How teams get this wrong
Five failure modes, each a way of not being a growth team: the vibes startup, the dashboard graveyard, the blast list, the rented-audience trap, and the subtle one — the tactic collector.
In this chapter's workbook
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Five failure modes, each one a way of not being a growth team. You'll recognise at least one from a company you've worked at:
- The vibes startup — no data at all. Decisions by intuition and the loudest voice in the room. Fast at first, blind at scale; you can't tell a real improvement from noise. The fix is the measurement chapters.
- The dashboard graveyard — analytics installed, nobody looks. PostHog is firing, the charts exist, and no decision has ever changed because of them. Measurement without a ritual and without action is theatre. The fix is the daily cadence plus the action layer.
- The blast list — action without measurement. A weekly newsletter to everyone, batch sends, no behavioural triggers, no holdouts (a group deliberately left un-messaged, so you can prove the sends changed anything at all). It feels like marketing and proves nothing. The fix is triggered journeys and incrementality testing (measuring the lift against that held-out group).
- The rented-audience trap — growth you don't own. All acquisition through paid ads, every reach re-bought, nothing captured into a channel you control. The moment you stop paying, the pipeline goes dark. The fix is the owned-audience flywheel.
A fifth, subtler than the others because it looks like doing everything right: the tactic collector. This team ships growth work constantly — a referral program one month, gamified onboarding the next, a pricing experiment after that — each copied from a company it worked for, none derived from this product's own data. It's the pattern Verna's list catalogues, and the tell is that nobody can say which leak the current project is supposed to plug. Tactics are the output of the loop, never the input.
The through-line: a growth team measures honestly, acts automatically, and owns its audience. Miss any one of the three and you've got a department, not a system.
Flashcards
Key ideas — how teams get it wrong
5 cards — tap to flip.
Before you move on
This chapter's workbook items — sign in free and they save as you go:
The machine you're going to build
The whole system on one page: three layers, one loop. See it (PostHog), act on it (Hogsend), own it (identity + ads) — and the division of labour that keeps it legible: PostHog detects, Hogsend acts, you decide.
The one rule: measure → keep → grow
If one idea from this course sticks, let it be the order. Acquisition is the last lever, not the first — pouring traffic into a product that can't keep users is just buying churn.