Elena Verna 3.0 on Growth Tactics That Never Work

Elena Verna 3.0 on Growth Tactics That Never Work

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Elena Verna 3.0 on Growth Tactics That Never Work

Speaker: Elena Verna Source: Lenny’s Podcast Date: c. 2024

Elena Verna — serial operator across Miro, Amplitude, Dropbox, and SurveyMonkey — returns for a third appearance to catalogue 10 growth tactics she sees teams waste resources on repeatedly, three favourite growth frameworks, and a contrarian take on full-time employment.

Key ideas

  • 10 tactics that never work. From hiring a growth team too early through colour-optimisation micro-tests, each item reflects a systematic failure mode rather than random bad luck. The unifying diagnosis: shortcuts substitute for doing the hard, foundational work.
  • Growth amplifies PMF; it cannot create it. A growth team can lift a healthy business by 10–15%. They cannot reverse a declining one. Before hiring growth, first stop the decline.
  • Earned channels over paid. Growth teams that own SEO and SEM are playing in someone else’s distribution. The priority is building an earned channel — virality, user-generated content, referral loops — that no competitor can buy or algorithm can revoke.
  • Don’t test everything. Paralysing an entire team behind A/B tests is as much a pathology as never testing. If a sample size takes eight months to collect, don’t test — use pre/post. Reserve experimentation for high-traffic, high-stakes decisions.
  • Career optionality as north star. Full-time employment is one item on a menu, not the default. The right question at every career juncture is: does this increase my option pool?

Detailed notes

The 10 tactics

  1. Hiring a growth team too soon. Founders must drive the first wave of growth to PMF and ~$1–10M ARR. Data must exist before a growth team can function. The longer you wait, the more the whole company learns to own growth.
  2. Hiring a growth team to fix a declining business. Growth amplifies; it does not reverse trajectories. Stop the decline first, show signs of life, then bring in growth to accelerate.
  3. Rebrand/homepage redesign to drive acquisition. Every redesign Elena has observed has been a performance step-back, not a step-forward. Net neutral (eventually) is the best case. Budget three to six months of optimisation after launch before expecting recovery.
  4. Obsessing over or copying competition. Use competitive teardowns for inspiration and to identify elemental patterns, never as a destination. You cannot tell whether their experience is tested or legacy. “Copying competition is the fastest way to mediocrity.”
  5. Assuming your problem is unique. In growth, every problem — activation drop-off, low virality, monetisation friction — has been solved before. Find the person who solved it. Hire advisors. Patternise solutions.
  6. Growth team owning paid channels over earned. Organic search, paid ads, and social algorithms are rented distribution. Build owned earned channels: virality, UGC, referral loops. “Algorithm can giveth, but algorithm can also taketh away.” Dropbox — over 50% of acquisition from sharing loops — as exemplar.
  7. Not overlaying multiple growth models. Product-led, marketing-led, and sales-led growth each have a lifespan. Most loops exhaust their output within five to seven years. Introduce a new model every 18 months. Allocate 20–25% of annual growth team time to exploring the next loop.
  8. Not hiring advisors. “Any growth team that does not have an advisor is a growth team that is underperforming.” Vet by running a paid workshop on your actual problem before engaging on retainer. Evaluate monthly.
  9. Over-testing everything. If sample size takes more than a month, use pre/post instead. Data is an input, not a substitute for intuition. Statistical significance at 0.05 is frequently misread as proof. Just go.
  10. Fire round (four sub-items):
    • Colour optimisations: as long as it’s accessible and bright enough, irrelevant to growth.
    • Third-party auth for non-developer tools: does not drive incremental acquisition or retention.
    • One-off emails: one email will never move any metric. Email is a series with a strategy.
    • Simplifying onboarding as a goal: simplification is a solution to a specific problem, never a problem in itself. Cross “simplify onboarding” off your roadmap; replace with the actual problem.

Favourite growth frameworks

  1. Growth loops (Reforge / Brian Balfour, Casey Winters, Andrew Chen): action → reaction → another action, a self-contained flywheel. The alternative to funnel thinking.
  2. Race car framework (Lenny Rachitsky & Dan): engines (loops), fuel (paid spend), turbo boosts (one-time large events), pit stops (optimisations). Separates short-term from long-term growth initiatives.
  3. Adjacent user theory (Bangaly Kaba on Growth, Career, and Adjacent Users): users just outside your ICP who can be brought in with targeted experience optimisations, without expanding PMF.

Contrarian corner

Full-time employment is not the best way to monetise your skills — it is one option on a menu that also includes consulting, fractional roles, interim roles, advising, and building content. Career optionality — the ability to choose what fits your life, skills, and personality at any given moment — is a better north star than title progression. Earn the right to unlock optionality (usually via full-time roles early in career), then start exercising it.