Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
00:17:50 · Elena Verna, Lenny Rachitsky
We're just like hanging on to it as fast as possible and making sure that we're not going to hit a wall, so to speak, in front of us and that the wheels are greased and that all of the pieces are in places like your race car framework that you have as well. We're really just putting a lot of oil into it and figuring out what is our engine actually going to be that is going to take us forward. But when I'm thinking about the patterns here and what I have to unlearn, I feel like only 30 to 40% of what I've learned in the last fifteen to twenty years of being in growth transfers here. And some of it is very straightforward. Okay, this is how you're going to do paid marketing. This is how you're going to do some of the habitual retention. Here's the free to pay maybe monetization frameworks that still stand. But the rest of it, I was just say, it doesn't feel like it even matters anymore because we just need to invest in such bigger bets and innovate and create new growth loops here as opposed to trying to optimize it to the moon and beyond, which would I usually be focused on in a scaled business like this. [00:18:57] S0: Let's follow those threads. So what is it that no longer is worth it in this bucket of just like, let's not spend any time on this thing? And then what do you find is actually moving the needle?
00:19:06 · Elena Verna
[00:19:06] S1: Not worth it In growth, most of the people spend most of the time optimizing existing user journeys. So you already have maybe some of your growth loops that you understand that you try to optimize or you just know, hey, there's big drop offs from acquisition to activation. Let me go figure out how I can tweak the dials to get it done. Here what I find is that optimizations are just not worth our time. So a lot of the times my growth team actually ends up working on new features or just standing up new growth loops one after another. And yes, there's of course the saying of like more growth loops does not mean more growth, but at the same time, the market is moving so quickly. You need to stand up a bunch of initiatives to capture it because it's perishable. Or we also have so much competition. We're not alone here. So we can't ignore that there's everybody and their mother is starting a vibe coating business nowadays and we need to figure out how to be ahead of them. And to be ahead of them is not optimization of the problem. It's reinvention of the solution. So I just feel like I usually spend maybe 5%, maybe 10% if I'm lucky innovating on growth in my roles, in my previous roles. Right now I'm spending 95% innovating on growth and only 5% on optimization. And most of my frameworks are on optimization because it's really hard to come up with frameworks for innovation because by default, they're by definition, they're innovative.
00:20:38 · Lenny Rachitsky
[00:20:38] S0: What I'm hearing here is new features, launching new features, new product is one of the bigger growth levers versus like you have a bunch of cool stuff, make it easier to use, increase activation, reduce friction, things like that.
00:20:51 · Elena Verna
[00:20:51] S1: Yeah. And for example, we on Growth team launched integration with Shopify to enable e commerce use case. Because we're like, Hey, there's already people trying to come in and do it. Shopify was open for integration with us. Let's go lean into it so people can vibe code their storefronts. That came out of Growth that usually would never come out of Growth. Like why would Growth Team ever invest into a core product integration? Or we enabled voice mode for people so they can actually chat with Lovable using their voice as opposed to only having type. And that's also, it's a feature, it's a core product feature, but we're like, hey, it's going to help people to converse with Lovable more. It's going to increase the engagement. One area that we've spent very little time in is activation. Because usually I spend majority of my time in activation because there's so many awareness things that need to happen and so many things that we need to smooth out experience for the users in order for them to get through that setup moment, to moment, to the habit loop. And here you're just interacting with agent. So we at the beginning were like the agent team that we have here is working a lot on it. Like why would we go in there and do anything? It's like our core team is responsible for activation. Now we're starting to move into doing agent work ourselves. So all of sudden growth team is not just doing product surfaces. Now we're doing agentic workflows and codifying agent instructions in order for customers to activate better. So the work fundamentally, I feel like has gotten deeper into product and deeper into actual core product functionality as opposed to just being a smoothing surface on the outer layers.
00:22:34 · Lenny Rachitsky, Elena Verna
[00:22:34] S0: Okay, that is also a very big deal. Every growth person that's ever been on this podcast, including you, always talks about the power of activation, just how much opportunity there is to get people to this moment, realize how the value of this product that increases retention and increases everything. And what you're saying here is you barely spend any time on activation, because in a company like Lovable, there's a prompt, you give it what you want, it generates a thing, and that's basically all it is, and so the impact is to make that agent better at that thing versus micro optimize every step. [00:23:06] S1: And our agent team spends night and day thinking about it. So I've never been at the company where core team thinks so much about activation, thinks so much about that first generation, thinks so much about reaching a moment. So it's more weaved in into DNA of the overall company, which takes the pressure off of me to only have to focus on it because otherwise, yeah, I would be in that in that experience all the time. But I feel a lot more at ease because everybody's thinking about it and everybody's working on making agents better. And agent, the beauty of it is it doesn't matter if it's actually first generation or if it's your nth generation. It just needs to be a better generation. Agents needs to understand your intent better and think and reason behind it. So it improves the entire life cycle immediately as opposed to having to only work on that first experience per se.
00:23:06 · Elena Verna, Lenny Rachitsky
[00:23:06] S1: And our agent team spends night and day thinking about it. So I've never been at the company where core team thinks so much about activation, thinks so much about that first generation, thinks so much about reaching a moment. So it's more weaved in into DNA of the overall company, which takes the pressure off of me to only have to focus on it because otherwise, yeah, I would be in that in that experience all the time. But I feel a lot more at ease because everybody's thinking about it and everybody's working on making agents better. And agent, the beauty of it is it doesn't matter if it's actually first generation or if it's your nth generation. It just needs to be a better generation. Agents needs to understand your intent better and think and reason behind it. So it improves the entire life cycle immediately as opposed to having to only work on that first experience per se. [00:23:59] S0: And what you're not saying is don't care about that experience. It's the team building that is already obsessed with making that activation experience better, better. [00:24:07] S1: I I love that because I... That's the core product functionality at this point. And before, people would spend more time building deeper features or deeper use cases or trying to improve some platform functionality. And now the core team, they're obsessed about that first experience because that is core product.