish, how changes are reviewed, and how releases are protected.
• Own the owned-channel martech stack and its vendors, with Braze as the core platform. That covers contracts, renewals, and platform health.

People Leadership

• Lead, develop, and retain a team of senior managers and specialists, and hire as the team grows.
• Keep the career ladder clear, and keep the team's engagement and growth high.

What You'll Need

• 10+ years in lifecycle, CRM, or retention marketing at a B2C consumer tech, fintech, or subscription business, including 4+ years leading managers.
• A track record of moving business metrics through owned channels, backed by incrementality evidence (holdouts, control groups) and not just engagement rates.
• Deep, hands-on fluency with a modern customer engagement platform (Braze strongly preferred): journey architecture, segmentation, Liquid personalization, and data integration through a CDP such as Segment.
• Working fluency in organic growth: SEO and technical SEO fundamentals, ASO, content strategy, and how AI search is changing discovery.
• Strong analytical judgment. You're comfortable in SQL or working closely with Data.
• Experience in a regulated industry (financial services, insurance, health, or telecom) where marketing goes through legal and compliance review.
• An operator's instinct: you've written the playbook, not just followed it.
• Executive communication that's clear and concise, with a habit of raising issues early.
• A record as a manager people want to work for, with high retention and engagement to show it.
• Active day-to-day usage of AI in your work.
• Experience with Canadian financial services regulation and CASL.
• Experience with predictive or ML-driven personalization (churn, propensity, send-time).

Nice to Have

• Professional working proficiency in French
• Experience with a headless CMS (e.g. Sanity) and on-site experimentation

Compensation

• Posted Salary Range: $175,000 – $210,000 CAD / year