Leveraging growth advisors, hiring well, mastering SEO, and honing your craft

Luc Levesque is Shopify's chief growth officer and a former Facebook, Messenger, Instagram and WhatsApp growth leader who has also advised companies like Twitter, Pinterest, Patreon, Thumbtack and Canva. The conversation covers impact-focused leadership, hiring playbooks, how to find and structure growth advisors, SEO strategy, the coming shift from AI search, and his personal reflection routine.

01Key learnings

• Focus relentlessly on impact over activity: measure outcomes against the north-star metric rather than hours worked or work completed, as Facebook's culture does.
• Hire the top 1% by looking for repeated 'signs of excellence' in a candidate's history, such as multiple standout achievements, not just one.
• Recruit with the whole executive team and involve the candidate's spouse or family, since changing companies is a family decision; stay relentless and keep momentum alive.
• Don't scale growth before product-market fit; growing a product users don't love can do more damage than good, so test in small, contained markets first.
• When vetting growth advisors, look at past performance, depth of channel knowledge and the teams they have worked on, not just their public following.
• Structure advisor equity with front-loaded vesting, a three-month cliff so either side can exit if it isn't working, and a long tail so the equity doesn't expire before a 10-year exit.
• For SEO, prefer an internal hire with prior SEO experience, supported by advisors, with agencies as a last resort; expect 3 to 12 months for impact from new content.
• Watch the shift to AI-generated answers in search: informational keyword traffic is at risk, so plan for less organic clicks and more paid spend over the next 12 to 24 months.

02Frameworks mentioned

Summary and takeaways written by PM Atlas; quotes are short excerpts. © the original author.