10 growth tactics that never work | Elena Verna (Amplitude, Miro, Dropbox, SurveyMonkey)
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What is the main focus of this episode and who is the guest?
Growth is a fairly new field. You have a lot of renowned interest in growth hacks of like what is the like sure things to get growth. In the age of social media, everybody and anybody is tries to share their tips and tricks. Oftentimes uh things that are completely out of context or they are very specific to one example and actually do not apply as a pattern.
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?
We live in tech, there's always lots of startups. Um startups are 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.
Powerful words. I'm loving this list already.
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 a Viking marketing site, produce good performance results. New CMO comes in 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 gonna go up and It never materializes into anything meaningful.
A lot of contrarian takes here. I love this.
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.
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, Similar Web, Sanity, Maze, so many more. In our 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 non-traditional 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, the step. 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 Cinch, 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 Cinch comes in. Over 150,000 businesses, including eight of the top 10 largest tech companies globally, use Cinch's API to build messaging, email, and calling into the
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What is the main focus of this episode and who is the guest?
0:00–8:35
2
Why is hiring for growth roles too early a common mistake?
8:35–15:52
3
When does hiring a head of growth fail to solve growth problems?
15:52–20:55
4
Why do rebrands and marketing site redesigns rarely drive growth?
20:55–27:32
5
How does obsessing over the competition hurt growth strategy?
27:32–45:38
6
Why should growth teams prioritize earned channels over paid ones?
45:38–1:10:42
7
What problems arise from over‑experimenting on every initiative?
1:10:42–1:20:00
8
What are Elena Verna’s three favorite growth frameworks?
1:20:00–1:35:05
Speakers
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