6 months at Lovable and why I had to throw out most of my playbook
It's all different now.
I’m about six months into Lovable, but it honestly feels like six years. In a good way. I haven’t felt a learning curve like this since I was still climbing early-career rungs.
The pace is intense for two reasons: LLM capabilities are evolving faster than we can finish a roadmap cycle, and customer expectations are shifting right along with them. So it feels like we’re on a PMF treadmill. What used to be “horizon 2” innovation that companies had years to get to, we’re hitting every quarter.
There’s no playbook for that. No patterns to copy. And we’re doing it while the ground underneath us is also shifting: we are in the middle of the AI-driven technological platform shift all while distribution shifts are happening as well, and everything I thought I knew is being re-evaluated in real time.
Need to let go
I’ve spent my career in growth roles where 70-80% of what I already knew mapped to the new job. I’d show up, apply my frameworks, tune the funnel, build the loops, scale. All pretty straightforward.
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Lovable has been the opposite. Maybe 30-40% of my experience transfers. The rest I’ve had to unlearn. I’m having to let go of past patterns. Which is super uncomfortable. One of my superpowers is pattern recognition and building scalable frameworks from the trends I see. But the old structures are breaking apart. The market is just moving way too fast to rely on frameworks built for stable environments. So, now I have to treat all my hard-earned knowledge as disposable. Kind of sucks, right?
There’s an entirely new world of growth that’s emerging, and here’s what I’ve been seeing:
Growth works on new… ‘features’!?
In previous roles, 90% of my job was experimentation and optimization. Here, most of the job is inventing entirely new loops, launching new initiatives, and creating new product surfaces (even, gasp, new features). We’re still defining how people use AI, not just scaling an existing behavior. The work feels closer to product innovation than funnel tuning.Traditional marketing isn’t the lever
Paid marketing, SEO, campaigns, nurture programs. They’re fine. They help. But they are not what moves an AI company right now. The real distribution is word of mouth, creator economy, and community. This all looks more like consumer growth patterns than traditional B2B. If your product isn’t getting talked about, there is no amount of optimization that can backfill that gap.Growth surfaces are collapsing
Most products are converging into a text box with an agent behind it. There are fewer knobs to turn on the surface. Growth work now sits deep in the agent quality, the model selection, the reasoning behavior, the personality. If the agent isn’t good, no onboarding flow will save you. So growth is embedded inside core product, not layered on top.Need to be on the constant lookout for new growth channels.
We are in the middle of the distribution shift and more than ever need to be constantly watching for new distribution windows opening. Will it be ChatGPT’s app marketplace? Will there be something with Sora? Who knows. But the point is that we are in the middle of the distribution collapse and changes are coming.
The AI skillset is crucial
I sometimes reflect how different my days are now compared to say... 2 years ago. I’m constantly building something in Lovable, discussing my ideas with ChatGPT (from writing/clarity to brainstorming growth loops), trying out new AI features (hating most, loving others).
Growth is confusing during the PMF treadmill
In past companies, finding product-market fit (PMF) meant you could move on to scaling and growth becomes the priority. Here, PMF is temporary, which means the growth/scaling stage is also… temporary and confusing. Every AI company is on this treadmill, whether they admit it or not. But we still have X,000,000 of paid users and millions in revenue to grow… What exactly are you scaling if product is changing so rapidly? I approach it by over-indexing on innovation and not optimization, but who knows if that’s the right path. My plan is to focus on more traditional growth optimization work when our PMF stabilizes.Roles are blending
We still have job titles, but the walls between them are thin. Designers do marketing. Marketers shape product direction. Engineers do product work. Everyone runs small feedback loops across their own work. The generalist mindset is necessary. People who only operate inside their lane move too slow for this environment.Organizational structure can’t keep up
The development velocity is too high for a clean process. You have to be comfortable in the messy middle. Plans are short. Ownership lines shift. You have to self-author your role day to day. This is not for people who want predictability. The current environment rewards people who can create clarity instead of waiting for it.
Those are the lessons, but what does this mean on a day-to-day level? Here are some specific shifts I’ve made to change how I work:
Plan in 2-3 week directional bets, not quarters.
Optimize for learning speed, not comfort.
Default to shipping over polishing.
Spend more time editing ideas than managing process.
Assume my current mental model will expire soon.
The work is intense, fast, and constantly shifting. It’s the most fun I’ve had in years.
Whether you’re in AI or not, the growth game is changing. Now, the skills that matter most will be: Letting go quickly, re-learning faster, working across boundaries, and always building things people love enough to talk about.
If you’ve been in this field for a while, these probably don’t sound completely new. They’re a continuation of what we’ve all been doing. But they’re more essential than ever and it’s all speeding up. That’s the amazing/terrifying thing about growth right now: Everything is up for grabs.
What you make of this opportunity is up to you.
Edited by Jonathan Yagel, assistant to the regional meme-ger.
You’re essentially talking about continuous product discovery and core product development! :)
As a B2C founder this is completely true and helpful