Ten Growth Tactics That Never Work, According to Elena Verna

Verna frames the list by noting that growth is a young field full of newcomers hungry for shortcuts. Social media amplifies tips that are tied to one company's context and do not generalize. She says head-of-growth roles may be fired even more often than CMOs, because expectations are high and when growth does not materialize the axe falls.

Her first item is hiring for growth too soon. Startups assume they need a growth team, but the founding team has to find the way to the first $1 million, $5 million or $10 million in ARR, and some companies do not build growth teams until $100 or $200 million. Figuring out product-market fit and distribution cannot be outsourced to someone with a shiny resume.

She sets two prerequisites: solid product-market fit with real retention, and enough data to run analysis and experiments. Ten customers, she says, is a spreadsheet, not data. In sales-led companies, sales should be hired first and a growth team may not be needed at all, but if you have any product-led component handling acquisition, activation, monetization or retention, growth should come in sooner. Waiting longer also trains the whole company to own growth instead of isolating it on an island.

The second mistake sits on the mature-company side: growth slows, so leadership hires a growth head and expects acceleration. Verna says the head is destined to fail because the slowdown has deeper causes than the lack of a growth team. Growth might lift results by 10 to 15 percent, and even that is the upper end when the trajectory is down.

She explains that growth can amplify great product-market fit but cannot fix a degrading one, a go-to-market problem or a competitor stomping on your territory. Large growth teams at that size are expensive and may return roughly one to one, nowhere near the J-curve people hope for. The name "growth team" itself fuels the misunderstanding that there is a silver-bullet hire.

Her advice is to first arrest the decline through core product and marketing work. Once metrics plateau and there are signs of life in pockets of the business, growth can be put in to amplify them. If you are still declining, she says, just do not hire, because the result a year later will be disappointing.

Verna calls this her favorite and spiciest item: in her experience she has never seen a rebrand or marketing-site redesign produce good performance results. There can be good reasons, such as entering a new category or a product that has evolved, but then it is a stepping stone that needs heavy optimization just to recover. The typical story is a new CMO who repaints the house to their own taste while promising acquisition will rise.

She describes the usual cost: an agency spending a million dollars or more, long debates over shades of blue, and eight to 10 months of development with lackluster results. Lenny adds that product and onboarding redesigns follow the same pattern, since teams ship because everything is built on top of the new design and then claw performance back. Verna says a redesign is a new starting point that is lower than your current, already-optimized experience.

The best outcome she has seen is net-neutral performance plus a better ability to optimize toward something bigger. She advises modeling a hit after launch and budgeting two to three months, ideally six, to optimize back and beyond. Teams often forget this because they treat the redesign as a big pop and move on to the next project.

Verna insists she tears down competitors constantly, signing up for products with many Gmail accounts and studying their onboarding, monetization and pricing. The failure comes from blindly ripping their flows: you do not know whether you are seeing a test cell or a personalized version, and each experience is tuned to its own customers and channels. Skipping research and A/B testing because "it works for them" fails about 95 percent of the time, she says.

She uses competitors to learn common patterns, like the sharing model across Slack, Figma, Miro, Notion and Google, then adapts the pieces that apply. Her rule is to treat competition as an input to ideation, never a destination. She also cautions that benchmarks hide wildly different metric definitions, since even "visitor" can mean all traffic, new traffic or new IP addresses.

Verna recalls someone at Dropbox praising an activation page that, she told them, had not been touched in 10 years and was only shown to a small cohort. Lenny recalls the same guesswork at Airbnb. Her point is that big companies are far more chaotic than outsiders imagine.

Verna's fifth item is the belief that your growth problem is unique. She is 99 percent sure it is not, and re-engineering a solution costs time to market. Her advice is to never start from scratch: look at competitors, then find people who solved the same problem on LinkedIn or X and ask how they did it, since people love to talk about what they have done.

She also urges teams to "patternize" their solutions so they can get to roughly 60 percent of a solution quickly and then implement something authentic. Going from zero to 60 as a one-off is something she says the industry has no time for if you do not want to be left behind.

Her example is standing up a community at Miro as interim CMO, with a year to show traction. A community builder from Atlassian asked whether she meant a user, agency or partner community, and suggested starting with agencies or partners for faster results. That saved her perhaps six to eight months, and she says admitting you do not know earns more credit than people think. Failure is still unavoidable in growth, she adds, but talking to people shortens the timeline of failures.

Verna's sixth item is a growth team that mainly owns SEO, SEM and social acquisition. She is not against those channels, but paid search enriches Google and social ads run on algorithms that can "giveth" and "taketh away". The priority should be an earned channel that competitors cannot buy into, built on virality, word of mouth, referrals and user-generated content.

She argues this matters more now because search as an interface is shifting toward AI, which gives content creators less credit and less control. Without earned channels on the roadmap, she predicts, acquisition costs will keep rising over the next year or two. She says this is not cheap, since it consumes product, engineering and marketing time, but it is applicable to more products than people think because most have team features, recommendations or shareable content.

Her flagship example is Dropbox, where over 50 percent of acquisition came through sharing: the recipient learns about the product and is partly activated by using it. Dropbox even had its own growth pod optimizing both the sender and recipient experience. Her advice is to diversify rather than abandon paid or SEO.

Her seventh item is sticking to a single growth model. Whether a company starts product-led or sales-and-marketing-led, she says it must overlay product, marketing and sales growth over time, just as product needs a second horizon beyond its first product-market fit. She cites Andrew Chen's "Law of Shitty Clickthroughs": over-optimizing the same thing yields minimal returns, and most growth loops lose steam within five to seven years, with Dropbox's 17-year sharing loop an anomaly.

As a bonus rule, she says to introduce something new about every 18 months, with something big taking a significant share of volume every five years. She devotes 20 to 25 percent of a growth team's time annually to new loops or channels and does not put goals on them immediately. At Miro the Miroverse user-generated library took about 18 months before the team put metrics expectations on it, and it became both an engagement and acquisition engine.

When Lenny asks for concrete options, Verna favors user-generated templates, case studies and reviews, with community around them. For individualistic B2C products, she suggests referral mechanisms, and for B2B, features that invite colleagues, such as sharing a report with your manager. She still sees value in SEO, social and paid, but leans toward earned channels because once built they keep giving.

Verna's eighth item is not hiring advisors. She says paying for an hour a week of someone who has lived through your problem is one of the biggest career and business amplifiers, and that a growth team without an advisor is underperforming. Even she, after advising many companies, hires advisors whenever she takes an operating role, because information in growth is scarce and people are cagey.

Advisors are an input rather than the strategy setter, she stresses, and you do not have to follow what they say. Her tip for vetting them is to run a paid workshop on a real problem before engaging them on retainer. You see how they interact with the team and whether they share examples and connect patterns, and then you review monthly whether they added value.

The ninth item is excessive risk aversion: if every growth initiative is an experiment, Verna calls it a paralyzing disease that slows velocity and learning. She advises trusting intuition more, since data is only good if you have enough of it. Her rule of thumb is that if you cannot collect the sample size within a month, do not test; compare pre and post instead, with readouts at 24 hours, seven days and 28 days and a retention check a year later.

She keeps precise experiments for big strategic pivots or high-traffic real estate where even 0.1 percent means millions of dollars. She also reminds listeners that 95 percent statistical significance is a directional signal, not a guarantee of the lift you will see.

The tenth item is a fire round of low-value work. Skip color optimization ("a blue is a blue is a blue"), and do not expect third-party sign-ups to drive acquisition except for products like developer tools, where GitHub auth is natural. Do not agonize over one-off emails, since open rates of 25 percent, or 40 to 50 percent at best, mean one email will never matter, so treat email as a series. Finally, do not put "simplify onboarding" on a roadmap: simplifying is a solution, and the real problem is that users are confused or lost.

Verna defines a framework as a pattern that appears across companies and gives a starting point for ideation. Her first favorite is growth loops: self-contained flywheels where an action generates a reaction that generates another action. She says thinking only in funnels means missing the chance to build a sustainable engine, and points to writing from Brian Balfour, Casey Winters and Andrew Chen.

The second is the race car framework by Lenny and Dan, which separates initiatives into engines (loops that keep spinning), fuel (such as paid marketing dollars), turbo boosts (such as big user conferences) and oil (the optimizations that keep the engine running). The third is adjacent user theory from a former podcast guest, which looks at users outside your core ICP and how growth can bring them in without expanding product-market fit, simply by optimizing their experience.

In the contrarian segment, Verna says a full-time job is not the best way to monetize your skills for everyone. It is one package to evaluate, but too many people default to it blindly. She lists alternatives, including freelancing, consulting, interim and fractional engagements, courses and newsletters, and says she personally prefers going horizontal across many companies because of how she pattern-matches.

She argues that many people chase a title, such as VP or people manager, and end up dissatisfied once they get there. A better north star is career optionality: asking each year whether a choice increases, preserves or decreases your options. Lenny adds that you still need depth and real experience before moving to advising or newsletters.

Verna agrees, saying you have to earn the right to unlock optionality, usually through full-time work, but after that you should test the market for other options. Lenny notes it is not a one-way door: you can move between full-time roles, advising and writing, and Verna calls it a menu from which you pick what fits at each point in life.