10 growth tactics that never work | Elena Verna (Amplitude, Miro, Dropbox, SurveyMonkey)

**Elena Verna** (0:00)
Growth is a fairly new field. You have a lot of renowned interest in growth hacks. Like, what is the, like, sure things to get growth? In the age of social media, everybody and anybody tries to share their tips and tricks. Oftentimes, I think that are completely out of context, or they are very specific to one example and actually do not apply as a pattern.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:21)
We're gonna start with growth tactics that never work. If you see these items on your roadmap, you should probably not do them. What's number one?

**Elena Verna** (0:26)
We live in tech, there's always lots of startups, startups obviously looking to grow. There is a huge misconception in the field that in order to get growth going, you need a growth team. To figure out your product market fit and how to distribute it, it's not something that you can outsource to somebody.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:42)
Powerful words, I'm loving this list already.

**Elena Verna** (0:44)
So number two, this one's my favorite and it might be a little spicy. Never ever once have I seen a rebrand or redesign, especially of a UK marketing site, produce good performance results. New CMO comes in, designing their website or designing the brand as if it was a reflection of their personal taste. And oftentimes it's promised with our acquisition is going to go up and it never materializes into anything meaningful.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (1:12)
A lot of contrary intakes here. I love this.

**Elena Verna** (1:14)
Number three, if every single one of your initiatives that you're doing on growth is an experiment, that's a problem. It's almost like a disease, like a paralyzing disease.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (1:28)
Today, my guest is Elena Verna, my first ever third time repeat guest. Elena is the smartest person that I know on B2B Growth. She's also hilarious. She's led growth at companies like Miro, Amplitude, Dropbox and SurveyMonkey. She's advised dozens of companies on growth, including Superhuman, MongoDB, Netlify, SimilarWeb, Sanity, Maize, so many more. In our conversation, Elena shares 10 growth strategies and tactics that never work, yet that she keeps seeing people and companies invest lots of resources into. She also covers her three favorite growth frameworks that help you wrap your head around how to think about growth. And she also does a short dive into the non-traditional career paths that we both went down. If you spend any time working on product growth or lead people or work with people working on growth, this episode is for you. If you enjoy this podcast, don't forget to subscribe and follow it in your favorite podcasting app or YouTube. It's the best way to avoid missing future episodes, and it helps the podcast tremendously. With that, I bring you Elena Verna. This episode is brought to you by Cinch, the customer communications cloud. Here's the thing about digital customer communications. Whether you're sending marketing campaigns, verification codes, or account alerts, you need them to reach users reliably. That's where Cinch comes in. Over 150,000 businesses, including 8 of the top 10 largest tech companies globally, use Cinch's API to build messaging, email, and calling into their products. And there's something big happening in messaging that product teams need to know about, rich communication services, or RCS. Think of RCS as SMS 2.0. Instead of getting text from a random number, your users will see your verified company name and logo without needing to download anything new. It's a more secure and branded experience. Plus, you get features like interactive carousels and suggested replies. And here's why this matters. US carriers are starting to adopt RCS. Cinch is already helping major brands send RCS messages around the world. And they're helping Lenny's Podcast listeners get registered first, before the rush hits the US market. Learn more and get started at cinch.com.
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Elena, thank you so much for being here. Welcome back to the podcast. Our first ever third-time repeat guest. What an honor. Dancing if you're not watching on video. Well, thank you for being here. I was actually just looking at our first episode, which we recorded over two years ago, September of 2022 And someone just today left a comment. People are still finding and watching it. And this comment kind of encapsulates why I love having you on this podcast. This person said, wow, every word from Elena encapsulates years of knowledge. This is one to digest slowly, go back to and put on repeat. Thanks for sharing your experience with the world.