11 hard truths about working in growth

Everything the highlight reels conveniently skip

I’ve been in growth for over a decade - long enough to collect some scars. Whether it is moving targets that make no sense, org charts that work against you, or data that that lies to your face.

Here are 11 hard truths about growth (and growth teams) that almost nobody says out loud.

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This post is sponsored by Amplitude, who just dropped their Product Benchmarks report - and it’s 🔥. Data from 2,600+ companies breaking down exactly what the top 10% do differently (spoiler alert - it’s all about retention). If you’re in product or growth, this is a must-read → find the report here.

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Hard truth #1: You will never ‘arrive’

You just have to make peace with the fact that in growth you’re always chasing an unattainable goal. And even if you do knock it out the park… the goals *immediately* adjust up.

Fun, right?

Goals and forecasts are faulty by design: they rarely account for market shifts, customer behavior changes, or product degradation over time. Which means every quarter there’s a painful conversation about why the plan wasn’t hit. And even when you do hit it, the system is built to move the goalpost further out of reach.

Hard truth #2: Your biggest growth blocker is your own org structure

Hate to break it to you, but the reason your company isn’t growing is probably your org structure.

Here is an example of how it usually looks (seen first hand at one of the companies I worked at): paid marketing would strut into Quarterly Business Reviews bragging about “crushing it” - lower CAC, more traffic, higher conversions. They’ve hit their goals! Everyone give each other high-fives! But wait… The overall business was struggling and (gasp!) shrinking. Even overall acquisition was down.

This is messed up on so many levels.

And I’ve seen the same movie elsewhere:

• Marketing hits pipeline goals while sales can’t close.

• Product ships features while retention slides.

• Support resolves tickets while CSAT tanks.

If one team is celebrating wins that don’t show up on the overall company performance, it’s not growth. It’s silos and a clear path to your business being crushed.

Companies try to patch it with Ops teams, OKRs, or reorgs. None of it really fixes the root problem. The best approaches I’ve seen:

1. Make everyone responsible for monetization (usually via OKRs, though most companies botch how they set them).

2. Define a North Star Metric that unifies every department around one outcome (and no, it’s not revenue).

Because until every team is tied to the same outcome, you’ll keep getting local wins that add up to company losses.

Hard truth #3: The best growth strategy is still a great product

A thriving business is the result of two factors combined: a great product and great distribution.

You can have great distribution with a ‘meh’ product, but these cases are usually due to first-mover advantage and massive switching costs for customers. I will call out Salesforce on this one - every time I open Salesforce, one of my brain cells dies, but no one even dreams about moving away from it. And I give them a TON of credit for that.

On the other hand, a fantastic product makes distribution 10x easier - like unlocking a whole new level in the growth game.

This is the reason behind Lovable’s exponential growth: we were at the right place, at the right time, in fast moving waters, and with an amazing product - a product so lovable that distribution fires up without us having to force it.

Hard truth #4: Most people (still) can’t explain why marketing is different from growth

I’ve said this 927 times already (like here, and here). The biggest source of confusion? Growth marketing. Sometimes it sits under growth, sometimes under marketing - but either way, marketing ≠ growth.

Growth is rooted in data. It’s about running activities that are measurable, trackable, and tied directly to user behavior and monetization outcomes.

Marketing, on the other hand, includes plenty of things you can’t (and shouldn’t try to) measure in the same way - brand, comms, PR, community.

Here’s the distinction:

• Marketing has plenty of activities that aren’t growth-related at all - think brand campaigns, comms, PR.

• Growth has plenty of activities that aren’t marketing - like invite flows, onboarding, and in-product loops.

Yes, there’s overlap. And that overlap is exactly why so many people get this wrong.

Hard truth #5: Growth loops eventually collapse, and the product has to carry that load

Andrew Chen calls it “the law of shitty clickthroughs”.

Every channel and every loop will eventually saturate and decline. The only question is how long they last.

Some loops endure for over a decade. SurveyMonkey’s user-generated loop (users sending surveys to others) fired for 15 years straight because the reach was massive and even tiny conversion rates produced meaningful results.

Other loops are super hot out of the gate but fizzle out after 3-5 years. Dropbox’s “refer a friend” loop drove explosive, double-digit acquisition in its early years. Today, it accounts for some single digits and declining. There are only so many friends a user can invite before the loop stalls.

This means the product itself has to keep evolving, creating new surfaces for new loops. Otherwise, teams are most likely to get stuck in optimization cycles that will eventually produce diminishing results.

Hard truth #6: Most growth teams are set up to fail

This one deserves its own essay, and I’ve written several. Here are the links:

• There’s a whole lot of ugly out there when it comes to growth teams

• Six rules of hiring for growth

Hard truth #7: Retention beats acquisition, every time

Do some simple maths with me.

Imagine you add $1M of new revenue in 2024. If those customers retain and *still* contribute $1M in 2025, you only need ~$200k of net-new to grow 20% year over year. But if you leak half of that $1M by 2025, you need $500k just to stay flat, then another $200k to grow 20%, meaning acquisition must drive $700k in revenue. (The best way to visualize it is through layered cake graph - see example 2 here).

Retention is the true growth engine. Amplitude’s report states:

• 80% of the value in the most successful growth companies comes from their existing customers

• There is ZERO correlation between having strong acquisition and retention.

• Our industry retention is shameful - by month 3, the median product has lost 96% of new users.

And I have seen similar numbers at almost every company I’ve ever worked at.

We keep overpromising and underdelivering to customers - fueled by the misaligned goals between product and marketing. Plus the challenge is that retention work is slow, complex, and cross-functional. It’s easier to launch a campaign or buy traffic than to improve onboarding, deepen product value, or expand accounts. Which is why so many teams chase signups while their revenue base quietly leaks away.

Hard truth #8: Most growth work won’t survive the year

Core product teams expect 90% of what they ship to still be live a year later.

Growth teams expect the opposite - only 10% of what you ship today will be in production next year. Thats a hard mental model for some…

Most of what growth ships is meant to be an experiment, a learning experience. A higher turnover is just the natural consequence. That’s why we switch things off on a weekly basis, whereas core product sunsets features every couple of years.

Hard truth #9: If the org thinks “growth will handle it,” you’re doomed

Growth is a team sport, everybody is responsible for it.

The growth team may be the most obsessed with it, but that doesn’t remove accountability from anyone’s shoulders.

The problem is when a mindset creeps in: “We launched it, growth will optimize it. Growth will handle it for us.” That’s a slippery slope.

Suddenly, growth becomes the cleanup crew, patching funnels and running tests on experiences that were never designed with outcomes in mind. Even worse, it takes responsibility away from product, design, engineering, and marketing, when those teams are the ones shaping what customers actually touch.

Growth can amplify and accelerate. But it can’t save a product experience that isn’t built to deliver results in the first place.

Hard truth #10: Attribution is a lie

Every single growth team is obsessed with being data-driven.

We chase clean attribution models and swear by them like the scientific method.

It might work for A/B testing, but attribution is directional at best. What drives a user to sign up, convert, or churn can’t be reduced to a single number. Human behavior is far more complex than that.

User paths are not linear, and many factors contribute to the journey, most of which we’ll never capture or control. Trying to compress all that into one neat metric, without any understanding of the psychological triggers involved, is an absolute lunacy.

I’m not saying you shouldn’t do attribution. But treat it as directional data, not a bible. Otherwise, you’re oversimplifying the world too much, and risk making wrong decisions.

Hard truth #11: Growth at scale gets boring

I’ve worked in startups and in large companies.

Similar roles, completely different jobs.

Large organizations are less innovation-prone and far more focused on optimizing existing systems than introducing new ones. A big part of that comes from the sheer complexity of introducing anything new in cross-functional environments. Also, the math changes: at scale, a 1% improvement can mean hundreds of millions in output, so optimization often beats invention.

I get it. But that also means the day-to-day of growth leadership shifts toward building operations, guardrails, and… plumbing.

At young companies like Lovable, the work feels the opposite.

Growth roles are a lot more open ended because the foundations aren’t built yet. I’ve written more about that here, but the point is: the job is unrecognizable compared to scale.

Which one is better? Depends on your personality. Just don’t confuse them. They’re two different jobs.

That’s growth

If you’ve been in growth for a while, you’ve experienced some of these hard truths, probably more than once. If you haven’t… give it some time.

That’s growth. Messy, relentless, occasionally ridiculous - and yet the most exciting job there is (in my biased opinion).

Edited with the help of Diana Bernardo.