Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
00:13:56 · Lenny Rachitsky, Elena Verna
[00:13:56] S1: Okay. That's an excellent clarification. So basically, what I'm hearing the advice is hire ahead of growth only when you have clear product market fit and you're a product led company and beyond a million ARR, ideally, something like that. [00:14:11] S0: Right. And I won't say you're product led company. You are relying on product led motion to resolve a lot of the growth levers within you because you don't have to be fully product led company. But so if product, let's say, acquires people, let's say, with the SEO or Centimeters, then its product is meant to activate them and then sales closes them, sales would be obviously important as well, but growth would have to be coming a little bit sooner as well. So if you have any product led components, where product is responsible for acquisition, activation, monetization, or retention, that's where growth comes in. [00:14:46] S1: Okay. We talked deeply about that specific topic in our first conversation. Yes. I just wanna go deeper [00:14:52] S0: I there and need to talk lot bring it back. This is like it keeps I need to repeat it. Need to repeat it three times, right, before it sticks to people. So hopefully this is the third time. [00:15:01] S1: Absolutely. I'm only saying that because I... People may be wanting more of what you're describing and I will point them to our first episode, which goes deep on that one topic. [00:15:09] S0: Amazing. [00:15:10] S1: Excellent. Anything else before we move on to number two?
00:15:13 · Elena Verna
[00:15:13] S0: No. Let's move on to number two. Let's do it. Okay. So number two, this is on the other side, on the matured company, where I see a trend over and over, and it's becoming even more prominent right now, of when companies' growth slows down, which inevitably happens for a lot of businesses. Businesses. It It happens happens for for a variety of reasons. We're not going to go into the reasons as to why growth can be slowing down. And then they hire a shiny growth head to fix the problem. So basically saying, Hey, our business is slowing down. We're on a decline. We're going to bring this person or we're going to put this team together and our growth is going to accelerate. That just does not happen. If you have the overall business slowing down, your head of growth is destined to fail because the reason the 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%. Maybe that's enough for you, even though Adelaide is on the upper end of what growth team would be able to do if there is a slowdown trajectory. But what's important is that if you have core product and core marketing issues, Growth Team will not be able to fix them for you. You're going to have to address the big elephant in the room as to why business is slowing down in the first place, as opposed to just plopping a growth team on the issue and expecting them to do miracles while the rest of the business continues chugging on the same trajectory that caused the slowdown in the first place.
00:16:41 · Lenny Rachitsky
[00:16:41] S1: Wow. That is a... I've never heard this point before, and it's such an important one. It's very related to your first point. Growth isn't gonna build a product people want. They will help you grow it. And your business is slowing, your product market fit basically might be disappearing and growth isn't solving that problem.
00:16:59 · Elena Verna, Lenny Rachitsky
[00:16:59] S0: Disappearing and maybe segregating, it may be being eaten by a competitor because there's somebody that is stomping on your territory. The point is growth can amplify great product market fit and growth can help you grow faster once you're already growing. But if you're slowing down and you have issues with either your go to market strategy or your core product strategy with your core product market fit, growth is gonna be absolutely helpless to do anything. And it's honestly, it's a huge waste of money because at those sides of the companies, you would need fairly large growth teams in order to tackle every single product flow and interface that is already out there and invented. So, it's a huge expense. ROI on it, maybe at least one to one. Like what you put into it, you might get that much out of it, but it's not gonna be enough to create a J curve of the reacceleration by just relying on growth team. So I think it's just like this is where the name growth team plays against it because like, Oh, we're looking for growth. Do you have a growth team? No, that's actually... I don't have a better idea, by the way, how to name it. But this is where I think it's misunderstood that there is the silver bullet of a perfect head of growth, perfect growth team that can reverse the trajectory of the business. [00:18:26] S1: So then for folks that are thinking about, oh, wow, maybe I shouldn't be hiring head of growth, when should you hire head of growth when you're kind of an established company?
00:18:26 · Lenny Rachitsky, Elena Verna
[00:18:26] S1: So then for folks that are thinking about, oh, wow, maybe I shouldn't be hiring head of growth, when should you hire head of growth when you're kind of an established company? [00:18:33] S0: If you're declining in your revenue growth or whatever other metric that you're looking at, your weekly active users or whatnot, see at least that you're able to plateau it so you can stop the decline, so there is already a visible trajectory that your core product and your core marketing teams are able to at least reverse the degradation of the metrics. Ideally, you would even start to see some immediate signs of life that there is potential in the business in the pockets, and then you can put growth into it to really blow it up to to the full extent. But if you are on a decline, just don't do it because there's going to be very disappointing results in a year or so. [00:19:18] S1: Awesome. Okay, great one. Let's move on. Number three.
00:19:22 · Elena Verna
[00:19:22] S0: Okay. Number three. So this is my favorite and it might be a little spicy if there's any marketers listening out here, but doing rebrand and more specifically homepage redesign to drive growth. Oh, this one hurts me so much, and I've lived through so many of these And never ever once have I seen a rebrand or redesign, especially of a marketing site, produce good performance results. Now, there's many reasons as to why you might want to do a rebrand, why you might want to redesign your marketing site, because you're trying to enter a new market, new category, your product has evolved and you need to do a full update. But those are almost like it's a lagging indicator that something needs to change and you're changing it. And then you know that you're going to have to optimize the hell out of it in order to actually bring it even to the previous performance results. So, it's like a stepping stone back, but there is a much bigger room for upside that you can get to, but you're going to have to work to get to that upside. But yet, so many companies there's a story that happens all the time. I hire a new CMO, new CMO comes in, they're like, Okay, what's inside my house here? My house is not designed to my liking. Let me repaint these walls. I want this shade of blue. Let me put the couches over here. And they start almost 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, our category penetration is going to go up, our education or, like, awareness is gonna go up. And it never materializes into anything meaningful because, again, if you're doing it as a step towards unlocking new global maxima, sure, I love that. Do it. Go after it. Know that you have a ton of work ahead of you in order to actually unlock that global maxima. But 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 color is going to be, and eight to ten months at the minimum of development and very lackluster results afterwards.