Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
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.
00:21:58 · Lenny Rachitsky, Elena Verna
[00:21:58] S1: Oh, man. I'm loving this list already. This is great. To your point, it may still be worth doing if you're coming into it eyes wide open. This isn't gonna drive growth, but we're setting ourselves up for a future brand that's world class and we know our current brand stinks and our homepage needs to be refreshed. We're just... If you're aware it's not gonna drive growth, it might be okay? [00:22:18] S0: I mean, every single time I've seen a marketing site at least rebrand, it's been a step back performance that then is being treated as a fire drill to fix. Don't don't... Just don't do it. If if you expect, like, immediate results out of it or at least educate the team on how long it's gonna take to get to the point where you think that there's gonna be upside from your... Away from your original brand. [00:22:47] S1: So I've experienced this not just with marketing sites, but like most redesigns. Redesign of the product, redesign of [00:22:54] S0: blogboard. Yeah. How much how much product and engineering work comes into, like, just changing a logo in your in your product or changing colors? It's insane with no results ever. There's no results. [00:23:06] S1: And to your point, it's like, okay. Well, we've spent six months redoing onboarding everything we've built... Builds on this new design and experience. So we can't not launch it because it's... Every team is working on this new world. So we're just gonna launch it and then we're gonna claw back. We're gonna figure out how to get it back. Right? That's
00:23:06 · Lenny Rachitsky, Elena Verna
[00:23:06] S1: And to your point, it's like, okay. Well, we've spent six months redoing onboarding everything we've built... Builds on this new design and experience. So we can't not launch it because it's... Every team is working on this new world. So we're just gonna launch it and then we're gonna claw back. We're gonna figure out how to get it back. Right? That's [00:23:23] S0: how it goes. It's It's a new starting point and that starting point is gonna be much lower than your current optimized experience that you have. Whether it's well optimized or not optimized, it doesn't matter. It's gone through some level of optimization versus rebrand is always a shot in the dark. It might be prettier, sure, but that doesn't mean it's gonna perform well. So obviously never say never. Sometimes it might work and if it worked for you, I am so glad, but that's an outlier and don't treat it as a pattern. [00:23:57] S1: Yeah. And I was just gonna say, think everyone listening to this that is working on something like this is probably thinking, no. I think we have a good shot at this. It's... We've really thought deeply about this and it might actually be really positive in your experience. It's like... It sounds like you've seen it work, like, in occasionally, or is it just never?