Six Popular Growth Tactics … That Don’t Actually Work
“Get growth quick” works about as well as “Get rich quick”
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We’ve all been there. Ambitious growth targets are looming over you. The team is feeling the pressure. The question pops up: “What can we implement to get those numbers moving?” And like clockwork, someone throws out the usual suspects: a homepage redesign, some extra emails, “optimizing” your CTA buttons. There’s an initial burst of enthusiasm, a flurry of meetings, and months of work. But when the dust settles… nothing. Or worse—metrics going in the wrong direction.
Why do we keep falling for these same tactics over and over again? It’s like we’re hoping for some magic trick to defy the laws of growth physics. The truth is, some of these approaches are more about looking busy than being effective.
Here are the 6 most common tactics I see teams trying that simply don’t work well—yet growth teams keep going after them.
1. Homepage Redesigns (The Classic Misstep)
This is my favorite (or rather, least favorite) one: the homepage redesign. The metric that teams hope to impact is usually sign-ups or revenue. The thinking goes that if you redesign your homepage, everything will skyrocket. But what usually happens? A multi-month effort ensues, involving everyone and their mother’s opinions, and the result often doesn’t just fail to lift sign-ups—it can crash them.
Why doesn’t it work? First, the homepage is just one touchpoint in a much larger user journey. Redesigning a single page won’t have a meaningful impact because it’s rarely the deciding factor for users. They often make up their minds long before they land on your homepage. And if you’ve been in business for a while, you’ll have lots of returning users, who really don’t care how it looks—they’re already familiar with you.
Plus, redesigns often make the homepage more aspirational, as companies try to get into “category creation,” using fancy words and trying to appeal to everyone. This just ends up diluting the core message. I’ve seen countless homepage redesigns that consume sooooo many hours… but I’ve never seen one that had a major positive impact.
What to do instead: Keep your homepage tight in terms of messaging and focus on the users landing on it, not some ideal buyer persona who you’re trying to sell your enterprise plan to. Try to make it as practical and informational as possible with use cases, pricing, testimonials and other social proof. Some of my favorite resources are this post by Emily Kramer and pretty much anything by Anthony Pierri (start with this post he did with Kyle Poyar). I’m not saying you shouldn’t update your homepage: Just look at it as just another step in the journey—not as a magic bullet for growth.
2. Oversimplifying Product Flows by Removing All Friction
This one usually shows up in activation flows. Teams think that by removing steps or simplifying flows, they’ll lift activation metrics. They might reduce a 15-step process to 5 and/or jam templates in (so the users don’t have to create anything from scratch). Or, just from a design perspective: designers usually like white spaces, pretty animations—lots of visual effects, which makes a more aesthetically pleasing flow… but this doesn’t necessarily drive any improvement in the conversion rate!
Why doesn’t it work? The assumption is that all friction is bad, but for high-intent customers, simplification can actually be bad. You don’t want to hide advanced features or make the product seem “dumbed down.” And complex flows need more information and context. Customers need to understand what’s happening and why. Oversimplifying can lead to low-intent customers moving through the funnel only to churn later. Worse, it can cause your core customers—who actually want those details—to drop off.
What to do instead: Of course simplification is not always a bad thing, but don’t think of it as simplification: Focus on the customers’ problem and why they’re dropping off. Only simplify if complexity is a genuine blocker. In most cases, customers need more guidance or information to proceed, not less.
3. Color Testing to Infinity
Yes, I’ve talked about gold as a “monetization color,” but endless testing between shades of blue? No. Choose a color that aligns with your brand and stick to it. Monetization buttons should be bright and premium: I recommend gold, Canva uses purple—at Dropbox, we tested lime green and it worked well! For action items that a user needs to complete, go with some calming and natural: green, blue, maybe black or graphite. Okay, sure, don’t go orange or red… but in general, obsessing over specific hues will rarely make a difference unless you’re the size of Facebook (because even tinies of movement in the numbers may mean millions to them).
What to do instead: Pick colors based on best practices—action green or blue, premium gold or purple—and move on. Optimize for clarity, not hues.
4. The “One Email Wonder”
We often think that adding just one more email to the lifecycle series will make a difference. We carefully craft it, launch it, and then obsessively measure it’s performance. And 99.9% we are disappointed with lack of the results. But one email—just like one notification—almost never makes a big impact (with an exception of maybe an abandon cart email).
Why not? Emails are part of a broader communication strategy. Think of email as a multi-channel-touch approach, incorporating in-product messaging, notifications, and retargeting. One email won’t save your growth trajectory.
What to do instead: Develop a comprehensive communication strategy across channels.
5. Adding Third-Party Auth to Sign-Up Flows
Adding options like Google or Facebook auth options aims to improve sign-up success rates. It sounds great in theory, right? But the reality is that while it might boost the number of sign-ups, it rarely increases any activation, monetization or engagement metrics.
Why not? Sure, the moment you turn on third-party auth, you’ll see about 30% of your customers taking that offer, maybe even more. These do have meaningful take rates because of the reduced friction… but they don’t usually result in any downstream activity! Here’s why: If your customer was flaky enough that the difference between entering their email and Google OneTapping convinced them to join, they are probably will not be motivated enough to go through the activation and monetization and retention journey. If the only thing pushing them to sign up was the convenience of one click, they’re likely to drop off at the next hurdle. This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t do it, but be ready to work a lot on activating much lower intent customers right after.
What to do instead: Offer third-party auth to be customer-friendly, but don’t expect it to drive substantial growth.
6. Adding Template Libraries
Templates seem like a no-brainer for improving activation - why start from scratch if you can start from a template!? Unfortunately, it doesn’t work.
Why not? Even if you build 100 templates, you’ll never cover every use case. Most users will need heavily edit or even delete the template and then start from scratch, which means they’ve wasted more time, not less. This can hurt activation rates.
SurveyMonkey had a great example of this: we’ve created a library with a few hundred templates, so people wouldn’t have to build their surveys from scratch. We even personalize templates we served them based on the profiling quiz answers. The result? 80% were deleted by the customers. 99–100% were heavily edited. And those who deleted these templates had a lower activation rate, which means this whole effort actually had a negative impact on our business!
What to do instead:
Think about smaller components that customers can use within their flows.
This is what we ended up doing at SurveyMonkey: we broke up templates into a ‘Question Bank,’ so people could drop pre-written questions into their surveys. This lets them mix and match.
Or, consider a user-generated approach to templates
Look at Miro’s Miroverse, where there are thousands of whiteboards that are user generated. This is very powerful because now you can get inspired by what other people are doing and you have thousands upon thousands of examples, so the likelihood of finding exactly what you want is much higher.
You’ve been warned.
These are the 6 growth tactics I see over and over that just don’t deliver. They’re tempting, they seem logical, but they rarely drive the growth you’re hoping for.
Think carefully before investing your resources—and always be skeptical of the “quick fix.”
Edited with the help of Jonathan Yagel, Assistant to the Regional Memeger.
It’s so easy to get caught up in these surface-level changes when the real game-changer is understanding the user's journey end-to-end. We often mistake activity for progress, but without clear insights, it's just noise.
great post!