How to build a high-performing growth team

Adam Fishman is a growth and product leader who has led growth at Lyft, Patreon, and Imperfect Foods and now advises companies and writes a newsletter. In this conversation with Lenny Rachitsky he covers his growth competency model for hiring growth leaders, lessons on optimizing onboarding flows and their retention impact, and a framework (PMF for candidates) for evaluating which companies to join.

01Key learnings

• Use a competency model (growth execution, customer knowledge, growth strategy, communication and influence) to hire for a balanced team rather than seeking one unicorn who excels at everything.
• Before hiring a growth leader, agree on what you need and where the gaps are, and use the model as a reverse interview to see what the candidate actually brings.
• Give specific feedback by naming the exact competency to improve, instead of vague comments like 'be more strategic'.
• Founders should seek internal hires who already know customers well, or hire smart, driven people while investing in external coaching and advisors to help them learn.
• Treat onboarding as the one part of the product every user touches, and keep it in lockstep with the brand promise so customers aren't disappointed early.
• Use opinionated defaults and guardrails to make the right choice easy without removing user choice, and let human intervention reveal what to productize.
• Judge onboarding changes by retention and proxy metrics, not just conversion, and only redesign when you have genuinely new customer insights.
• When evaluating a company, define your own people, mission and financials criteria, observe leadership dynamics, and ask for back-channel references since your time is the scarcest investment.

02Frameworks mentioned

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