I want to eliminate my own job

Gasp.

Growth was once the most exciting role in tech.

It demanded a superhero with marketing head, product manager body, and engineering legs.

At first, it felt revolutionary. But over the last few years, something changed.

Bouncing from company to company, I kept seeing the same pattern: teams stuck in the basics, burning time and resources trying to implement fundamentals… and often failing.

To be honest, it felt demotivating and disheartening.

Instead of moving the field forward, we keep running around in circles, solving the same old problems with solutions that already existed but never got implemented.

It was so uninspiring that when I left Dropbox, I seriously considered retiring.

But you probably know what happened next. Lovable stole my heart and made it pump again. For all the reasons you can imagine, and for one more: it presented me with an opportunity to change Growth forever. An opportunity for people like me and roles like mine to never exist again.

Growth feels stuck on repeat

Growth emerged as its own discipline 10-15 years ago.

Here was a function that bridged product, marketing, and engineering with one clear focus: delivering revenue and customer outcomes. It was highly analytical, deeply technical, and clearly business-oriented. It tackled problems that felt genuinely new:

• How do we get users to the “aha!” moment faster?

• How do we build self-serve monetization models?

• How do we create viral loops and user-generated content that actually works?

We uncovered the answers as we went.

That energy is part of what led to Reforge. We built frameworks and programs to help people think about distribution in ways that went far beyond traditional sales and marketing.

It felt like new ground, and a constant push toward innovation.

But somewhere along the way, the field stagnated. I felt it first hand as I started running out of things to write in this newsletter. How many times can I talk about Activation or Monetization!???

I don’t mean to bite the hand that fed me, but the roles I’ve held over the past ~5 years, across so many different companies, have all felt like the exact same one. I get to work and realize that the basics are all wrong:

• Activation is not done properly

• Monetization hasn’t been optimized

• Viral loops are not measured or completed all the way through

• User-generated content is lifeless

• [Insert your favorite broken fundamental here]

Same story, different day. At every single company.

Even standout organizations that have mastered Growth 101 and should have graduated to Growth 201, like Dropbox, eventually loose their way and reverted to the basics.

To the point that 95% of people working in Growth today are doing very basic, repeatable tasks. We all claim we want to innovate, but almost nobody is actually doing it. We’re just putting building blocks in place, one after the other.

The work produces results, but are we progressing the field? Not at all.

So when Lovable approached me, I saw an opportunity to change all that.

Growth 101 should be automated

What if every Lovable app shipped with Growth tactics out-of-the-box? Can we codify Growth 101???

We spend way too much time on the foundations: figuring out Google Tag Manager, setting up analytics to measure events properly, optimizing landing pages for better conversion, or measuring activation correctly.

Now imagine all of that comes baked directly into the AI-powered product experience for builders. The next generation of apps, built in AI-native environments, would have an unfair advantage without lifting a finger. No weeks of setup, or growth teams blocked by infrastructure debt. Just building from day one, without friction.

I’m talking about an out-of-the-box experience that includes:

• A/B testing

• Analytics

• Tracking and attribution (which takes most teams far longer to get right than they’ll admit)

• Agents built on real operator experience:

  • An onboarding optimization agent that optimizes and adapts flows based on user behavior

  • A lifecycle email agent that identifies correlations and triggers targeted messages

  • A CRO agent that analyzes your site and runs conversion experiments automatically

All of this can be automated now. All of this should be automated.

“But Elena, if 95% of people are doing basic tasks that will be automated, aren’t we putting them all out of a job?”

Well, yes and no.

What future Growth roles look like

Yes - this will make many current roles obsolete.

But no - it will not leave everybody unemployed.

Because this isn’t a threat, it’s an opportunity. One that will allow everyone in Growth to move beyond foundational work and focus on the creative, strategic, and human elements only they can bring. Growth 301 - we long for you!

We’re already seeing this evolution in other fields: developers don’t need to write boilerplate code when AI can get them 50-80% of the way there. Creatives use AI to generate ideas and beat blank page syndrome.

In these cases, the output is written or visual. Growth is different: it involves coordination between pieces. But we’re fooling ourselves if we think that can’t be automated too. It can, and it will. And once it does, we’ll be free from having to do foundational Growth work.

So what will we do instead?

We’ll finally get to spend our time on the strategic, creative work that actually benefits from human thinking. For example: come up with new Growth loops in the product, work on innovative campaigns, or explore new channels.

That’s the real shift that’s happening: not AI replacing humans, but AI replacing people who choose to keep doing the work AI can replace. It’s those not willing to rise up and add their humanity to the work whose jobs are going to be eliminated.

In fact, you might be giving Growth a chance to finally become again the exciting field it once was.

Lovable will be reshaping Growth

My mission is to make every Lovable app ship with Growth 101 out-of-the-box, so no team ever has to rebuild the same foundations again. We’re codifying this knowledge, so every app will have an Elena Growth agent that does what I would do for every company in a full-time capacity.

We’re already seeing companies emerge that tackle slices of this: Try Pavlov focuses on lifecycle emails. Others do user research, onboarding optimizations, cro... You name it.

But what makes Lovable different is that we own both front end and the backend ourselves, so we can do this natively. It’s all out-of-the-box, baked into the app’s infrastructure.

I’m genuinely excited to eliminate my own job, because there is so much goodness that can come out on the other side.

The path forward

Don’t be afraid of AI taking your job. Instead, think about how you can make that happen faster. Ask yourself:

• What parts of my job are repeatable?

• What could be codified into an agent?

• What’s the uniquely human and creative work I want to be doing instead?

This is how you gain first-mover advantage instead of waiting for the market to move on, leaving you behind.

AI isn’t a threat, it’s a chance to raise the bar. Growth 101 has been holding us back for too long. It's time to automate the basics and get back to real innovation.

Edited with the help of Diana Bernardo.