The single most counterintuitive thing said across 100+ hours of conversation:
"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. 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
If you've been in growth for more than five years, you probably feel this in your bones. The entire discipline is inverting. What used to be gospel—test everything, iterate incrementally, compound small wins—is colliding with a new reality where the most successful companies are throwing out 60–70% of their playbooks and betting on invention over optimization.
This essay synthesizes what 20 growth leaders across the United States, France, and Latin America actually said in long-form podcast conversations recorded in 2025 and early 2026. Not LinkedIn hot takes. Not conference keynotes. Real operators describing real tensions, real trade-offs, and real bets.
The Optimization-vs-Invention War
There's a civil war happening inside growth teams right now, and it's not about tools or tactics. It's about philosophy.
On one side: the experimenters. The A/B test true believers. The people who built careers on rigorous hypothesis testing, statistical significance, and compounding marginal gains.
On the other: the inventors. The people saying that in AI-native products, in hyper-competitive markets, in environments where value propositions shift every quarter, you can't optimize your way to escape velocity.
"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."
— Elena Verna, Growth Advisor at Amplitude / Miro / Dropbox
But listen to Chris Miller at HubSpot describe the opposite reality:
"We really had an aggressive mentality, an aggressive approach. We approached the team who owned self-service and we were like, are y'all working on this? And they were like, nah, we're working on a bunch of other stuff. We were like, can we take this? And they were like, sure, if you want it. And so we took it and immediately blew it up."
— Christopher Miller, VP Product, Growth & AI at HubSpot
What's going on here? Two things can be true. In mature SaaS businesses with established funnels, rigorous experimentation still wins. But in AI products, in emerging markets, in contexts where the distribution model itself is unproven, over-indexing on testing kills momentum.
The operators who are winning right now know which mode they're in—and when to switch.
Product-Market Fit Is Dead (Long Live Continuous PMF)
Here's a tension almost everyone touched on, even if they didn't name it directly: product-market fit is no longer a destination. It's a treadmill.
"Product-market fit as a concept is no longer what it used to be. Every company has to recapture product-market fit every 3 months."
— Elena Verna, Head of Growth at Lovable
Compare that to what Amol Avasare at Anthropic said about velocity:
"The product value that we will deliver in 2 years' time is probably like 1,000x what it is today. Internally, linear charts are just not cool. Everything is log linear. Just show me a log linear scale."
— Amol Avasare, Head of Growth at Anthropic
When your product improves 1,000x in 24 months, every assumption about activation, retention, and monetization evaporates every quarter. Growth leaders at Anthropic, Lovable, and other AI-first companies are operating in a continuous state of re-discovery.
But this isn't just an AI phenomenon. Gilles Bertaux at Livestorm, a non-AI SaaS company, is already tracking Daily Active Users as a core metric—something traditionally reserved for consumer apps.
"Ese creo es nuestro desafío ahora en adelante. Cuando hablamos MercadoLibre, venimos mirando a Amazon. Amazon crece a partir del share of wallet de los usuarios."
— Pablo Moretti, VP of Technology at Mercado Libre
Even e-commerce giants are realizing that the old funnel is breaking. Acquisition is morphing into engagement. Retention is morphing into habituation. The lines are blurring.
The Growth Team Mirage
One of the spiciest convergences across every market: hiring a growth team before you have distribution figured out is startup malpractice.
"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
This was echoed—word for word—by operators in Mexico, France, and California. If founders don't understand their own growth loops, hiring a Head of Growth is just expensive theater.
But once you do have initial traction? The definition of what that team does is splitting down geographic and cultural lines.
In the US, "Head of Growth" increasingly means someone who sits between the CPO and Chief Revenue Officer—owning conversion, churn, expansion, and monetization across the entire customer journey.
"The Head of Growth, finalmente, il est beaucoup plus proche du produit. Il est quasiment un CPO, mais avec un focus qui n'est pas uniquement sur l'entrée, l'utilisation du produit, mais aussi la conversion, le churn, le tout."
— Brice Maurin, CEO at La Growth Machine
In France and parts of Latin America, the role has narrowed. Growth leaders are often responsible for top-of-funnel acquisition and prospecting—closer to a turbocharged SDR than a strategic product owner.
Why does this matter? Because if you're hiring across borders, you need to know which version of "growth" you're buying.
US vs. France vs. LATAM: The Cultural Fault Lines
The biggest cultural difference isn't about work ethic or talent. It's about relationship to risk.
"Ce qui est bien aux États-Unis, c'est que le prix c'est jamais un problème parce que l'argent n'existe pas aux États-Unis. Personne a d'argent mais tout le monde vit comme s'il avait de l'argent. C'est tout le monde vit à crédit. Ils ont pas peur de perdre l'argent aux États-Unis."
— Jeremy Goillot, Founder at The Mobile-First Co.
American operators bet bigger, fail faster, and rebuild without shame. In France and parts of Europe, growth leaders optimize for sustainability and elegance. In LATAM, the game is different again—scrappier, more resourceful, often building for markets where infrastructure is still emerging.
"No hay muchos emprendedores, empresas en Latam que hayan salido a construir un producto global. Es muy raro. Abrir ese camino creo que es retador y estamos viviendo ese reto."
— Julian Nunez, Founder at Yuno
Yuno, Nowports, and other LATAM breakouts are competing globally while simultaneously building the rails their products run on. That's a different growth problem than optimizing Google Ads spend in San Francisco.
And yet, the French bring something the Americans often lack: discipline.
"Aujourd'hui, on voit beaucoup la personne qui fait le Growth comme une personne qui va faire de l'acquisition, qui va s'occuper de faire en sorte de remplir le pipe. Mais si tu regardes aux US, le Head of Growth, il est beaucoup plus proche du produit."
— Brice Maurin, CEO at La Growth Machine
The best teams are learning to code-switch: bet like an American, build like a European, hustle like a LATAM founder.
AI Isn't the Future of Growth—It's the Present Boring Reality
Every single operator interviewed is already using AI in production. Not experimenting. Not piloting. Shipping.
"Our growth platform team is driving this effort called CASH, which is Cloud accelerates sustainable hypergrowth. How can we use Cloud to automate growth experimentation? And it's delivering results."
— Amol Avasare, Head of Growth at Anthropic
At Lovable, AI isn't just in the product—it's in the growth motion itself.
"Ya tienes un agente de AI programado que te va a resolver cualquier duda que quieras. Yo lo veo como darle al vendedor los poderes de un CEO."
— Santiago Savinon, Chief Growth Officer at 99minutos
Sales teams are getting AI co-pilots. Support is automated. Onboarding flows are dynamically personalized. But here's the tension: most growth leaders still don't know how to measure AI's impact on their core loops.
There's a gold rush happening, but the picks and shovels are still being figured out.
The Rebrand Delusion and Other Sacred Cows
Some truths are universal, regardless of market or company stage. Here's one that drew blood:
"Never ever once have I seen a rebrand or redesign, especially of your marketing site, produce good performance results. New CMO comes in designing their website or designing the brand as if it was reflecting of their personal taste, and it never materializes into anything meaningful."
— Elena Verna, Growth Advisor
And yet, every year, hundreds of startups burn six figures on rebrands that move no needles.
Other things that never work, according to the corpus:
- Hiring a growth team before you understand your own loops
- Over-investing in attribution when your conversion rate is below 2%
- Running experiments on features no one uses
- Treating "growth hacking" as a substitute for strategy
What does work? This:
"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
The New Asymmetry: Speed vs. Scale
Here's a pattern that emerged from every high-growth operator: the skills required to start a company are completely different from the skills required to scale one.
"Los skills que se necesitan para hacer una startup y para crecer esa startup son muy distintos a los skills que se necesitan para hacer una escala."
— Carolina Samsing, VP of Growth at Nowports
Early-stage growth is about invention, speed, and resourcefulness. You're building the airplane while flying it. But once you hit $10M ARR, the game flips. Now it's about systems, repeatability, and leverage.
Naomi Gleit at Meta put it this way:
"I really believe in frameworks for things. That helps drive extreme clarity. Everyone should know exactly where the canonical doc is. That's the one place I can go to to get all the information I need about a project."
— Naomi Gleit, Head of Product at Meta
But Lovable? Anthropic? They're still in speed mode.
"Leading growth inside of Anthropic is the hardest job I've had in my life. You come into Anthropic, you need to understand that 50, 60, 70% of how you operate in the past, just throw it out the door."
— Amol Avasare, Head of Growth at Anthropic
The operators who thrive long-term are the ones who can shift modes without whiplash.
The Channels That Actually Work in 2026
Paid acquisition? Still works, but only if you're capital-efficient and your LTV:CAC is above 3:1.
SEO? Dead in some verticals, alive in others. Depends on whether AI summaries have eaten your traffic.
What's actually working right now?
Building in public + founder-led content:
"One of our biggest strategy is building in public, and it's coupled with employee socials, founder-led socials."
— Elena Verna, Head of Growth at Lovable
Giving your product away aggressively:
"If somebody, one of our users stands up and say, hey, I'm going to have a hackathon at my work on Lovable, can you give us some free credits to play with? Why would we prevent a person who wants to do all of the marketing and activating for us from using us? We're like, take it. How much do you need?"
— Elena Verna, Head of Growth at Lovable
Partnering with agencies and ecosystems:
"La forma que descubrimos de crecer fue a través de agencias de marketing. Fue la forma de penetrar una nueva región."
— Carolina Samsing, VP of Growth at Nowports
WhatsApp and conversational commerce:
"Con Patagon AI, la calificación la hace automáticamente una IA por WhatsApp. Sus clientes reportan hasta un 400% de aumento en la conversión de lead a reunión."
— Fernando del Rio, Chief Growth & Marketing Officer at Talisis
The through-line? Distribution is fragmenting. The companies winning are the ones treating every surface—social, community, product, partnerships—as a potential growth vector.
What Changes in 2027
Based on what operators are building right now, here's what's coming:
1. The death of the traditional growth hire. Companies will stop hiring "growth generalists" and start hiring specialists who own one loop end-to-end: virality, monetization, retention, acquisition. The era of the Swiss Army Knife growth person is over.
2. AI agents as growth team members. Not in the "AI will replace you" sense, but in the "every growth PM will have 3–5 AI agents doing research, running experiments, and generating creative" sense. The humans who win are the ones who learn to manage agent teams.
3. The PLG-to-sales handoff becomes automated. Right now, most product-led companies still rely on humans to convert high-intent users into enterprise deals. By end of 2027, AI SDRs and automated nurture sequences will handle 60% of that motion.
4. Growth teams will own brand. The line between performance marketing and brand is collapsing. The best growth leaders already know this. In 2027, everyone else will catch up—or get left behind.
"Brandformance is the concept. El concepto de brandformance es integrar brand y performance."
— Fernando del Rio, Chief Growth & Marketing Officer at Talisis
5. LATAM becomes the global growth lab. US companies are going to start copying growth tactics invented in Mexico, Colombia, and Brazil—not the other way around. The constraints LATAM operators face are forcing invention that US operators haven't needed yet.
"Hemos procesado decenas de miles de millones de dólares. Nos fuimos a Brasil, idéntica la historia. Y lo mismo en Argentina, en Chile, en todas partes. Todo nos llevó lentamente a eso, a necesitamos ser globales."
— Julian Nunez, Founder at Yuno
The future of growth isn't being built in San Francisco anymore. It's being built everywhere, by operators who refuse to accept that the old playbook is the only playbook.
This essay is based on conversations with: Amol Avasare (Anthropic), Bangaly Kaba (YouTube), Naomi Gleit (Meta), Christopher Miller (HubSpot), Elena Verna (Lovable), Laura Schaffer (Amplitude), Jeremy Goillot (The Mobile-First Co.), Brice Maurin (La Growth Machine), Gilles Bertaux (Livestorm), Yann Leonardi (Independent), Carolina Samsing (Nowports), Nicolas Rojas (DAPTA), Julian Nunez (Yuno), Fernando del Rio (Talisis), Santiago Savinon (99minutos), Pablo Moretti (Mercado Libre), and Victoria Colombato (Mural).