Elena Verna on 10 Growth Tactics That Always Fail (But Keep Getting Tried)

Don't Hire a Head of Growth to Build Your Growth Engine

The biggest mistake Elena Verna sees? Startups hiring for growth before they're ready. Founders think a shiny head of growth will unlock their stalled metrics. It never works.

Growth teams can't create product-market fit. They can only amplify it. Before you even think about hiring growth, you need two things: solid retention and actual data. Not 10 customers in a spreadsheet—real volume you can analyze and experiment on.

To figure out your product-market fit and how to distribute it, it's not something that you can outsource to somebody.

— Elena Verna

Verna recommends waiting until at least $1M ARR, though many successful companies don't build growth teams until $100M-$200M. The longer you wait, the better—your entire company learns to own growth instead of delegating it to one island team.

For B2B companies, hire sales first if that's how you'll monetize. Only bring in growth when you have product-led components handling acquisition, activation, monetization, or retention.

Your Homepage Redesign Will Tank Performance (Just Accept It)

New CMO walks in. Rebrands the company. Redesigns the marketing site. Promises better acquisition. And then… nothing. Or worse, a step backward.

Verna has never—not once—seen a rebrand or homepage redesign produce immediate positive results. The best case? Net neutral performance with better ability to optimize toward something bigger.

Never ever once have I seen a rebrand or redesign, especially of your marketing site, produce good performance results.

— Elena Verna

The pattern is predictable: 8-10 months of development, $1M+ in agency fees, endless debates about brand colors, and lackluster results. Even product redesigns follow the same trajectory—6 months of work, a launch that underperforms, then a scramble to claw back to baseline.

If you're going to do it anyway, go in eyes wide open. Model out the performance hit. Budget 3-6 months of optimization work after launch. Don't expect a win at the 7-day readout. This is a stepping stone to a new local maximum, not a growth driver.

Copying Your Competition Is the Fastest Path to Mediocrity

Verna has thousands of Gmail accounts. She tears down competitor flows constantly—onboarding, pricing pages, activation, monetization. She knows what everyone's shipping. But she never copies blindly.

Using competition for inspiration? Smart. Ripping their entire experience because they're winning? Disaster. You don't know which test cell you're seeing. You don't know if that flow even works for them. You don't know how they define their metrics.

You'll never be a leader if you copied somebody else. Leader is by default somebody that is able to separate themselves from the pack.

— Elena Verna

Verna uses web archives to see how competitor pages evolved. She builds Miro boards cataloging sharing models, invite flows, and pricing strategies across Slack, Figma, Notion, Miro, and Google. She extracts patterns—common elements that winners converge on—and uses those as input for ideation. Never as the final destination.

The same warning applies to benchmarks. Definitions vary wildly across companies. What one team calls a "signup" might be completely different from yours. Benchmarks are useful inputs, not gospel.

Don't Bring in Growth to Fix a Declining Business

When growth slows, companies panic. They hire a head of growth to reverse the trajectory. The head of growth is set up to fail.

If your business is declining, you have deeper problems. Core product issues. Go-to-market problems. Degrading product-market fit. Maybe a competitor is eating your territory. A growth team can't fix that. They can optimize—maybe lift metrics 10-15% if you're lucky—but they won't create the J-curve you need.

Verna's advice: Don't hire growth on a downward slope. First, stop the bleeding. Get your product and marketing teams to at least plateau the decline. Ideally, show early signs of life in pockets of the business. Then bring in growth to blow it up.

Growth amplifies great product-market fit. It doesn't create it. If you hire too early in a turnaround, you're burning cash on a team that can't succeed—and growth roles already have one of the highest firing rates in tech.

Your Problems Aren't Unique (Stop Pretending They Are)

Every team thinks their growth challenge is special. A unique puzzle no one else has solved. Verna is here with bad news: your problem isn't unique. Someone, somewhere, has already solved it.

With thousands of startups and decades of accumulated knowledge, most growth problems are patterns. Trying to re-engineer solutions from scratch wastes time and creates massive opportunity cost. Learn from others. Adapt frameworks. Don't reinvent the wheel.

Verna's North Star metric for conversations? Insights per minute. She optimizes for density, not novelty. The same applies to solving growth problems—prioritize speed to a good solution over the satisfaction of building something totally original.