Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
00:00:00 · Elena Verna, Lenny Rachitsky
[00:00:00] S0: 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, things that are completely out of context or they are very specific to one example and actually do not apply as a pattern. [00:00:21] S1: 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? [00:00:26] S0: We live in tech. There's always lots of startups and 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. [00:00:42] S1: Powerful words. I'm loving this list already. [00:00:44] S0: So number two, this was my favorite, and it might be a little spicy. Never ever once have I seen a rebrand or redesign, especially of your marketing site, produce good performance results. New CMO comes in designing their website or designing the brand as if it was reflection of their personal taste. And oftentimes it's promised with our acquisition is gonna go up and it never materializes into anything meaningful. [00:01:12] S1: Lot of contrarian takes here. I love this. [00:01:14] S0: 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.
00:01:28 · Lenny Rachitsky
[00:01:28] S1: 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, Maze, so many more. In her 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 nontraditional 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 Sinch, 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 Sinch comes in. Over 150,000 businesses, including eight of the top 10 largest tech companies globally, use Sinch'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 two point o. Instead of getting texts 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. Sinch 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/lenny. That's sinch.com/lenny. This episode is brought to you by Vanta.
00:03:55 · Lenny Rachitsky, Elena Verna
When it comes to ensuring your company has top notch security practices, things get complicated fast. Now you can assess risk, secure the trust of your customers, and automate compliance for SOC two, ISO 27,001, HIPAA, and more with a single platform, Vanta. Vanta's market leading trust management platform helps you continuously monitor compliance alongside reporting and tracking risk. Plus, you can save hours by completing security questionnaires with vanta.ai. Join thousands of global companies that use Vanta to automate evidence collection, unify risk management, and streamline security reviews. Get 1,000 off Vanta when you go to vanta.com/lenny. That's vanta.com/lenny. 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 almost two year... Over two years ago, September 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. [00:05:22] S0: Well, thank you for having me. And my North Star metric is insights per minute. That's what I try to use whenever I have any live meetings with people, so it squarely fits within what I'm optimizing for. So that's great.
00:05:22 · Elena Verna, Lenny Rachitsky
[00:05:22] S0: Well, thank you for having me. And my North Star metric is insights per minute. That's what I try to use whenever I have any live meetings with people, so it squarely fits within what I'm optimizing for. So that's great. [00:05:36] S1: That needs to be my KPI in this podcast, insights per minute. [00:05:40] S0: I think you have it. I think I think your your insights per minute is pretty high. [00:05:44] S1: That is... I do shoot for that. Although I have learned you also need it to feel good and feel the story. You know, there's like an interesting combo of stuff. You can't just be insight, insight, insight. You know? People like [00:05:54] S0: Well, yeah. It's all about how you present them too. Storytelling is a big portion of it actually to stick. [00:05:59] S1: Yeah. All right. Already insight. That's an insight right there. There's two areas that I wanna spend time on with you. And these are areas I know you've been thinking a lot about. One is growth tactics that never work, that people keep spending time on and waste their time on. And then you have a a nice list of things you've seen that just don't work that people keep trying. And then two is growth frameworks, your favorite growth frameworks to help people wrap their mind around how to think about growth and grow their product. So we're gonna start with growth tactics that never work. Maybe just frame what we're gonna talk about, talk about what this list and collection of tactics that we're gonna talk about is.
00:06:35 · Elena Verna
[00:06:35] S0: Yeah. So growth is a fairly new field compared to marketing or product management or engineering. So there's a lot of people that are now accumulated that have ten years or so experience, but there's also a lot of newcomers. And because there's ratio of actually newcomers is much higher than those people that have five, ten years of experience of doing growth, you have a lot of renowned interest in growth hacks. Like, what is the like sure thing to get growth? What is the sure thing to get that metric up? How can I contribute to success with the company the fastest way possible? So, all of these shortcuts. And obviously, in the age of social media where everybody and anybody tries to share their tips and tricks and this and that, people are grasping for the oftentimes things that are completely out of context, or they are very specific to one example and actually do not apply as a pattern or simply not even applicable to their type of business whatsoever. So, there's just a lot of failure happening in growth teams. 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 you're a growth PM, or you're a growth marketer, you're supposed to drive growth. And when that growth does not happen, here comes the axe and people off they go. And the recycle and cycle starts all over in order to populate those positions. So, I think that there's just a lot of misinformation, I would say probably out there in terms of what growth actually is and how it should be done in the companies. And today I just want to cover some of the biggest ones that I see as a patterns, as I'm advising companies, as I'm operating in companies, because it's just so blatant, yet there's very few pieces of information on this for people to learn from.
00:08:31 · Lenny Rachitsky
[00:08:31] S1: Amazing. All right. What's number one?