The best growth strategy is still… a great product
Growth isn’t a hack - it’s the outcome of a great product. The fastest-growing companies don’t chase tactics; they obsess over delivering value fast. When your product makes customers successful, growth takes care of itself.
Elena Verna’s right - the best growth strategy is still a great product.
It sounds obvious, but in practice, most companies forget it. They chase tactics, channels, or shortcuts before they’ve nailed the thing people actually want to use, pay for, and tell others about.
I’ve seen this again and again. From early-stage startups trying to scale before they’ve proven fit, to global enterprises, who are only just rediscovering what it means to move at product speed.
Why wouldn't you use your greatest asset?
Growth is an outcome, not a function
We treat “growth” like it’s a department. It’s not.
Growth happens when the product experience itself makes users successful faster than your competitors do. When customers win, your business grows.
Take Sikoia, for example. They were building an automated KYC platform but it was a challenge to convince investors and clients that it could scale. We didn’t start by adding more features or funnels. We simplified. We redesigned the onboarding flow, made risk scoring visible and instant, and built a design system that let engineers ship improvements weekly.
That focus on product excellence - clarity, speed, confidence - led directly to measurable growth. Conversion improved, investors bought in, and they raised $6.1M. Growth followed great product. Not the other way around.
Product-led growth starts with proof, not polish
A lot of teams still think “product-led growth” means putting the product at the centre of marketing, but in reality, it’s about evidence. The faster you can turn an idea into a working, testable product, the faster you learn what customers value - and what they don’t.
That’s why I created The Build Loop. It’s a framework designed to turn strategy into validated products in weeks, not months.
Each loop — Frame → Create → Validate → Learn - is a mini growth engine. Every cycle produces evidence: user validation, usage data, or insight that compounds into growth.
When we ran this with Sentrisk, they started moving like a startup. In 10 weeks, we went from a legacy process to a working product demo that won 72 qualified leads on launch day. Not because of marketing spend, but because the product itself did the talking.
The real growth levers are inside your product
If you want growth, start by asking:
- Does our product solve a real pain point clearly?
- Is the first experience frictionless?
- Can users reach value quickly without hand-holding?
- Do we have evidence that people would recommend it?
Every high-performing product team I’ve seen does three things consistently:
- Talk to users weekly. Growth starts with empathy.
- Ship something small every loop. Momentum builds belief.
- Instrument everything. You can’t grow what you can’t measure.
Growth is not a hack, it’s a habit
The irony of the “growth hacking” era is that it distracted everyone from what actually works: a product that delivers genuine value, faster and more elegantly than anyone else.
Elena Verna’s hard truth reminds us that the best growth playbook isn’t new: It’s timeless.
The difference today is speed. With AI, design systems, and frameworks like The Build Loop, we can test, learn, and deliver faster than ever before. But the principle stays the same:
The best growth strategy is still a great product.
Build that first, and everything else compounds.
