How to build a high-performing growth team | Adam Fishman (Patreon, Lyft, Imperfect Foods)
Adam Fishman, former growth leader at Lyft, Patreon, and Imperfect Foods, discusses his growth competency model for hiring, the impact of optimizing onboarding flows, and a framework (PMF) for candidates to choose companies. He shares valuable insights for founders and job seekers.
Deep Dive Analysis
16 Topic Outline
Adam Fishman's Career Overview and Current Work
Memorable Lyft Launch and Super Pumped Reflections
Motivation Behind the Growth Competency Model
Common Mistakes Founders Make Hiring Growth Leaders
Components of the Growth Competency Model
Deep Dive into Growth Execution and Customer Knowledge
Advanced Competencies: Growth Strategy and Communication
Hiring Junior Growth Talent vs. Internal Transfers
The Power and Impact of Onboarding
Onboarding's Impact on Creator Revenue at Patreon
Productizing Onboarding Learnings with Opinionated Defaults
Balancing Onboarding Conversion and Retention
When to Redesign Onboarding and Team Structure
PMF Framework for Evaluating Companies as a Candidate
Applying the PMF Framework: Lessons from Imperfect Foods
Due Diligence for Candidates: Backchannel References
6 Key Concepts
Growth Competency Model
A framework designed to help founders and leaders hire, evaluate, and develop growth talent by breaking down the necessary skills into four main components: Growth Execution, Customer Knowledge, Growth Strategy, and Communication & Influence. It emphasizes building a well-rounded team rather than finding a single 'unicorn' individual.
Customer Knowledge
A key competency within the Growth Competency Model that involves data fluency, instrumentation, understanding user psychology, and developing creative approaches to communicate with customers. It highlights the importance of addressing customers' emotional frames before appealing to their logical brains.
Growth Strategy
An advanced competency for growth leaders focusing on growth loop modeling (understanding how a product grows), capital allocation and forecasting (deploying resources effectively), and prioritization and roadmapping (sequencing work based on growth models and hypotheses).
Communication & Influence
The most challenging and advanced competency in the Growth Competency Model, involving strategic communication, team leadership, and stakeholder management. It's crucial for growth practitioners to win over others and align on what growth means, especially when it might be perceived as at odds with product quality.
Opinionated Defaults
A product design principle, particularly useful in onboarding, where the system makes it easy for users to do the 'right' thing (based on learned best practices) and harder to do the 'wrong' thing, without eliminating user choice. This guides users towards behaviors that lead to greater success and retention.
PMF for Candidates
A personal framework for job seekers to evaluate potential companies based on three criteria: People (enjoyable and productive working relationships), Mission (the company's positive impact on the world beyond financial gain), and Financials (the company's fiscal discipline and responsible management of resources).
9 Questions Answered
Founders often seek a 'silver bullet strategy' for growth challenges, pattern-match to successful growth leaders without understanding underlying competencies, and have mismatched expectations of what a growth person should be doing, leading to poor hires and frustration.
The four main components are Growth Execution (channel fluency, experimentation, productizing learnings), Customer Knowledge (data fluency, user psychology), Growth Strategy (loop modeling, capital allocation, prioritization), and Communication & Influence (strategic communication, team leadership, stakeholder management).
Growth Strategy and Communication & Influence are considered more advanced competencies, often requiring longer experience and relying more on 'softer skills' that are best learned through extensive practice and navigating complex situations.
Founders can have success with both, but Adam Fishman biases towards internal hires to create opportunity and leverage existing company knowledge. When hiring less experienced growth practitioners, prioritize those strong in Customer Knowledge and Growth Execution, as these foundational skills are harder to teach.
Onboarding is the only part of a product 100% of users touch, it's the first chance to deliver on the brand's promise, and users are most motivated during this phase, making it a prime opportunity to connect them to value and foster habit formation.
While onboarding can improve conversion, its biggest impact is often on retention. By connecting users to value and helping them form habits early, it significantly improves cohort retention curves, potentially by 10-20 percentage points, even if it means slightly reducing initial conversion by weeding out less qualified users.
Companies should avoid redesigning for redesign's sake. Onboarding should be revisited when net new principles about customers are learned, or when the growth model reveals new insights that onboarding can directly influence, rather than just micro-tweaking.
The PMF framework stands for People, Mission, and Financials. Candidates should rigorously evaluate if they will enjoy working with the people, if the company's mission creates a positive impact, and if the company demonstrates fiscal discipline and responsible financial planning.
Candidates can ask to observe executive or team meetings, inquire about past strategic offsites and how disagreements were resolved, and conduct backchannel references by speaking with current or former employees not on the interview circuit to get candid feedback on the working dynamics and culture.
23 Actionable Insights
1. Evaluate Companies with PMF
When choosing a company, rigorously evaluate it against your personal “PMF” criteria: People (enjoy working with, productive disagreement), Mission (positive societal impact beyond financial gain), and Financials (fiscal discipline, responsible spending) to avoid career mismatches.
2. Prioritize Onboarding Investment
Invest significant time and resources into optimizing your product’s onboarding experience, as it’s the only part 100% of users will touch and represents the first chance to deliver on your brand’s promise, preventing mismatched expectations and disappointment.
3. Improve Retention via Onboarding
Focus on optimizing onboarding to drive habit formation and significantly improve overall cohort retention curves, as churn is most likely in early usage, and getting users past this initial hump can shift retention curves outward by 10-20 percentage points.
4. Diligence Leadership Team Dynamics
Before joining a company, especially in a leadership role, observe the inner workings of the C-suite or team by attending executive meetings or offsites to assess how feedback is delivered, disagreements are resolved, and overall team dynamics.
5. Build Balanced Growth Teams
When hiring for growth, aim to build a well-rounded team by balancing skills across the four core competencies (growth execution, customer knowledge, growth strategy, communication & influence) rather than seeking a single “unicorn” individual who excels at everything.
6. Prioritize Internal Growth Hires
Consider hiring internally for growth roles, especially for early-stage practitioners, as internal candidates often have strong customer knowledge and can transition faster, leading to quicker results and a lower risk of making the wrong hire.
7. Implement Opinionated Defaults
Design onboarding with “opinionated defaults” that make it easy for users to do the “right” thing (based on learned best practices) and harder to do the “wrong” thing, without eliminating choice, to guide users towards successful product usage.
8. Ask About Disagreement Resolution
During interviews, ask leaders to describe their last strategic offsite, specifically where people disagreed, what they disagreed on, and how they reached a resolution, to gauge the team’s ability to navigate productive conflict.
9. Conduct Back-Channel References
As a job candidate, conduct your own back-channel references by speaking with current or former employees not on the interview circuit, or even asking for a list of past direct reports, to get candid feedback on the company culture and management.
10. Prioritize Emotional User Understanding
When designing products or growth strategies, first understand the emotional frame and underlying challenges users are trying to solve, rather than immediately appealing to their logical brain, as this often drives their initial motivation.
11. Redesign Onboarding with New Insights
Avoid redesigning onboarding for its own sake; instead, revisit and optimize it only when you gain fundamentally new insights about your customers or growth model that can directly influence and significantly impact early user success and retention.
12. Use Proxy Metrics for Onboarding
To evaluate onboarding impact without waiting for long-term retention data, identify and monitor early proxy metrics (e.g., velocity to key milestones or initial engagement behaviors) that correlate with eventual user success and retention.
13. Productize Learnings from Experiments
Ensure growth practitioners have a track record of productizing learnings by translating insights from experiments or MVPs into permanent product changes that integrate into different areas of the product.
14. Identify High-Potential Users Early
During onboarding, identify high-potential users by assessing factors like audience size and engagement across relevant external platforms (e.g., social media, content sites), then provide tailored experiences like human intervention for these users.
15. Invest in Junior Growth Hires
When hiring less experienced but smart and driven growth talent, be prepared to invest in external advisors, education, mentorship, and coaching, as these individuals need support to learn effectively and avoid common pitfalls.
16. Prioritize Retention Over Conversion
When optimizing onboarding, prioritize long-term retention over immediate conversion, as a slight decrease in conversion might be acceptable if it weeds out unsuitable users and leads to a higher proportion of engaged, retained customers.
17. Qualitatively Screen Onboarding Users
Supplement quantitative data with qualitative screening of onboarding users by sampling new sign-ups, observing their initial behaviors, and comparing them against your success model to ensure you’re attracting and guiding the right types of users.
18. Establish Onboarding/Activation Team
Consider establishing a dedicated team or assigning a team the responsibility for the activation experience, including onboarding, to ensure this critical part of the product is regularly revisited and optimized based on new learnings.
19. Hire Growth Specialists Strategically
Only hire external growth specialists (e.g., for SEO or paid growth) when you have a clear need for specific expertise that doesn’t exist internally and after foundational growth elements are in place, rather than as a first growth hire.
20. Use Growth Competency Model
Utilize Adam Fishman’s growth competency model as a foundational framework to provide concrete and specific feedback, such as focusing on “growth strategy” with specific examples like “better modeling of loops,” instead of vague statements like “be more strategic.”
21. Avoid Silver Bullet Growth Hiring
When hiring for growth, avoid seeking a “silver bullet” solution; instead, focus on establishing a clear strategy for new growth loops and a system for execution, as founders often have mismatched expectations of what a growth person should deliver.
22. View Job Search as Time Investment
Recognize that choosing a job is an investment of your finite time, a more scarce resource than money, and therefore warrants thorough diligence similar to how an investor evaluates a company.
23. Seek Growth/Product Advisory
If your company needs help with growth or product strategy, consider reaching out to Adam Fishman for advisory services, as he is open to new interests and learning about new companies.
5 Key Quotes
Onboarding is the only part of your product experience that 100% of people are ever going to touch.
Adam Fishman
Your brand is the promise that you're making and your product experience is your delivery of that promise. And those two things have to be in lockstep with each other, or you're going to have mismatched expectations and some really disappointed customers.
Adam Fishman
The goal of the competency model is not to find a unicorn human being that is like an 11 out of 10 on every one of these things, because frankly, that person doesn't exist.
Adam Fishman
If you don't know what you're doing as the founder or the leader, it's hard. You're not going to be able to help them yourself. So you've got to be willing to invest in advisors like me, outside education, mentorship, coaching. Otherwise what's going to happen is that very driven and hungry and enthusiastic person is going to run through a lot of brick walls, which is great, except they're going to miss the fact that the door was standing right next to the wall that they just ran through.
Adam Fishman
When you're interviewing at a company, you are actually investing in even more scarce resource. You're investing your time. There is no way to get more time. We're all on a finite clock. You can always get more money.
Adam Fishman