How to build a high-performing growth team | Adam Fishman (Patreon, Lyft, Imperfect Foods)

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.