Oct 28, 2021 · 44m · 20growth
20 Growth: The 3 Levers to Successful Growth Models, The 3 Types of Growth Hires Startups Need To Know, The 3 Stages All Successful Growth Teams Need To Go Through with Elena Verna, Advisor @ MongoDB and HP
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In this episode of 20 Growth, host Harry Stebbings interviews growth executive and advisor Elena Verna to explore how startups can design, hire for, and scale high-performing growth organizations. Verna outlines key frameworks for growth models, hiring archetypes, data-driven experimentation loops, and cross-functional team collaboration.
How this conversation actually went
Every chapter scored 0–10 on four independent dynamics. Hover any point for the reasoning behind the score. Harry holds 24.5% of the talking time here. How this is scored →
Harry as informed peer 3.1 Guest teaching 5.8 Guest disagreement 2.5 Harry pushing back 2.2
speaking balance: gold is Harry, purple is the guest (3 minute bins)
Sharpest disagreement ▶ 28:56 Premise rejection on postmortems
Elena directly rejects Harry's prompt about structuring postmortems, asserting that relying on postmortems means a team failed at performing proper premortems.
Hardest push from Harry ▶ 21:42 Challenge on sticky plaster growth solutionsHarry actively challenges Elena's scenario by asking whether hiring growth marketers for product-led issues is just putting a sticky plaster on top of a broken cup.
Biggest teaching moment ▶ 16:27 Innovator, Settler, and Optimizer frameworkElena re-educates Harry and the audience on growth hiring by introducing a three-part profile framework, explaining that founders consistently hire Innovators when they actually require Settlers.
Harry holds his own ▶ 30:08 Citing Casey Winters on growth team code clutterHarry brings prior guest Casey Winters' experience into the interview to challenge Elena on how growth experimenters leave behind messy code for core product teams to fix.
the scores for every segment, with the reasoning behind each
| Chapter | Topic | Harry as informed peer | Guest teaching | Guest disagreement | Harry pushing back | Why |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Elena Verna's Unconventional Path into Growth | 1 | 2 | 1 | 1 | Harry asks standard background questions regarding Elena's career path into growth. Elena shares her non-linear journey from Craigslist applicant at SurveyMonkey to leading growth, maintaining a warm and collaborative tone. | |
| Defining Growth: Product-Market Fit vs. Growth Models | 1 | 7 | 2 | 1 | Harry opens with a foundational definition question about growth leadership. Elena delivers a structured breakdown distinguishing Product-Market Fit from Growth Models and outlining the acquisition, monetization, and retention levers. | |
| When Startups Should Not Build a Growth Team | 3 | 6 | 2 | 2 | Harry explicitly steers the conversation toward a contrarian viewpoint on when startups should avoid hiring growth teams. Elena details common founder missteps, such as attempting to build growth teams pre-product-market fit. | |
| Internal Talent Nurturing vs. External Growth Hiring | 3 | 6 | 3 | 2 | Harry asks pointed follow-ups regarding internal vs. external growth talent. Elena reframes industry hiring tropes, explaining why chasing candidates with multiple prior Head of Growth roles often fails. | |
| The Three Types of Growth Hires: Innovator, Settler, and Optimizer | 4 | 7 | 3 | 3 | Harry drills down with precise interview-style questions on how to test candidates for data-centricity and adaptability. Elena outlines a key taxonomy of growth profiles—Innovators, Settlers, and Optimizers—and notes founders frequently hire the wrong archetype. | |
| Common Pitfalls in Structuring and Onboarding Growth Teams | 5 | 6 | 3 | 5 | Harry pushes back on Elena's argument regarding misaligned growth hires, asking if marketing additions are merely a temporary 'sticky plaster' on broader product issues. Elena acknowledges the nuance while maintaining that misaligned roles lead to operational friction. | |
| Data Literacy Levels and the Three Stages of Growth Teams | 4 | 7 | 2 | 2 | Harry offers an insightful observation about founders confusing basic Google Analytics setup with true data literacy. Elena builds on this with formal frameworks detailing data-informed versus data-driven stages and the three phases of growth team experimentation. | |
| Replacing Postmortems with Premortems and Product Collaboration | 5 | 6 | 4 | 3 | Elena explicitly rejects Harry's premise on postmortems, arguing that premortems are significantly more effective. Harry then cites Casey Winters' insights regarding growth teams leaving messy code for product teams, prompting Elena to candidly confess to having committed that mistake earlier in her career. | |
| Navigating Growth Strategy Without Complete Data: Crisp Case Study | 3 | 5 | 2 | 2 | Harry asks Elena to describe a growth strategy executed without complete quantitative data. Elena highlights her advising work at Crisp, illustrating how customer qualitative feedback guided product growth directions prior to telemetry setup. | |
| Quick-Fire Round: Everlasting Tactics, Outdated Practices, and Industry Myths | 2 | 6 | 3 | 1 | During the quick-fire segment, Harry prompts concise takes on industry trends. Elena passionately criticizes founders and recruiters who conflate CMO roles with Growth leadership. |
Statements from this episode (22)
Elena Verna pursued SurveyMonkey for eight months before getting hired
“I applied for SurveyMonkey position off Craigslist, and they didn't want to hire me. I pursued them for eight months, trying to get them to make a decision on me, after which I finally convinced them to take a chance on me and give me a job.”
Elena Verna: Growth models rely on acquisition, monetization, and retention
“There's three main levers that fall into growth model, which is how do you acquire customers? How do you monetize your customers? And how do you retain those customers? Those three levers uniformly apply across any given product to achieve maximum distribution…”
Elena Verna: Terrible products with great growth models can become unicorns
“And by the way, there is incredible products that have never seen the light of day. And died of slow death because they never had a growth model. And there's also a lot of really terrible products that have incredible growth models and the multi-billion dollar…”
Elena Verna: Startups under 50 employees should not outsource growth
“On the other side, I also think that not putting any pressure of growth on your original founding team of those First, 30, 50 people is a mistake. If you immediately hire head of growth or growth team and say, Hey, none of my PMs, none of my marketers are resp…”
Elena Verna: Hiring a growth team pre-product-market fit is a mistake
“I think hiring pre-product market fit, big, big mistake. Hiring right after product market fit without actually figuring out how to create some of the traction is a big mistake as well.”
Elena Verna: Hiring external Heads of Growth early risks cultural rejection
“I think the biggest mistake that I seen in the companies hiring is they chase after that head of growth position from the beginning without understanding who internally can create that growth evolution as opposed to creating growth revolution with an external …”
Elena Verna: Growth teams fail without top-down CEO buy-in
“CEO or the leadership team do not understand the value that growth team is meant to provide and what their Success looks like and what their goals are. It's going to get rejected by the system. There has to be buy-in top-down if you're creating growth team. Ot…”
Elena Verna: Experienced Heads of Growth rarely take a third executive role
“Nobody after successfully running growth teams for two successful companies ever wants to do a third time. It's the same thing, and it becomes boring and repetitive.”
Elena Verna: Candidates seeking stability and full ownership fail in growth
“So if you see somebody that has ownership desires, that they want stability, they want ability to finish something from very start to the very end, probably not going to be great on your growth team. Your growth team has to be flexible.”
Elena Verna: Founders should hire growth settlers first, not Heads of Growth
“I believe, for example, that it's founders responsibility to come up with original hypothesis for growth model. And then everybody immediately goes into, I need to hire head of growth. Wrong. Because you need to hire a settler. You need to hire a settler that'…”
Elena Verna: Hiring growth roles without targeting specific friction is a mistake
“Going after just saying, oh, everybody's hiring growth PMs, or everybody's hiring growth marketer, without actually understanding where the friction is lying within your growth system, to hire for the role that will be able to unlock that friction based on the…”
Elena Verna: Growth hires fail without pre-existing data infrastructure and analysts
“I'll tell you number one mistake, not having data team ready for growth team. So hiring growth team even before you have data analysts or data literacy in your company before you were data informed or hiring growth and not attaching any data analysts into thei…”
Elena Verna: Expecting metrics lift within three months undermines growth onboarding
“Expecting wins right away. You hire your growth person, your growth team, and then the three months you expect the forecast lift. It's the worst thing that you can do to a growth team in terms of really messing up their onboarding, in terms of them creating th…”
Elena Verna: Measuring performance by revenue alone is not data-informed
“If you look at your revenue as a measurement of performance, you're not even data informed. You're just financially driven.”
Elena Verna: Startups cannot become truly data-driven using only Google Analytics
“By the way, I use Google Analytics all the time, but it's very rarely, unless that there's, you have GA-threes that you can actually drill them into the cohort behavior. That you can exit data informed stage with just being on Google Analytics.”
Elena Verna: Premortems are far more effective than postmortems for growth teams
“I learned from Fareed, who was director of growth at Slack, that premortems are far more effective than postmortems.”
Elena Verna: Growth teams must enable others rather than hoarding wins
“So really being an enabler, to the company, as opposed to whole source of all of the ideation and the win is the key here in order to create successful relationships with the rest of the teams.”
Elena Verna: New growth teams must rely on intuition before data
“Any new growth team has to initially rely on intuition or just overall feeling within the company of what needs to be worked on because you don't have data at the beginning.”
Elena Verna: WalkMe product tours are an outdated, unsustainable growth tactic
“Also, the one that has completely died down is walk me tours. Before we would fix the problems in the product UI by creating elaborate walk me tours. I see those dying down quickly, less and less. You need to focus on fixing your UX as opposed to just slapping…”
Elena Verna: Minimalist onboarding flows no longer work for software growth
“So oversimplification and overminimalization are not the tactics that work now that worked five years ago.”
Elena Verna: Growth leaders should advise outside companies to build strategic perspective
“The way I think through ability to unlock your strategic thinking and to really learn more from the market Is to do advising for other companies as well. It helps you look at your problems in your full-time role a lot more strategically. It helps you understan…”
Elena Verna: Conflating marketing with growth shows a fundamental industry misunderstanding
“And the fact that people just fully don't differentiate the two and think marketing equals growth blows my mind that we're still almost 10 years into growth as a discipline, and we still, as an industry, cannot differentiate between different motions that you …”