Growth Teams Are Spending 95% of Their Time On the Wrong Thing

Lovable reached $200 million in annual recurring revenue in under 12 months with fewer than 100 employees. No massive sales team. No complex funnel optimization. No A/B testing landing page headlines for incremental conversion lifts.

Elena Verna, who leads growth there, admits she's thrown out most of what she learned across 15 years at Dropbox, Amplitude, and Miro.

I feel like only 30 to 40% of what I've learned in the last 15 to 20 years of being in growth transfers here because we just need to invest in such bigger bets and innovate and create new growth loops here. I usually spend maybe 5% innovating on growth in my previous roles. Right now I'm spending 95% innovating on growth and only 5% on optimization.

— Elena Verna, Head of Growth at Lovable

That ratio flip—from 95% optimization to 95% innovation—cuts to the core question facing every growth team right now: Is product-led growth, the strategy that defined the last decade of SaaS, still the right answer when AI products can activate and monetize themselves?

The Speed Problem That Breaks Traditional PLG

Product-led growth emerged as a counterweight to expensive, slow sales cycles. Companies like Slack, Figma, and Atlassian proved you could build billion-dollar businesses by letting the product sell itself. The playbook became doctrine: free trial, frictionless onboarding, usage-based expansion, conversion rate optimization across every micro-step.

Then AI collapsed the timeline.

Lovable went from launch to $100 million ARR in 7 months, then doubled to $200 million just 4 months later. Over 8 million users tried the product. Hundreds of thousands became paid subscribers. The company hit these numbers with a team of roughly 100 people.

This isn't just Lovable. The entire AI category is rewriting what's possible. When Christopher Miller joined HubSpot in 2016, the company had just launched a free CRM but lacked a "fully formed perspective on what was going to happen after that." Miller helped architect HubSpot's shift toward PLG, which became one of the most successful transformations in B2B software history. That transition took years of experimentation, team building, and organizational change.

Today's AI products don't have years. The window to establish market position, capture users, and build defensible moats has shrunk from years to quarters—sometimes months.

Every company basically has to recapture product-market fit every 3 months. Everybody and their mother is starting a vibe coding 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.

— Elena Verna, Head of Growth at Lovable

What Actually Moves The Needle When Optimization Is Dead

If 95% of growth effort should shift to innovation, what does that look like in practice?

Verna points to three core strategies at Lovable: building in public coupled with employee and founder-led social, giving the product away aggressively, and shipping things worth talking about.

On the distribution side, when a user asks for free credits to run a company hackathon, Lovable's answer is simple: "Take it. How much do you need?" The logic is ruthless. Why prevent someone who wants to do your marketing and activation from using the product?

You have to remove the barrier of entry. The trick is get more people to try it. Just ship things you can talk about. The only way to create a word of mouth loop is just to blow their socks off.

— Elena Verna, Head of Growth at Lovable

This isn't the PLG playbook of optimizing signup flows and reducing time-to-value by 12%. It's a fundamentally different growth motion where the product experience itself—not the conversion funnel—drives expansion.

At HubSpot, Miller learned that growth required radical ownership of problems the business wasn't explicitly asking to solve. When he found that only a small percentage of HubSpot's revenue came from self-service, his team took over that area and "immediately blew it up." That aggressive mentality—treating every problem as the growth team's problem—unlocked opportunities that careful optimization never would have found.

I think I was just willing to take some risks and really push for the things that I believed made sense, even though maybe based on the titles that I had at the time, I wasn't sort of inherently given a seat at the table and sort of really pushed my way into some of these conversations.

— Christopher Miller, VP Product, Growth & AI at HubSpot

The PLG Purist Trap And Why Everyone Needs Both Motions

Here's where the growth leaders diverge.

Hila Qu, who ran growth at GitLab and Reforge, argues that PLG is "fundamentally DLG, data-led growth." When you give away a free product, you should get two things in return: broader reach and deep understanding of usage behavior that correlates with conversion and retention. Without that data foundation, "you are giving away a free product for nothing."

If you don't have a foundation of data and an understanding of how to analyze those data, you are giving away a free product for nothing.

— Hila Qu, EiR at Reforge (fmr Dir Growth at GitLab)

Qu sees PLG and sales-led motions as complementary, not competing strategies. PLG excels at volume and lowering barriers to trial. Sales teams close big accounts faster than PLG funnels can. Most successful companies eventually need both.

Verna's experience confirms this. Working with advisory clients, she's witnessed many startups running parallel motions from early stages—PLG for volume, targeted sales for large accounts. "I think eventually you need both," she says, though she adds a caveat: "It is easier if you have PLG from early on. If you are pure sales-led, you try to add PLG, that's the harder thing to change."

But Verna also pushes back on what she calls PLG purism—the belief that product-led growth is the only path and sales teams are unnecessary.

I wouldn't say it's shifted completely because I always believe you don't need to be a PLG purist, meaning there are people who are like, PLG is the future. It's the only thing. You don't need sales. I was never like that.

— Elena Verna, Head of Growth at Lovable

Gilles Bertaux, CEO of Livestorm, runs a business that embodies this hybrid approach. Livestorm is a webinar platform with strong product-led elements—customers can sign up and run events without talking to sales. But Bertaux focuses heavily on mid-market and enterprise accounts, combining self-service with targeted sales motions.

The tension isn't between PLG and sales. It's between optimization of existing motions and innovation of new ones.

Where Data Becomes The Actual Product (Not Just An Input)

If AI products can activate themselves, where does that leave the traditional growth stack?

Vickie Peng, a partner at Sequoia Capital who leads their Engineering, Product, and Design (EPD) team, sees companies over-indexing on the product side of product-market fit. Sequoia's EPD team doesn't just advise portfolio companies—they build products for founders, scouts, and ecosystem members to help them do their jobs better.

This model points to an emerging reality: the tools that support growth are themselves becoming product experiences that need to deliver value, not just track metrics.

Peng emphasizes what she calls "four areas of conviction" for product-market fit, though she warns against the tendency to focus too heavily on solution development while neglecting market needs. She also offers a framework beyond the tired vitamin-versus-painkiller analogy: hair-on-fire solutions (urgent, immediate pain), hard facts solutions (clear ROI and measurable impact), and future vision solutions (betting on where the market is going).

Companies across the board have a tendency to kind of over-index on the product side of product-market fit. It's about striking more of a balance that not only looks for the solution to a problem, but also meets the needs of the market it serves at the same time.

— Vickie Peng, Partner at Sequoia Capital

Miller's dual role leading both Growth and AI at HubSpot reflects this convergence. AI isn't a separate initiative—it's becoming the foundational technology that creates experiences to help customers succeed. Growth and AI aren't parallel tracks; they're the same conversation.

The Hiring Disaster No One Talks About

Verna identifies one of the most common—and expensive—mistakes: companies hiring growth teams before they understand what growth actually means for their business.

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.

— Elena Verna, Growth Advisor

The hiring churn in growth roles is brutal. Verna notes that heads of growth face higher firing rates than even CMOs. New growth leaders come in with high expectations, fail to deliver quick wins, and get cut—often within a year or two. The cycle repeats.

Victoria Colombato, who was the first growth hire at Mural (which went on to become a unicorn with over $100 million ARR), experienced this firsthand. She thrived on zero-to-one challenges but recognized the need to find environments where continuous reinvention was built into the role, not just the first few months.

I love doing something new, taking something from 0 to 1. When it becomes a bit more routine, I realize there's something that—I don't want to say bores me, but a little bit, yes. That's why I was always attracted to the world of growth, because it's a constant innovation.

— Victoria Colombato, Fmr Growth PM at Mural

Miller found opportunity in HubSpot's organizational ambiguity. When he joined, HubSpot had launched a free CRM but didn't have a dedicated team working on self-service growth. His team asked to take it over, got permission, and "immediately blew it up." That aggressive ownership mentality—seeing problems before they're assigned, triangulating business impact, pushing for bigger strategic conversations than your title warrants—separated successful growth work from tactical execution.

What Survives When The Playbook Burns

If 60-70% of traditional growth knowledge doesn't transfer to AI products, what does?

First, the focus on reach and barriers. Lovable's approach of removing friction and giving the product away to anyone who might advocate for it isn't new—it's PLG's core insight taken to its logical extreme. The difference is velocity and scale.

Second, the importance of data infrastructure. Qu's point stands: without the ability to understand usage patterns and what drives conversion, free users are just cost centers. AI products generate more behavioral data faster than traditional SaaS, which makes the analytical foundation more critical, not less.

Third, organizational dynamics. Miller's experience at HubSpot shows that growth teams succeed by expanding their scope and taking ownership beyond their formal mandate. Colombato's journey at Mural reinforces that early growth hires need to be comfortable with ambiguity and able to define their own success metrics.

What doesn't survive: patient iteration, incremental optimization, and the luxury of time to perfect onboarding flows.

I just feel like I usually spend maybe 5% innovating on growth in my previous roles. Right now I'm spending 95% innovating on growth and only 5% on optimization.

— Elena Verna, Head of Growth at Lovable

The companies winning in AI aren't running better A/B tests. They're building entirely new distribution mechanisms, experimenting with pricing models that didn't exist six months ago, and reconstructing their product-market fit every quarter as the underlying technology shifts.

Product-led growth isn't dead. But the version that dominated the 2010s—methodical, optimization-focused, conversion-rate-obsessed—can't keep pace with products that reach $200 million ARR before their first birthday. The discipline that matters now is the part PLG practitioners spent the least time on: inventing growth loops that don't exist yet, shipping experiences worth talking about, and moving fast enough that the playbook never solidifies into dogma.

Miller spent years helping HubSpot master PLG. Verna built her reputation optimizing growth at some of the most successful B2B companies in the world. Now both are saying the same thing: everything that made you good at growth is still useful, but if you're spending most of your time on what worked before, you're already behind.