Elena Verna

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In fact, I believe that if we truly believe into this AI change that is happening in all of our lives, then ICs should get paid more than managers, because as an IC, you can drive more outcome and impact than a manager in the old system.

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So, if it's cheaper to try than to debate, make sure that when experiments are cheap, approval chains are the expensive part.

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Then, the authority has to travel with accountability.

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However, our organizational designs currently gate information by design. You have all of these layers of people filtering information down to individual contributors. Well, that can be no more. You have to trust your people.

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So, you don't have such a strong connection to what you're doing, especially in the next year or so when all of our jobs are going to change. You're not going to lose a position in your company, but what you're doing is going to change.

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Are you changing your organizational design underneath you in order to take advantage of all of those skills? In order to take advantage of the people utilizing those tools? Because if you don't, you're actually not taking advantage of the biggest change that is happening in our system right now.

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When the cost of building falls below the cost of coordinating, the org chart should change.

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So, only one or two areas of exceptional craft are needed, and then the good enough everywhere else to get it to the point where you can learn.

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I actually think of AI as average intelligence. I'm sure you will get into AGI world someday, but for now, it's still super powerful to have at your fingertips an average marketer, an average engineer, an average analyst, an average designer.

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The ladder was built with an old constraint that more impact that you can have equals more people underneath you.

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For the love of God, a blue is a blue is a blue. As long as it's accessible and as long as it's bright enough, off you go. You do not need to test the shades of blue, but test it against green or so on.

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My rule of thumb, if we cannot collect the sample size in a month, we shouldn't test it. Period.

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If every single one of your initiatives that you're doing on growth is an experiment, uh that's a problem.

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I think that you should not hire an advisor until you do some sort of workshop with them on the problem that you're experiencing. See them in action.

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So, I think any growth team that does not have an advisor is a growth team that is underperforming

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I try to focus 20% 20 to 25% of growth team's time annually, not every given sprint, not every given quarter, but annually, to introduce a new growth loop.

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If you have a growth model that works for you, that's wonderful. Good for you. Optimize it, grow it, scale it, create a team that will be nurturing it and that will be amplifying it. But you're going to need to evolve it. And that evolution needs to come through overlaying other growth models on top of it.

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And the percentage of those recipients sign up to become Dropbox users, and that accounts for 50% of acquisition. That is a stable, earned channel that nobody can compete with.

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Focusing on these earned channels that you own becomes the utmost priority. And if you don't have them on your growth road map, you're going to be in some really big trouble over the next year to two years because your cost of acquisition is only going to go up.

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An algorithm can give it, but algorithm can also take it away at any point and you have no control because you don't own those channels.

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My big motto like life motto in growth is that you have to fail to learn. You can't just constantly succeed. Success is an output of a lot of failures.

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And number one thing that whenever you have an initiative or whenever you have a metric that you need to go and move, do not start from scratch ever. Do not start from scratch.

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but I'm very sorry to break it to all of you, but your problem is not unique. I'm 99% sure of that. Your problem has been felt by somebody somewhere and probably many, many places

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I mean, I've been doing this for over 15 years. If there were any shortcuts, I'd be all over them. There are patterns and there are frameworks, but there's no shortcuts.

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So, taking also any benchmark that is derived from competition and saying this is where we should be is also so dangerous because it might not even be applicable depending on how you define the metric.

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because copying competition is like the fastest way to mediocrity because you'll never be a leader if you copied somebody else.

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But to ever promise a homepage redesign or marketing site redesign in order to drive more acquisition is a failed promise that is going to be led by lots of agency money spending, uh often a million dollars plus

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

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Growth team can optimize. Growth can maybe lift it by 10, 15% maybe that's enough for you even that like is on the upper end of what growth team would be able to do if there is a slow down trajectory

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If you have the overall business slowing down, your head of growth is destined to fail because the reason business is slowing down is much deeper than not having a growth team.

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It depends on how you're actually going to collect the money. If your money collection is going to happen through sales team primarily, then you absolutely should be hiring sales way before growth.

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if you have 10 users or 10 customers, that's not data. That's a G sheet with your customers and you don't need a growth team for that.

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I really believe that the founder led growth is not being popularized enough that you do not need growth teams until you actually can start running experiments on your user base

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I love Veep on HBO. Uh so funny. I've probably watched it two times already, the entire series, and I'll probably watch it more because I just cracks me up every time.

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just got AirPods Max, my headphones. I couldn't connect them to my computer, still technical difficulties on that, but I love them. The sound is amazing. That's like my new favorite gadget that I'm obsessed about.