Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
01:10:22 · Elena Verna, Lenny Rachitsky
And 5% of the chances, if you're measuring 95% statistical significance, you might not even be there. And yet, we'll, like, take it for some granted. Oh, it's gonna drive this much lift. So I just think that people stop, like, in this age of data, don't always rely enough on their own intuition. [01:10:42] S1: A lot of contrarian takes here. I love this. Elena, we've reached number 10. [01:10:47] S0: Okay. [01:10:47] S1: And I know number 10 is like a special one where it's more than one quick
01:10:51 · Elena Verna
[01:10:51] S0: So number 10 is gonna be my little fire round. My fire round on, like, little things that I just see people spending way too much time on and, like, it hurts my heart because it's not going to drive any results on them. So number one, color optimizations. For the love of God, a blue is a blue is a blue. As long as it's accessible and as long as it's bright enough, off you go. You do not need to test the shades of blue or test it against green or so on. Pick a color, move on. Please don't spend time on it. That's a early 2000s tactic. It doesn't work anymore. We passed that in technology sector. Number two, third party signups. A lot of times we think, Oh, we're going get so much more acquisition if we add Google Auth, or if we add Facebook Auth, or Slack Auth, or Microsoft Auth, whichever Auth you want to add to it. In some cases, it's very important to have third party auth. So, for example, if you're a developer product, please have a GitHub auth. It's kind of unnecessary. The developers already have the account there, have them connect with it as opposed to create a new one. However, if you're a productivity product, email is fine for the longest time, Gmail is nice, it's not gonna drive more acquisition for you. You're just gonna do a mix shift into more people using it, it's not gonna create incrementality, it's not gonna improve your activation, it's not gonna improve your retention. It's not a growth tactic, it's part of your customer experience that you want to invest into. Number three, on the fire round. One email wonders. 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 gonna cost? It will never cause any lift. It will never work as a one off email. Too few people open it, on average 25% open rates. At best, you'll get 40 to 50% open rate. Too few people click it. One email will never do anything. If you're gonna go into email, please think about it as a series about communication, about how it interacts with product communication. It's a whole strategy. It's a whole thing. Please don't stress about one off email. Never test a change in one email. It'll never work. You're gonna have to do the whole goddamn thing and see how it's gonna do, not just one email. Just never, gonna work.
01:13:03 · Lenny Rachitsky
[01:13:03] S1: I'm definitely guilty of this one. That is a really good one for sure. But it's so obvious in hindsight, so I love that you shared that.
01:13:09 · Elena Verna
[01:13:09] S0: Yes. And then the last one. Growth teams are often too obsessed about removing friction. Because if we remove the steps, then more people are gonna get to the destination. And to an extent, if you cause horrible friction in your product where it's just confusing about what the next step is, I agree. Go fix the friction of the cognitive load that it takes to complete a step. That is the friction that you should be working on. 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 you're solving, but if you ever have a line item on your roadmap that says simplified onboarding, please cross it out. It's not going to work because simplifying onboarding is an action. What is the problem that you're solving? You're never trying to solve a problem of simplifying. You always have a problem of people are confused in it, where people don't know where to go or they get lost in it, or they're not educated enough. That is the problem. And simplifying might be a solution, but it can never be a problem on its own. And too many growth teams are just obsessed with this notion that came out, I think in early 2000s, like, Oh, simplifying is like the biggest growth hack that you can do. Please don't do it. It's only a solution to a very specific problem set of too much complexity.
01:14:48 · Lenny Rachitsky, Elena Verna
[01:14:48] S1: Wow. That was a big one to end on that I think will help a lot of people avoid wasting time. Again, a whole other podcast conversation probably focused just on onboarding advice that you probably have... That I know you have. We've reached the last item. Is there anything else you wanna share about this list before we go on? [01:15:07] S0: I think we spent so much time on the list. We're ready to go. [01:15:10] S1: Much. Just enough time. And kind of on that note, wanna call an audible. And so we were gonna talk through all of your frame... Your favorite frameworks. I like the way this conversation has gone. I don't want people to get overwhelmed with information. So one idea is just just list maybe your favorite growth frameworks just for folks to go check these out and not spend too much time on each one.
01:15:30 · Elena Verna
[01:15:30] S0: Yep. Let's do that. Okay. Great. So the list of my favorite growth frameworks. And to me, by the way, it's not a solution, it's a pattern. It's a pattern that exists across almost every single company out there and it's a starting point for your ideation and to figure out how you can almost shortcut to possible list of solutions as opposed to trying to figure out too hard of how to even define a problem on its own. So number one, it's probably expected if anybody has read anything or listened to me talk, is growth loops. I think anybody who thinks about growth anybody who thinks about growth in the funnel fashion versus understanding what the growth loops are is missing out on the ability to create sustainable growth engine. So, it's very important to think about actionreaction that generates another action, and it's a self contained flywheel that can spin. A lot of resources on it at Reforge, Brian Balfour and Casey Winters and Andrew Chen wrote a lot about this. Highly recommend anybody looking into. My next favorite growth framework is actually written by you, Lenny, and Dan, which is a race car framework. Everybody has a really hard time often thinking about what are all of the parts of growth initiatives and which are long term, what are short term, how much are they going to actually produce in results. And RACECAR framework is wonderful because it separates different initiatives into, hey, there's some engines, loops, that are just going to keep on spinning. There's some fuel that you're going to need to add into it, potentially like paid marketing dollars. There's some turbo boosts that you may have in your race car that are going to be, let's say, big user conferences that you're going to hold as a product, or there's lubrications and optimizations that you're going to need to do of pouring oil into that engine so it actually performs correctly. It's beautiful. I talk about it all the time with everybody. The next favorite growth framework for me comes from Bangaly, and that's adjacent user theory. I think that one's very powerful in terms of thinking about growth evolution.