Hire for Balance, Fix Onboarding, Evaluate Companies Rigorously: Adam Fishman's Growth Playbook

Fishman, who led growth at Lyft, Patreon and Imperfect Foods, says he wrote his Growth Competency Model because he had never seen a canonical reference for hiring and planning for growth. Founders often ask how to find someone like him ten years earlier in his career, which he calls pattern matching rather than a first-principles approach. He is also building a growth leadership program, so how to hire and balance a team was top of mind.

He also lived through the failure mode. At Wyzant, a tutoring marketplace, he joined between Lyft and Patreon, and the founders wanted a silver-bullet growth strategy. What they actually needed was a strategy for adding growth loops and a system for executing it, which takes time and patience. Because neither side evaluated the real competencies, the effort ended with the San Francisco office closing and layoffs, including his own.

Fishman describes the model as a circle with four equal wedges. His answer to what to look for is "it depends" on the team's current skill gaps, since the goal is not a unicorn who is an 11 out of 10 on everything. Even he is not, he says, despite many growth executive roles. The goal is a well-rounded portfolio of skills across the team.

The four buckets are growth execution, customer knowledge, growth strategy, and communication and influence. Execution covers channel fluency, experimentation, and productizing learnings, meaning turning hypotheses and test results into lasting product changes. Customer knowledge covers data fluency and instrumentation, user psychology, and narrative and creative approach; Fishman says users usually arrive in an emotional frame, so appealing to their logic first is a mistake.

The model also works in reverse: candidates can use it to ask founders which competencies matter and to be candid about their own strengths, and managers can use it to give specific feedback. Instead of telling someone to be more strategic, you can ask for better loop modeling.

Growth strategy comprises growth loop modeling, capital allocation and forecasting, and prioritization and roadmapping. Communication and influence comprises strategic communication, team leadership and stakeholder management. Fishman calls the last group the pinnacle and a lifelong journey, because growth is often seen as at odds with craftsmanship and each company's people trade in different currency. He adds that great product managers and great growth practitioners overlap heavily.

Fishman says hiring a senior growth leader is hard, and he suggests a first hire need not be one anyway. Look for smart, driven people who might be less experienced in growth but senior elsewhere, or for internal candidates who already know the customer. If the founder cannot teach growth, they should invest in advisors, courses and coaching, or the hungry hire will run through brick walls without noticing the door next to them.

At Lyft he hired Ben Lauzier, a generalist marketer from a corporate catering startup who had already nailed execution and customer knowledge. Fishman prefers those two skills in young hires because teaching someone to execute is hard. He recalls Ben borrowing a Chromebook during an interview day to deploy something for the job he was leaving, as a sign of work ethic.

At Patreon he moved a marketer named Sean into an entry-level growth PM role. Sean brought strong execution, prioritization, data fluency and deep customer knowledge from being inside the company. Fishman says he leans toward internal hires because they create opportunity, deliver faster results and carry less risk of the wrong hire, though specialists such as SEO or paid experts, his "surgeons", should be hired externally later.

Fishman says he does an onboarding project at nearly every company he works with or advises. Onboarding is the only part of the product 100% of users touch, and it is the first chance to deliver the brand's promise. Brand is the promise, product is the delivery, and a mismatch means disappointed customers.

It is also when users are most motivated, since they typically need what you sell badly. That gives you room to add some friction and learn about them. He says onboarding work improves habit formation and can shift cohort retention curves by 10, 15 or even 20 percentage points, because churn concentrates in the earliest usage.

At Patreon the growth team experimented with when to connect a person with a creator during onboarding. Connecting the right human at the right time raised a creator's first-month or second-month revenue by 25%. That mattered because the second processing month was a key input into lifetime value, so overall value rose by about the same amount.

To find high-potential creators, the team asked them to connect accounts such as YouTube, Instagram or Twitter and pulled in data on audience size and engagement, working with data scientists. Those flagged were pulled out of self-guided onboarding into the hands of a person. Fishman gives the example of a million subscribers who all watch every video versus a million passive ones.

What humans learned was then productized as "opinionated defaults": making it hard to do the wrong thing without removing choice. Creators could still set up one tier or forty, but the team knew three to five tiers and a three to five dollar entry point worked better, so deviations had more friction. Lenny relates a similar Airbnb effort with instant book and smart defaults for hosts.

Fishman says that done well, onboarding conversion can drop slightly because unqualified users are filtered out, which raises retention. The risk is cutting conversion by more than retention improves, so teams should watch the opposing metrics. He believes the biggest impact is on retention, since it connects users to value early and forms a habit that leads to referrals.

Because retention takes too long to measure, he uses proxy metrics. At Patreon, the speed at which a creator got a first patron and reached the first $100 predicted long-term success. The team also qualitatively sampled creators who were onboarding and ran them through their model.

He dislikes redesigning for its own sake. Revisit onboarding when you learn something new about customers or the growth model, such as the right tier structure, and let it rest otherwise, since micro-tuning rarely moves the needle. He thinks larger companies benefit from a team whose scope includes activation, even if onboarding is only a quarter or two of its roadmap each year.

Fishman calls his candidate framework "PMF", a pun on product-market fit that stands for people, mission and financials. He developed it because of layoffs and wanted to shift power to job seekers. The criteria are personal, but you should be rigorous about them. People means colleagues you can disagree with productively; mission means that many people end up better off because the company exists; financials means fiscal discipline, as many firms that raised heavily at the pandemic peak are now cutting staff.

He says he chose well at Lyft and Patreon and poorly at Wyzant and Imperfect Foods. Wyzant was a people miss because the founders' expectations differed from what he could deliver. Imperfect Foods had a strong mission, a good financial strategy and a great CFO, but infighting in the C-suite made planning hard, and product and growth leaders bear the brunt of that angst. Whenever he settled for two of three, it did not end well.

To check people, he would have observed leaders at an executive meeting or offsite, and he suggests even junior candidates can sit in on a team meeting or product review under an NDA. He asks about the last strategic offsite, where people disagreed, and how it was resolved. He calls people the hardest dimension to evaluate.

Fishman likens a job decision to an investment of time, which is more scarce than money, so diligence is warranted. He recommends back-channel references with current or former employees not on the interview circuit, and notes that Tal Raviv asked him for a list of past reports when interviewing at Patreon. If a company or manager refuses, he says, that tells you something.