Jan 19, 2025 · 1h 35m · lennys-podcast
10 growth tactics that never work | Elena Verna (Amplitude, Miro, Dropbox, SurveyMonkey)
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In this comprehensive interview, leading growth executive Elena Verna joins Lenny Rachitsky to dismantle ten commonly attempted yet counterproductive growth tactics while sharing proven frameworks for sustainable business expansion and career optionality. Through concrete examples from companies like Miro, Dropbox, and SurveyMonkey, Verna provides actionable guidelines on when to deploy growth teams, how to build compounding loops, and when to trust intuition over over-experimentation.
How this conversation actually went
Every chapter scored 0–10 on four independent dynamics. Hover any point for the reasoning behind the score. Lenny holds 19.7% of the talking time here. How this is scored →
Lenny as informed peer 4.9 Guest teaching 6.0 Guest disagreement 3.7 Lenny pushing back 1.3
speaking balance: gold is Lenny, purple is the guest (3 minute bins)
Sharpest disagreement ▶ 20:05 Elena takes aim at CMO homepage redesigns
Elena passionately dismantles a staple marketing practice, asserting that redesigns driven by executive vanity consistently damage performance.
Hardest push from Lenny ▶ 1:25:00 Lenny caveats career optionality with the need for foundational depthLenny checks Elena's contrarian career advice by arguing that workers must first build verifiable depth in full-time roles before attempting consulting or media.
Biggest teaching moment ▶ 16:15 Elena debunks hiring growth leaders to reverse business declineElena directly reframes the limits of growth teams, showing why bringing in growth leaders cannot rescue a company suffering from fundamental product slowdowns.
Lenny holds their own ▶ 32:40 Lenny shares Airbnb's experience with competitor copycatsLenny demonstrates deep practitioner domain knowledge by explaining how Airbnb competitors copied untested, unoptimized features under the false assumption of perfection.
the scores for every segment, with the reasoning behind each
| Chapter | Topic | Lenny as informed peer | Guest teaching | Guest disagreement | Lenny pushing back | Why |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Opening Banter and Setting the Growth Stage | 4 | 5 | 3 | 1 | Lenny sets up the premise of common growth failures and high churn in growth leadership. Elena enthusiastically outlines why growth tactics often fail due to lack of context and social media hype. | |
| Tactic #1: Hiring a Growth Team Too Early | 6 | 7 | 4 | 2 | Elena forcefully argues against hiring growth teams before product-market fit and solid data volume. Lenny synthesizes the insight and clarifies the distinction between product-led and sales-led hiring timelines. | |
| Tactic #2: Expecting Growth Hires to Fix a Declining Business | 4 | 7 | 4 | 1 | Elena debunks the idea that a new head of growth can revive a declining business if core product-market fit is deteriorating. Lenny acknowledges how counterintuitive and rare this framing is. | |
| Tactic #3: Homepage Redesigns and Rebrands to Drive Performance | 6 | 6 | 5 | 2 | Elena takes a fiery stance against marketing site redesigns and rebrands driving conversion, calling them net negatives at launch. Lenny corroborates with his own experience of product redesigns dropping performance. | |
| Tactic #4: Blind Competitor Copying vs. Analytical Inspiration | 6 | 6 | 4 | 1 | Elena dissects why copying competitor flows leads to mediocrity and highlights the pitfalls of comparing unstandardized benchmarks. Lenny shares an anecdote from Airbnb about competitors copying unoptimized features. | |
| Tactic #5: Assuming Problems Are Unique and Refusing Guidance | 4 | 7 | 3 | 1 | Elena urges practitioners to drop their ego and consult external peers who have solved similar problems rather than reinventing the wheel. She shares a vulnerable example from her time standing up communities at Miro. | |
| Mid-Roll Sponsor Break: OneSchema File Feeds | 1 | 1 | 0 | 0 | Lenny hosts a brief mid-roll sponsor interview with Christina Gilbert from OneSchema discussing CSV file feeds. Standard promotional segment with zero combativeness or pushback. | |
| Tactic #6: Over-Relying on Paid Channels Instead of Owned Loops | 5 | 8 | 5 | 2 | Elena warns against over-relying on paid acquisition channels and algorithm-dependent platforms, advocating for owned viral loops. Lenny probes whether owned loops are universally viable for all products. | |
| Tactic #7: Relying Exclusively on a Single Growth Horizon | 6 | 7 | 3 | 1 | Elena outlines the necessity of layering new growth horizons and loops every few years to avoid growth plateauing. Lenny connects the concept to classic growth S-curves and asks for concrete examples of growth loops. | |
| Tactic #8: Neglecting Experienced Growth Advisors | 5 | 7 | 4 | 2 | Elena emphasizes the value of hiring experienced advisors to bridge information asymmetry and recommends paid problem-solving workshops as an audition. Lenny probes on how founders can avoid low-quality advisors. | |
| Tactic #9: Paralysis by Over-Experimentation and Risk Aversion | 5 | 7 | 5 | 2 | Elena criticizes growth teams paralyzed by requiring A/B test certainty for every minor change and advocates pre/post measurement when traffic is low. Lenny asks for practical heuristics to determine when to test versus ship. | |
| Tactic #10: Rapid-Fire Bad Tactics (Colors, Auth, Emails, Simplification) | 5 | 6 | 6 | 1 | Elena delivers rapid-fire dismissals of button color tests, arbitrary third-party auth, one-off email tests, and naive onboarding simplification. Lenny admits guilt on one-off email testing and agrees with the takeaways. | |
| Elena Verna's Essential Growth Frameworks | 6 | 6 | 2 | 0 | Elena highlights three foundational growth frameworks: growth loops, Lenny and Dan's racecar framework, and Bangaly Kaba's adjacent user theory. Lenny warmly appreciates the shout-out to his framework. | |
| Contrarian Corner: Maximizing Career Optionality | 6 | 6 | 5 | 3 | Elena shares a contrarian philosophy that full-time employment should not be treated as the sole career path, pushing instead for career optionality. Lenny pushes back slightly to emphasize that people must first earn credibility in full-time roles before branching out. | |
| Lightning Round: Sci-Fi, Heated Gear, and Growth Memes | 5 | 4 | 2 | 1 | The episode concludes with a playful lightning round covering sci-fi literature, heated clothing, favorite TV series, and Elena's famous growth memes. |
Statements from this episode (24)
Verna: Heads of Growth Face Higher Firing Rates Than CMOs
“It's actually, I think growth teams are becoming one of those departments that has a higher head of growth firing rate than even CMOs because people are coming in. There's a bunch of expectations. Hey, you're head of growth or your growth PM, or you're a growt…”
Verna: Very Few Growth Professionals Stay in Roles Beyond Two Years
“Very few growth people actually stay in the job for over a year or two years.”
Verna: Startups Should Rely on Founder-Led Growth Before Hiring Growth Teams
“You do not need growth teams until you actually can start running experiments on your user base, which means that you have volume of users that you can learn from and optimize and innovate on. And that first wave of growth has to be a founder led.”
Verna: Sales-Led Companies Do Not Need Dedicated Growth Teams
“In fact, in the sales led companies, growth teams are not necessarily needed even that much. You might have a growth marketing team, which is really a demand gen team. That is rebranded for growth marketing. So they can charge you a 20 to 30% more in their sal…”
Verna: Growth teams fail in declining businesses because they only lift 10-15%
“If you have the overall business slowing down, your head of growth is destined to fail because the reason business is slowing down is much deeper than not having a growth team. Growth team can optimize growth can maybe lift
It by 10, 15%.”
Verna: Redesigning marketing sites to drive acquisition is a million-dollar failure
“To ever promise a homepage redesign or marketing site redesign in order to drive more acquisition. Is a failed promise that is going to be led by lots of agency money spending often a million dollars plus, lots of arguing about which shade of blue your brand c…”
Verna: Every marketing website rebrand caused an initial performance drop
“Every single time I've seen a marketing site at least rebrand, it's been a step back in performance that then is being treated as a fire drill to fix.”
Rachitsky: Much of Airbnb's flow was guesswork, not tested optimization
“What made me realize this back in the day was thinking at Airbnb, especially thinking about people looking at our flow and being like, this is, they got it all figured out. We're just going to copy what they've done. Cause they're so thoughtful and have tested…”
Verna: An activation page outsiders copied from Dropbox performed terribly
“I actually had that happen to me at Dropbox not so long ago. Somebody reached out and they're like, oh, I look like it was like some page and activation flow and they're like, oh, I love this page. This is so cool. I love what you've done here. And like, I'm g…”
Verna: Startups must never build growth solutions from scratch
“Your problem is not unique. I am.
Sure of that.
Your problem has been felt by somebody somewhere in probably many, many places.
and
You trying to re-engineer solution is time lost to market and has a huge opportunity cost.
So I, my biggest thing that I try to…”
Verna: Paid acquisition costs and competition will rise over next two years
“And if you don't have them on your growth roadmap, you're going to be in some really big trouble over the next year to two years, because your cost of acquisition is only going to go up. Your competition in those channels is only going to go up.”
Verna: Over 50% of Dropbox acquisition comes from file sharing
“Now, for example at Dropbox, over 50% of acquisition comes through sharing.”
Verna: Most growth loops exhaust their effectiveness within 5 to 7 years
“Most of growth loops spin out a their ability to produce meaningful results for you within the first five to six to seven years.”
Verna: Companies must introduce a new growth engine every 18 months
“Every five years or so you for sure need a new channel, new growth loops, new tactics new engines, so to speak to power your growth engine whether it's overlaying sales on top of self-serve, whether you're doing a lot of, let's say virality right now in terms …”
Verna: Dedicate 20% to 25% of growth team time to new loops
“I try to focus 20%, 20 to 25% of growth team's time annually, not every given sprint or not every given quarter, but annually to introduce a new growth loop, or to introduce a new channel, or to introduce something new that can potentially bring us Additional …”
Verna: Any growth team without an advisor is underperforming
“So I think any growth team that does not have an advisor is a growth team that is underperforming”
Verna: Never hire an advisor without testing them in a workshop first
“I think that you should not hire an advisor until you do some sort of workshop with them on the problem that you're experiencing.”
Verna: Do not A/B test if sample size takes over a month
“It's my rule of thumb. If we cannot collect the sample size in the month, we shouldn't test it. Period.”
Verna: Color and button shade optimization no longer drives growth
“You do not need to test the shades of blue or tested against green or so on. Pick a color, move on. Please don't spend time on it. That's a 2000 early 2000 tactic. It doesn't work anymore. We passed that in technology sector.”
Verna: Third-party logins do not drive incremental growth for productivity products
“However, if you're a productivity product, Email is fine for the longest time. Gmail is nice. It's not going to drive more acquisition for you. You're just going to do a makeshift and two more people using it. It's not going to create incrementality. It's not …”
Verna: One-off marketing emails will never drive measurable growth lift
“We stress too much about this one email that we're going to send to this one customer group. And we're like, oh my gosh, how much lift is it going to cost? It will never cause any lift. You will never work as a one-off email. Too few people open it on average,…”
Verna: Treating onboarding simplification as a standalone goal fails
“However, just removing steps or yanking or simplifying things to an oblivion where you lose an identity of what you even do or what you're capable of doing is a completely failed growth tactic. So simplifying may be an initiative of a different problem that yo…”
Verna: Full-time jobs are not the best way to monetize professional skills
“Full-time jobs are not the best way to monetize the skills that you have. It's one of the packages that everybody should evaluate and take advantage of, but too many people blindly default to that package and don't explore other options that are both available…”
Verna: Career goals should optimize for optionality rather than corporate titles
“I think setting as a title as your goal, which so many of us have titles as goals is very wrong way to think about it as opposed to saying, Hey, my goal professional is actually to have options so I can choose what I want to do so I can choose what fits my lif…”