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

Lenny's Podcast: Product | Growth | Career

Lenny Rachitsky

Technology, Business, Entrepreneurship

5 • 1.5K Ratings

🗓️ 13 October 2022

⏱️ 66 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Adam Fishman has decades of experience building and scaling some incredible businesses, like Lyft, Patreon, and Imperfect Foods. He is currently an Executive in Residence at Reforge and an advisor to numerous companies on growth, product, strategy, and company building. In today’s episode, Adam shares his growth PM competency model to help founders identify specific skills when hiring growth leaders, how to structure feedback, and how to identify gaps in your growth team. He also discusses the role of onboarding in retention and how to evaluate a company as a prospective employee.

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Find the full transcript here: https://www.lennyspodcast.com/how-to-build-a-high-performing-growth-team-adam-fishman-patreon-lyft-imperfect-foods/#transcript

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Where to find Adam Fishman:

• Twitter: https://twitter.com/fishmanaf

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/adamjfishman/

• Website: https://www.adamfishman.com/

• Adam’s newsletter: https://www.fishmanafnewsletter.com/

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Where to find Lenny:

• Newsletter: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com

• Twitter: https://twitter.com/lennysan

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lennyrachitsky/

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Thank you to our wonderful sponsors for making this episode possible:

• Linear: https://linear.app/lenny

• Coda: http://coda.io/lenny

• Eppo: https://www.geteppo.com/

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Referenced:

• Stream Super Pumped on Showtime: https://www.sho.com/super-pumped

• Super Pumped: The Battle for Uber: https://www.amazon.com/Super-Pumped-Battle-Mike-Isaac/dp/0393652246

• HitRecord: https://hitrecord.org/

• Adam’s growth competency model: https://www.reforge.com/blog/the-growth-competency-model

• Adam’s LinkedIn series: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/adamjfishman_ive-now-published-my-complete-series-on-activity-6979198793992802305-VtCu/

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In this episode, we cover:

(00:18) Adam’s background

(06:16) Lyft’s launch press release

(09:56) Adam’s newsletter and growth competency framework

(10:34) Myths and mistakes founders make

(15:12) The growth competency model

(18:47) Customer knowledge and user psychology

(21:23) Why strategy and communication are more advanced competencies

(25:45) Why to hire a junior-level growth executive and how to support them

(31:20) Why Adam skews toward internal hiring

(33:25) Generalists vs. specialists

(35:59) The importance of onboarding

(41:49) Opinionated defaults

(45:03) Balancing conversion and retention with successful onboarding

(48:46) Guidelines for redesigning onboarding

(52:22) The PMF criteria for candidates

(57:57) What Adam would have done differently at Imperfect Foods

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Onboarding is the only part of your product experience that 100% of people are ever going to touch.
0:07.0	Good luck getting 100% feature adoption of anything else in your product, right?
0:12.0	But onboarding is the thing that you have to go through in order to use the product.
0:19.0	It's also the first opportunity that you have as a company to kind of deliver on the promise that you made out in the marketplace.
0:28.8	So I like to think of like 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.
0:43.4	So this is the first chance that a customer has
0:46.1	to be really excited or really disappointed
0:49.7	in what they thought they were getting.
0:51.7	So don't mess that out.
0:53.0	Adam Fishman was the first growth in marketing hired Lift,
0:59.0	where he spent two and a half years leading that growth efforts.
1:02.0	Then he went on to lead product and growth at
1:04.0	Patreon where he spent over four years building one of the most successful and
1:07.8	lasting creator platforms out there and most recently he was CPO and imperfect foods.
1:13.0	Today he spends his time advising companies on product and growth
1:17.0	and he's also doing a lot more writing.
1:19.0	And in this episode we cover three things,
1:21.0	his growth competency model model which helps you hire and
1:24.4	evaluate growth talent and also get a job as a growth person. We go deep into why
1:29.1	onboarding is such an under-appreciated growth lever and all of the impact that you could have
1:33.6	optimizing your onboarding flow. Adam also shares a super cool framework for choosing
1:38.5	which company to work out. Adam is hilarious and he's so full of wisdom and I can't wait for you to hear this episode.
	...

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