Welcome folks! 👋

If you’re new to the newsletter, I’m Ben aka the Product-Led Geek, a product and growth geek who’s spent the last 25 years building, breaking, and scaling products. I’ve led product, growth and design teams, coached founders and product/growth leaders, and made plenty of mistakes along the way. My approach is deeply user-centric, pragmatic, and allergic to silver bullets. I believe the best growth strategies are messy, iterative, and collaborative.

This edition of The Product-Led Geek will take 7 minutes to read and you’ll learn:

• The critical growth mistakes that even experienced product and growth leaders make when chasing tactics instead of building sustainable systems.

• Why over-relying on paid acquisition can become an expensive addiction that undermines your product's long-term growth potential.

• How to align growth with product value by prioritising depth for core users before expanding to new segments.

Let’s go!

GEEK LINKS

GEEK OUT

Ten Growth Mistakes I See Everywhere (and What to Do Instead)

Let’s start with a confession: I’ve made almost every mistake on this list.

Not just once, either. In my years as a product and growth leader I’ve watched well-intentioned teams grind away at growth only to stall, churn, or even shrink.

Sometimes, we didn’t know why at first. Other times, we missed the warning signs because they looked like progress.

But here’s the thing: most growth strategy mistakes aren’t the result of incompetence or laziness.

They’re the product of smart people following best practices too rigidly, mistaking tactics for strategies, or being seduced by short-term wins while neglecting long-term health.

This post is my attempt to surface the ten mistakes I see most often, and offer some practical, actionable ways to avoid or fix them.

Whether you’re a PM, growth lead, or founder, I hope this saves you from at least a few headaches, wasted quarters, and “growth” that turns out to be fool’s gold.

Let’s jump in.

1. Chasing Growth Hacks Instead of Strategy

Let’s get this out of the way: growth hacks are not a strategy.

They’re tactics, often one-off, and usually lose effectiveness as soon as they become widely known.

What this looks like:

• Teams obsessing over , referral widgets, or clever onboarding nudges without a clear understanding of their core value prop.

• Chasing after the newest trick from a competitor, a growth benchmark report, or a case study (“They added a waitlist! Let’s add a waitlist!”).

Why it’s a mistake: Growth hacks can deliver a burst of users, but they rarely move the needle on sustainable, compounding growth. Worse, they can become a distraction from the hard work of building real product value and understanding your users.

What to do instead:

• Anchor your growth efforts in your product’s core value and user journey.

• Use appropriate tactics to support a clear, user-centric strategy.

• Ask: “Will this still work in 6 months? 12 months? 2 years? Is it compounding?”

2. Ignoring Retention

It’s tempting to focus on acquisition - new users are shiny, impressive on dashboards, and easy to count.

New user growth feels good - but might not always actually BE good. If you’re not keeping users, acquisition is just pouring water into a leaky bucket.

What this looks like:

• Teams celebrating sign-up milestones while churn quietly climbs in the background.

• Overemphasis on top-of-funnel metrics; little attention to engagement or habit formation.

Why it’s a mistake: Retention is the engine of sustainable growth. If users don’t stick around, your CAC skyrockets, LTV plummets, and every week becomes a mad scramble for new users.

What to do instead:

• Make an engagement metric your north star metric - especially early on.

• Map out your user lifecycle and identify key aha and habit moments.

• Invest in post-signup activation and continued engagement, not just acquisition.

3. Over-Relying on Paid Acquisition

Paid channels can be powerful.

But too many teams treat them as a shortcut to growth, neglecting organic or product-driven channels.

What this looks like:

• Growth charts propped up by ever-increasing ad spend.

• CAC creeping up quarter after quarter, with no clear path to profitability.

• Little investment in self-sustaining acquisition and engagement loops, SEO, AEO, content, or referral engines.

Why it’s a mistake: Paid acquisition is addictive and often gets expensive fast. It’s not sustainable unless your LTV/CAC ratio is healthy and you’re building organic engines alongside.

What to do instead:

• Use paid to supplement, not substitute, organic and product-led growth. Think about how it can help your loops spin even faster.

• Track blended CAC and LTV, not just paid metrics.

• Invest in SEO, AEO, content, and virality from day one.

4. Neglecting Onboarding

Onboarding is your primary tool in getting users and teams on a path to habit formation with your product. We want to help them experience value, form habits, and come back. And it’s a lever you should be pulling continuously. So I’m always surprised to see these efforts being treated as ‘one-and-done’ projects.

What this looks like:

• Static onboarding flows that haven’t been touched in years.

• Teams focusing on “how quickly can we get users to complete onboarding” instead of “how quickly can we get users to value”.

• No experimentation or segmentation in onboarding.

Why it’s a mistake: Bad onboarding kills activation and retention. It’s the single highest-leverage place to improve growth, yet many teams still treat it as a box to tick.

What to do instead:

• Treat onboarding as a continuous experiment, not a one-off project.

• Focus on getting users to their first moment of value, and to a moment that is predictive of habit formation, not just getting them through the door.

• Personalise onboarding for different segments or use cases.

5. Copy-Pasting Competitors’ Playbooks

It’s tempting to look at industry leaders and think, “If it worked for them, it’ll work for us.” But context is everything.

What this looks like:

• Blindly adding features, pricing models, or growth loops seen elsewhere.

• Mimicking competitors’ messaging or positioning.

• Ignoring your unique strengths (and weaknesses).

Why it’s a mistake: What worked for Airbnb, Slack, or Notion was a product of their market, timing, and audience. Copying tactics without understanding the underlying dynamics leads to wasted effort - and often, a muddled product.

What to do instead:

• Use competitors for inspiration, not instruction.

• Validate every tactic with your own users before scaling.

• Lean into your own strengths and unique insights.

6. Measuring the Wrong Things

You can’t manage what you don’t measure. But measuring the wrong things is worse than measuring nothing at all.

What this looks like:

• Teams obsessed with total sign-ups, page views, or downloads.

• Dashboards full of numbers that look impressive but don’t correlate with business health.

• Chasing north star metrics that aren’t actually predictive of growth.

Why it’s a mistake: Vanity metrics give a false sense of progress and can mask deeper issues (like low activation or high churn).

What to do instead:

• Define metrics that track real user value and business outcomes (e.g., weekly active users who perform a key action, value-derived engagement states, cohorted retention, …).

• Regularly review and refine your metrics as your product evolves.

• Make sure everyone on the team understands which numbers actually matter.

7. Misaligning Growth with Product Value

Growth for its own sake is dangerous. If your growth efforts aren’t aligned with the core value your product delivers, you risk acquiring the wrong users, driving up churn, and diluting your brand.

What this looks like:

• Aggressive acquisition targeting users who are unlikely to get value.

• Feature bloat aimed at capturing new segments, rather than deepening value for your core.

• Growth goals disconnected from product/market fit.

Why it’s a mistake: Misaligned growth is unsustainable. It leads to wasted resources, poor retention, and - ultimately - brand damage.

What to do instead:

• Prioritise depth of value for your core users before expanding to new segments.

• Ensure growth experiments reinforce, not dilute, your core proposition.

• Regularly validate that new users are getting real value (not just signing up).

8. Siloed Growth Teams

Growth shouldn’t be a bolt-on team that operates in isolation. The best results come when growth is everyone’s job, deeply integrated with product, engineering, and design.

What this looks like:

• Growth teams running experiments with little coordination with product/UX.

• Marketing owns acquisition; product owns retention - never the twain shall meet.

• Growth teams focused on short-term wins at the expense of long-term product health.

Why it’s a mistake: Siloed teams miss context, duplicate efforts, and can damage user experience. Sustainable, compounding growth requires collaboration across functions.

What to do instead:

• Embed growth thinking across product, engineering, and design.

• Share metrics and learnings openly between teams.

• Make growth a core part of your culture, not just a department.

9. Over-Optimising for the Wrong Users

Not all users are created equal. Optimising for “more users” can backfire if you’re attracting or prioritising the wrong segments.

What this looks like:

• Chasing sign-ups from users who never activate or pay.

• Building features for edge cases or loud minority voices.

• Ignoring power users in favour of appealing to the masses.

Why it’s a mistake: The best growth is driven by your highest-value, most engaged users. Optimising for everyone usually means delighting no one.

What to do instead:

• Identify and deeply understand your best users (those with high LTV, engagement, and advocacy).

• Optimise acquisition, onboarding, and product for these segments first.

• Say no to growth that doesn’t align with your ideal user profile.

10. Failing to Adapt as You Scale

What gets you from zero to one doesn’t get you from one to ten. Growth strategies must evolve as your product, market, and team mature.

What this looks like:

• Relying on founder-led sales/marketing well into scale-up stage.

• Clinging to early-stage tactics (e.g., manual onboarding, personal outreach) when user numbers explode.

• Failing to invest in infrastructure, automation, or new channels as you grow.

Why it’s a mistake: Sticking to old playbooks leads to bottlenecks, missed opportunities, and burnout.

What to do instead:

• Regularly audit your growth strategy—what worked last year may not work now.

• Invest in scalable systems, automation, and new channels when needed.

• Embrace continuous learning and adaptation as a core growth value.

Growth Is a System, Not a Silver Bullet

If there’s one thread running through all these mistakes, it’s this: sustainable growth means building a system that delivers real, compounding value to the right users, again and again.

I’ve learned (often the hard way) that growth is everyone’s job, and that the best teams are humble, user-obsessed, and always willing to challenge their own assumptions.

There’s no shame in making these mistakes - only in refusing to learn from them.

Key takeaways:

• Anchor your growth in user value, not tactics.

• Obsess over retention and activation, not just top-of-funnel.

• Build cross-functional teams and measure what really matters.

• Adapt your strategy as you scale, and never be afraid to challenge “best practices”.

Over to you: What mistakes have you seen (or made) in growth strategy? Which of these resonate - or don’t? Hit reply or share your own stories - I’d love to learn from your journey.

THAT’S A WRAP

Before you go, here are 3 ways I can help:

Take the FREE Learning Velocity Index assessment - Discover how your team's ability to learn and leverage learnings stacks up in the product-led world. Takes 2 minutes and you get free advice.

Book a free 1:1 consultation call with me - I keep a handful of slots open each week for founders and product growth leaders to explore working together and get some free advice along the way. Book a call.

Sponsor this newsletter - Reach over 7800 founders, leaders and operators working in product and growth at some of the world’s best tech companies including Paypal, Adobe, Canva, Miro, Amplitude, Google, Meta, Tailscale, Twilio and Salesforce.

That’s all for today,

If there are any product, growth or leadership topics that you’d like me to write about, just hit reply to this email or leave a comment and let me know!

And if you enjoyed this post, consider upgrading to a VIG Membership to get the full Product-Led Geek experience and access to every post in the archive including all guides.

Until next time!

— Ben