Why the Same UA Playbook Fails in a New Category
Most growth teams assume a working acquisition playbook travels wherever the product goes. Reface's Stanislav Berkutov argues the tactics never survive the jump — only the systems behind them do.
One of the most common assumptions in mobile growth is that entering a new product category is mostly a targeting challenge. If you have built a working user acquisition (UA) function in one vertical, the thinking goes, you should be able to apply the same playbook elsewhere with a different audience.
I’ve rarely seen it work that way.
Over the past several years, I’ve worked across entertainment, photo and video editing, health and fitness, mental health, AI tools and utility products. Each category attracts people for different reasons, retains them for different reasons, and responds to a different creative language.
Expanding into a new vertical has never felt like adjusting campaign settings to me. It has meant rethinking how the whole UA function approaches the product.
That’s a lesson that has shaped how I think about building growth organisations more than any single change in channels or platforms.
Early in my career, I had the chance to build UA functions from the ground up more than once. In a previous role at a wellness technology company, I joined to help establish a Google and web acquisition direction as the market adjusted to iOS 14.
The strategic logic was sound, but the organisation was not yet ready to execute it. The product, engineering and operational pieces that the strategy depended on were still being built elsewhere.
That experience stayed with me: a channel strategy only works if the organisation around it is prepared to run it.
When I joined Reface as its first in-house UA manager, the company had already proven that people wanted the product. What was needed was the internal capability to support that demand. I restructured how the department operated, created a system for tracking new creative concepts and variations, and worked closely with the design team to plan new creative and iterate on existing work.
None of that was glamorous, but it is the part of the job that determines whether a team is genuinely learning or simply repeating itself.
As Reface grew, so did the product portfolio. Entertainment expanded into health and fitness, mental health, photo and video editing, AI tools and utility. That was when I stopped thinking of UA as a channel function and started thinking of it as an organisational capability — one that has to be partly rebuilt every time the product changes.
Companies routinely underestimate how many shifts between categories. What earns attention in an entertainment product does not necessarily earn trust in a health product, and neither does it look much like what makes a utility app feel useful in the first 10 seconds.
Even when the acquisition channels stay the same, almost everything underneath them can change: creative concepts, onboarding, user expectations, retention patterns, and the signals used to decide whether something is actually working.
That is why I have never treated expansion into a new category as a targeting exercise. It starts with research before any campaign is built: why people use these products, what gets them to install, what problem they believe they are solving, and what kind of messaging feels credible to them. Only once that is understood does execution begin.
The biggest difference I have noticed between teams that scale into new categories successfully and those that struggle is what they try to reuse.
What scales across categories are the systems behind the tactics, not the tactics themselves. The teams that struggle tend to reuse tactics. The teams that adapt well reuse the systems behind them: how research is conducted, how ideas are tested, how creatives are tracked, how results are reviewed, and how decisions are made. The execution itself has to be rebuilt around the category.
My own role changed in parallel with the organisation. As a UA manager, my work focused on building processes and gaining real visibility into the data. Later, as marketing lead, I owned the marketing strategy for two products and built the first team around it. Today, as Head of User Acquisition, I lead UA across the portfolio.
The work now looks less like optimising individual campaigns and more like building an organisation that can make good decisions across several products at once. Communication between teams starts to matter as much as media buying. A shared process becomes as valuable as a strong creative idea. Organisational design becomes part of the performance strategy, whether you planned for it or not.
Automation has become an important part of that infrastructure. Managing several products across different categories eventually reaches a point where manual execution becomes a bottleneck. The team does not scale with the number of products as you would want, and the market does not wait for you to catch up.
That pushed us to look carefully at which parts of the process actually required a person to make a judgment call and which did not. Today, around 80% of account-level changes occur automatically, though what that looks like varies by product and category.
The goal was never to make every product behave the same way. It was to standardise the repetitive parts of execution so people could spend more time on problems that require experience, context and judgement.
That is what building a scalable UA organisation has come to mean for me: the systems become more standardised, while the thinking behind them has to become more adaptable.
The real lesson is not about channels, bidding strategies or creative formats. UA teams do not scale by repeating the same playbook across different businesses. They scale by knowing what should stay constant — the systems, processes, and decision-making discipline — and what must change each time they enter a new category.
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