Luc Levesque on Hiring Growth Teams and Building Durable Loops

Luc Levesque says he began as an entrepreneur moving between product and growth. At 21 he built the travel blogging network TravelPod, concentrating on making the product excellent rather than on its distribution.

During TravelPod's acquisition process, questions from TripAdvisor's CEO about SEO, metadata and traffic sources made him realize how central growth could be. Levesque concluded that a good product also needs a way to reach and retain users at scale.

He says he later built Traveler IQ Challenge and TripWow, which reached roughly 100 million and 65 million users respectively on Facebook, then worked on TripAdvisor's SEO growth. These are his retrospective figures; the interview does not specify their measurement or independently verify them.

After advising companies including Pinterest, Patreon and Twitter, Levesque joined Facebook following conversations with Mark Zuckerberg. He recalls a visit with his wife and receiving an offer after trying an early Oculus headset.

A viral loop, in his definition, is a behavior by existing users that brings new people to the product and gets them to join. It is particularly powerful when sharing is part of the product itself, as with a photo-sharing service, rather than an unrelated add-on.

Asked about Shopify, Levesque says merchant recommendations are an important source of new users and the company works to make sharing easier. This is the Shopify growth executive's assessment of its product and acquisition, not an independently measured conversion claim.

His Facebook lesson was to think beyond one growth channel. SEO, paid acquisition and viral loops are options, but growth can also involve acquisitions or entirely new products; he cites Messenger Kids as a product that reached a new segment.

Among the teams he advised, Levesque valued curiosity, humility and willingness to revise assumptions. He says experienced advisers can communicate lessons quickly, but teams need to question those lessons and apply them to their own circumstances.

Levesque defines growth by an outcome: identify the principal metric or activity the company wants to increase, then consider the approaches that might move it. The definition is deliberately broad rather than a fixed list of tactics.

Choosing that north star depends on the product and the company's most important lever. He contrasts Facebook's focus on daily engaged people with Shopify's concern for merchant success, and argues for an explicit decision about the outcome the team will prioritize.

He personally prefers a standalone growth organization with multiple functions inside it, although he says several structures can work. The key constraint is whom a company can hire and what that person can lead; product and growth must cooperate either way.

When possible, he favors an experienced first growth leader because intuition takes many experiments to develop. If senior talent is unavailable, he suggests supporting a more junior hire with advisers rather than treating one organizational choice as universally feasible.

His hiring process looks for evidence of past excellence and repeated performance. Examples he finds meaningful include a former manager recruiting someone again, entrepreneurial experience and a strong recommendation from a trusted source; these are his heuristics, not validated guarantees.

Stebbings asks how to distinguish a candidate's contribution from a successful team. Levesque probes the depth of their knowledge: someone from a large organization may have benefited from substantial supporting infrastructure and need a different skill set elsewhere.

One favorite question is 'Tell me something I don't know about growth.' The answer helps him see which insight a candidate considers important, while repeated questions about why something worked reveal whether they understand underlying mechanisms.

Levesque describes an initial career walkthrough and challenging questions, followed by references through his network. He sometimes uses an exercise when uncertainty remains, but notes that busy, sought-after candidates may decline and he does not always require one.

Hiring the wrong growth leader can cost time and money. He warns that rapid promotion can have several explanations in a small talent market and that a strong speaking or social-media presence does not by itself establish operational ability.

He recommends including product and marketing partners in interviews because their working relationship with growth is crucial. Leaders should meet regularly, understand each other's goals and collaborate; simply ordering them to get along is not enough.

Whether growth attends every product review depends on how the company is organized. Levesque's preferred model gives growth ownership of relevant product surfaces; if another product team owns them, he says growth should be more closely embedded in its reviews.

Stebbings asks how growth teams can experiment without leaving fragile code or alienating engineering. Levesque points to shared reviews, early involvement and trust, and calls an experiment that lifts a metric but damages quality or other teams' goals a failure.

Growth reviews vary with team size and project stage. An early proposal can seek agreement on the proposed work; a later review can examine the relevant metrics, opportunity size and reasons the team believes the idea will work.

A string of unsuccessful experiments can hurt morale. Levesque urges leaders to celebrate small wins and treat genuine learning as valuable, while maintaining the persistence needed to find a useful growth lever.

For projects, he offers roughly six months as a possible checkpoint: even without a major win, he wants evidence or learning that suggests a path forward. He allows that some projects can take longer, so the period is a judgment aid rather than a rule.

For a new leader, he expects early signs sooner: within 30 to 60 days he hopes to see positive impact, and within a few months an early win or faster experimentation. These are his management expectations, not a guarantee that every role has the same ramp.

Slow progress and repeated excuses are warning signs in his view. Tension with product teams is another: a damaged relationship can undermine both teams, so he looks for humility, questions and constructive collaboration as well as speed.

At Shopify, Levesque says building and retaining an excellent team takes much of his attention. His description of the team's quality and the potential effect of hiring decisions reflects the perspective of its growth leader, not a controlled comparison.

He finds it challenging to alternate between strategic oversight and hands-on detail as the organization scales. Leaders must engage deeply without disempowering the team, leaving strong people room to execute.

Asked about decisions without data, Levesque argues for both evidence and a reasoned thesis. Before an experiment, he wants to understand the size of the opportunity and what prior results or other signals make the proposed change plausible.

He recalls rejecting the rationale 'throw things against the wall' for an SEO change. A stronger proposal would connect earlier results and observed signals to a clear hypothesis; the accumulated knowledge of what worked and failed can improve future decisions.

Stebbings raises a counterargument from other growth practitioners: past intuition can mislead when products and circumstances differ. Levesque agrees that assumptions must be retested, and argues that understanding why an experiment worked is more transferable than copying its result.

As an example of diminishing returns, he recalls repeated TripWow homepage tests to reduce signup friction. The first few iterations helped, but after roughly seven versions, further tweaks produced less impact; reducing friction has limits relative to user motivation.

He says defaults can substantially affect behavior, although he is unsure exactly how another guest intended the phrase Stebbings quotes. The impact depends on the objective and how the product interaction is designed.

In his 2022 assessment, SEO, onboarding and funnel optimization remained useful, while paid channels had become more important. These are his observations at the time, not timeless guarantees about channel performance.

He advises founders against manipulative SEO practices that violate search-engine guidelines, citing the risk of penalties that can damage a domain or business. He acknowledges that such tactics may still be possible but considers their risk unjustified.

A common mistake is hiring a growth team without giving it the engineering capacity to act. He also wants the growth leader close enough to the CEO for important or time-sensitive decisions to be resolved quickly.

For a leader entering a new role, his first advice is to identify the north star, align the team and stop work that does not matter to it. Growth teams receive requests from across a company, so focus means regularly declining some of them.

He favors a short communication path between the CEO and growth leader, ideally with weekly meetings, while acknowledging that reporting structures can vary. They should discuss issues and strategic changes, not just exchange numbers.

Levesque sees a small growth-talent pool in part because few organizations offer enough scale and experiments for people to build extensive experience. He would like more practitioners to share knowledge and help expand the field.

Asked for a company whose growth he admires, he names Bounce and discloses that he is an investor and adviser. He praises its use of advisers and company-wide understanding of growth loops; the interview does not independently verify its growth.

For attracting advisers, he suggests aligning incentives, often through equity, and pitching them much as one would an investor. He evaluates the potential business and growth loops, and finds introductions to existing investors useful; his view reflects his own role as an adviser and investor.

Stebbings thanks Levesque and closes the interview.