Product Team Owns Activation at Lovable

Lovable's growth strategy centers on embedding activation within the core AI product team rather than treating it as a separate growth function. This approach has been fundamental to their extraordinary growth trajectory, reaching $200M ARR with just 100 employees in under a year.

At most companies, the growth team spends the majority of its time optimizing activation - getting users to experience the core value of the product. But at Lovable, Elena Verna discovered that this traditional approach wasn't necessary because the product team was already obsessed with activation.

"Our agent team spends night and day thinking about activation," Elena explains. "I've never been at a company where the core team thinks so much about that first generation, thinks so much about reaching that moment. It's more weaved into the DNA of the overall company."

This integration happens naturally because with AI products, the activation experience is the core product functionality. The AI agent's ability to understand user intent and deliver value immediately is what makes or breaks the experience. The beauty of this approach is that improvements to the agent benefit the entire user lifecycle simultaneously - unlike traditional products where activation optimizations are separate from deeper product enhancements.

"The agent team is working a lot on it... our core team is responsible for activation," Elena notes. This frees the growth team to focus on other levers like building new features, launching new growth loops, and expanding into new use cases rather than micro-optimizing the onboarding flow.

The growth team still contributes to activation, but in a different way - by working on "agentic workflows and codifying agent instructions" to help customers activate better. This represents a fundamental shift where growth work extends deeper into core product functionality rather than just "smoothing surfaces on the outer layers."

This approach works particularly well for AI products because the activation moment is so immediate - users give a prompt, get a response, and either experience the magic or don't. With the product team already focused on making this interaction as powerful as possible, the growth team can concentrate on expanding reach and creating new opportunities for users to experience that magic moment.