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

Adam Fishman: Onboarding is the only part of your product experience that a hundred percent of people are ever going to touch. Good luck getting a hundred percent feature adoption of anything else in your product, right? But onboarding is the thing that you have to go through in order to use the product. It’s also the first opportunity that you have as a company to deliver on the promise that you made out in the marketplace. So I like to think of 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. So this is the first chance that a customer has to be really excited or really disappointed in what they thought they were getting. So don’t mess that up.

Lenny: Adam Fishman was the first growth and marketing hire at Lyft where he spent two and a half years leading their growth efforts. Then he went on to lead product and growth at Patreon, where he spent over four years building one of the most successful and lasting created platforms out there. And most recently, he was CPO at Imperfect Foods. Today he spends his time advising companies on product and growth, and he’s also doing a lot more writing.

And in this episode we cover three things, his growth competency model, which helps you hire and evaluate growth talent and also get a job as a growth person. We go deep into why onboarding is such an underappreciated growth lever and all of the impact that you can have optimizing your onboarding flow. Adam also shares a super cool framework for choosing which company to work at. Adam is hilarious and he’s so full of wisdom and I can’t wait for you to hear this episode. With that, I bring you Adam Fishman.

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Adam Fishman, welcome to the podcast.

Adam Fishman: Thanks for having me, Lenny. Super excited to be here. It’s a pleasure to be on chatting with you today.

Lenny: It’s even more my pleasure. Thank you for being here. To set a little context for listeners that don’t know too much about you yet, can you spend 45 seconds giving us a little overview of all of the wonderful things that you’ve done in your career?

Adam Fishman: Sure. I’m setting my timer for 45 seconds.

Lenny: And, start.

Adam Fishman: So I’ve been the Chief Product Officer and VP of Growth and Product at a bunch of different companies Imperfect Foods, Patreon, Lyft, the precursor to Lyft which was Zimride to name a few. Now, I do three things primarily, I’m an EIR at Reforge and a program partner, which means I create courses. I run an advisory practice on growth and product strategy, which keeps me pretty busy, and then I recently started a newsletter which was pretty much inspired by your work in this area over the last several years. Those are the three pillars of my life these days, my professional life at least.

Lenny: Nailed it. Wow, that was very contained and clear. Let’s plug the newsletter real quick. What’s the URL? Is it fishmanafnewsletter.com?

Adam Fishman: It is fishmanafnewsletter.com. I am blessed with great initials that allow me to have that name for a newsletter.

Lenny: It’s not obvious. Adam Fishman AF. There you go. That’s the acronym. And then in terms of the advising, just to set this expectation, are you looking for more clients or are you capped out? How should people think about that as they listen?

Adam Fishman: Well, I’m pretty busy, but it is a bit of a revolving door, so there’s always some pipeline. So even if I can’t work with folks right now, sometimes it makes sense for me to work with them a few months down the road. So always open to new interest and learning about new companies.

Lenny: All right, great. We’ll share how to contact you at the end of this and it will be in the show notes.

Adam Fishman: Awesome.

Lenny: One question I wanted to ask off the bat is, Lyft, you were there super early. I imagine it was an incredibly wild ride. I’m curious, what’s the most tangible memory you have of your time at Lyft?

Adam Fishman: I have a ton of memories from the almost three years that I was there, but I think the biggest one, and probably the most tactile or memorable thing was when we launched Lyft, when we were bringing it out of private beta, we had this press event at the office, which is in Soma, and it had these doors, these big huge garage style doors. And so we opened them up and we actually drove a car into the office with a pink mustache on the front of it, and then a bunch of drivers piled out of it and met the press members and were high fiving people and stuff like that. And then we also served a giant pink mustache cake at this event. So of all of the things there, that one sticks in my head the most.

Lenny: I love that. I hope there was no hair in this mustache cake.

Adam Fishman: No, no, there was not. It was delicious.

Lenny: Okay, awesome. Another question I always have for folks that worked at Lyft or at Uber is how they feel about Super Pumped and what it is like watching that, if you’ve seen it, what it’s like watching the story of Uber and especially working for Lyft.

Adam Fishman: Yeah, I have seen it. I actually read the book first. I’ve been a pretty big fan of Mike Isaac, who’s the New York Times reporter who wrote it. So I’ve been a big fan of his reporting for a long time. I connected with him a bit while he was writing the book, and I would say, there were parts of it that were painful. It was like renavigating, relitigating a history that I had lived through already. And so much of that story was stuff that I had experienced pretty regularly while I was at Lyft battling against Uber.

So one part of me was like, “I remember that. God, that was hard.” Another part of me was happy to see that all of the things were out in the open finally, things that were hard to talk about about competitive practices and stuff like that and just shady things. And some part of me was happy that it was out there. And then one other thing separately, so I actually was interviewing with Joseph Gordon-Levitt to be an advisor with his company HitRecord while he was filming Super Bumped.

And we had this conversation over Zoom when he was on break in between scenes of filming the show. And for those who don’t know, he’s the guy that plays Travis Kalanick, the CEO and founder of Uber. So he did this interview with me and he was in his trailer on set, fully decked out as TK in his look with his hair slicked back. And it was really funny and also cool to see him in this context. And he is probably the polar opposite from Travis Kalanick. Obviously they’re both super successful, but JGL is a really down to earth, nice, very family-oriented calm guy. So anyways, this is a funny story of my time meeting and interviewing with him.

Lenny: That is amazing. Did you slip in a couple Lyft facts to help Lyft look a little happier and better?

Adam Fishman: I did. We talked a bit about that journey and I asked him some questions about how he prepared for the role and stuff like that. And so yeah, it was pretty fun. We swapped some stories and stuff. So yeah, it was neat.

Lenny: Fun fact, my mom wanted me to dress like Joseph Gordon-Levitt and I was like, “I should look like this guy. Wear some vests. This guy’s looking good. Looks like you a little bit.”

Adam Fishman: I see that. I do see that. That’s awesome. Way to go, mom.

Lenny: Yeah. Then I’ll follow her advice. Maybe I should have.

Adam Fishman: It didn’t work out so well.

Lenny: Yeah. Okay. So transitioning to the meat of our chat, there’s three things I wanted to spend our time chatting about. One is your growth competency model, which essentially is this post you wrote recently that tells founders how to hire and how to evaluate growth people. Two, I want to chat about onboarding flows. You have a lot of really interesting experience optimizing onboarding flows and the impact that’s had. And then three is how to choose a company to work out. You’ve chosen a lot of really interesting companies and you have some cool insights around how to think about that. Does that sound good?

Adam Fishman: Yeah, it sounds great. I’ve also chosen some bad companies in my time too, so we can talk about the good, the bad and the ugly.

Lenny: Okay, excited to hear about that. So first we talked about this briefly. You’ve started to do a lot more writing. You have this newsletter at fishmanafnewsletter.com, and you recently wrote this really epic piece called the Growth Competency Model, which essentially lays out what to look for in a growth leader, how to hire, how to evaluate, what to concentrate skills on? Things like that. First question, just what made you feel like you had to write this? What mistakes have you found founders make when hiring and evaluating growth leaders?

Adam Fishman: Yeah, so first I’m going to put up my new background here, which is my growth competency model background. For those watching on YouTube, I have a funny graphic in the background for this. So I guess the reason that I wrote this, there were a few reasons that I wrote it. One is it really felt necessary to write it. And at first it’s, I don’t think I’ve ever come across this type of canonical reference before around how to hire and plan for growth. So that’s number one. I didn’t think it existed. It needed to exist.

Two, as an advisor and someone who has held the head of growth role many times, I get asked this question a lot. I get asked all the time about how do you hire growth people? And it’s usually something like, “Hey, how do we find you but 10 years earlier in your career?” And it feels like that question is missing the first principles approach to hiring a growth person. And if you’re doing that, you’re just pattern matching to me. And I may not be the best person, right, or somebody who looks like me may not be the best person. So I think we’re missing that.

And then third, one of the programs that I’m currently creating is around growth leadership. And so I’ve been thinking a lot about what it takes to be an exceptional growth leader, how you hire other people onto your team and create balanced teams. And this is going to be a really important component of that program. So it was just really top of mind. So yeah, that’s why I wrote it.

Lenny: Let me ask one quick question and I think you were about to start answering one mistakes founders make, but I guess it’s less of a question. I know this was built on another model for product management, which is really awesome. And I love that there’s this growing fountain of career ladders, competencies per function. And so I don’t know if there’s been one that’s really great for design and engineering, but I love that this is happening. And so first of all, I just want to say I appreciate that you put in the time to think this through.

Adam Fishman: Cool. Thank you. Yeah, and I do think we need more of these. I think we need one for marketers, I think we need one for engineers, designers, research probably, there’s probably a bunch of functions that could benefit from some canonicalized resource around this stuff. So yeah, some myths and mistakes that I think founders made and that I’ve made. I’ve definitely lived through some mistakes. A few experiences where I was hired into a company where the founder had really messed up expectations of what a growth person should be doing, what I should be doing. And I wanted to set the record straight for founders because they are the folks who hire for this and other leaders.

So one example that comes to mind is, I did a very brief stint at a company called Wyzant, in between Lyft and Patreon. And the founders of that company, so Wyzant was a tutoring marketplace. It was acquired by a company not too long ago, so it’s now part of a bigger learning company. And the founders of that company we’re looking for what I would call a silver bullet strategy to their growth challenges. And what they really needed, and I was naive and didn’t think about asking these questions or about evaluating this properly, what they really needed was to create a strategy to add on new growth loops and a system for how to execute against that strategy.

Adam Fishman: If we had talked about that as part of evaluating each other, as part of them evaluating me, it would’ve given me a lot of confidence that it was the right hire to make. But the problem was they didn’t approach it that way. They didn’t ask me those questions and I was too naive to recognize that, “Hey, they’re not actually evaluating this with the competencies that you would expect for a growth leader.” Executing a growth strategy takes time and patience, and they didn’t really have it. And overall it ended rather unsuccessfully. I helped them build this office in San Francisco, hired a bunch of folks, we actually closed down the office. I had to lay off a bunch of the people that I’d hired, including myself, which wasn’t particularly fun. And I think all of it comes back to that they didn’t have a really strong set of criteria on what it meant to hire a great growth person. And so if I can help even just a little bit with founders making that decision better, it’ll lead to fewer mismatches I think in the hiring process.

Lenny: Awesome. Let’s get into it. What are the components of this model? And you can put it back up again for folks to follow along in the background.

Adam Fishman: It’s coming back.

Lenny: It’s like a TikTok.

Adam Fishman: The whole thing looks like a big circle and there’s four wedges in that circle, four equal parts. And I think that answer of what are the components, what should people look for, really, I’ll give the PM answer, which is it depends. And what does it depend on? It depends on the state of the team and where the skill gaps are. So the goal of the competency model is not to find a unicorn human being that is an 11 out of 10 on every one of these things, because frankly, that person doesn’t exist. I am not an 11 out of 10 on these skills and I have been a growth executive at many companies. I consider myself to be pretty good at the job. The goal is to create a well-rounded team so that you’re hiring and balancing skills across your team and that you don’t have any gaps in your portfolio.

And so when you think about it, there are four main components to the growth competency model. And the four big components or buckets are growth execution, customer knowledge, growth strategy, and then the last one is communication and influence. And each of those has three really specific skills. And so to give an example, let’s break down growth execution for example, which is one of the very first ones that you should be good at if you’re a growth practitioner. Within this competency grouping, there’s three individual competencies that are channel fluency, experimentation, and what I’d call productizing learnings. And so you can evaluate and ask questions to understand how good people are at these different things and what their experience has been with them.

So in productizing learnings for example, one of the key things that a growth person has to do is generate hypotheses, learn from those hypotheses and then translate that into changes that they’re making in the product. And you want to find somebody who has a track record of at least understanding how to take something they have learned that might be an experiment or something that’s very NVP and turn that into something that has hooks into different areas of the product. And so that’s a critical skill to evaluate. And one of an example, the overall set of competencies.

Lenny: To throw in a question real quick, is one way to use this model, coming back to your Wyzant example where there’s of course misalignment between you and the founder to sit down and look at this circle here and be like, “Here’s where I’m strong, here’s where maybe we need to hire someone to take over.”

Adam Fishman: Yeah, absolutely. You can almost use it as a reverse interviewing characteristic and say, “What are the competencies you, founder, CEO, care about? What’s really important to you for the first person in this role? Or the expectations that you have of what I will bring to the table.” And then you can be really candid about what you’re good at and what you’re not good at, where you’re developing. So yeah, I agree with that for sure.

Lenny: Awesome. I know this also plays into evaluating your performance and it could be like, “Hey Adam, here’s the three things that we want to focus on in the next cycle.”

Adam Fishman: For sure. Yeah. It’s really a good foundational framework for being really concrete and specific in the feedback that you provide someone. So rather than saying, “Adam, you really need to be more strategic.” Everybody’s heard that at some point and it’s like, “Well, what do you mean?” You can say, “Hey, we need to work on the area of growth strategy and that means I need to see better modeling of loops out of you, better understanding communication of what those loops are.” And you can give really concrete feedback.

Lenny: Awesome. So we’ve talked about growth execution, What’s next?

Adam Fishman: The next one is what I would call customer knowledge. And within customer knowledge there’s a set of things and really this is about data fluency and instrumentation, understanding user psychology, which is a big one, and then this idea of being able to experiment and learn over time and how you develop your narrative and your creative approach to talking to customers. I love user psychology and it’s one of the things that I think attracted me to growth and to product. I studied consumer psychology when I was in college and I’m just probably would’ve been a psychologist if not for a growth practitioner, which is a weird other approach I could have taken in my career. But-

Lenny: It’s not too late to pivot.

Adam Fishman: … Second career. Yeah, actually, announcing today I’m pivoting the newsletter to just talk about therapy and psychology.

Lenny: Yes. This is going to be the title of the podcast.

Adam Fishman: Awesome. So like user psychology, I think one of the things that people don’t easily understand is that most people come to your product with an emotional frame and a lot of people want to appeal to their logical brain right away. And the reality is, don’t do that. And so you have to understand the mindset that people are in. How low are their lows? How high are their highs? Why are they seeking out your product? And it often, as I mentioned, stems from some emotional challenge that they’re having or something that they’re seeking. And it’s not because your product is the best chat bot or because it gives the best answers. There’s a different thing that they’re trying to solve. And only when you address that can you move on to those other things. So that’s the second competency is, customer knowledge.

Lenny: It reminds me of something I mentioned on some podcast recently, this tweet that one of the Collison brothers tweeted about how user research is often misunderstood in that people think you do user research and that informs what you build. And instead the way you think about it is user research informs your model of your customer and that model informs what you build.

Adam Fishman: Exactly.

Lenny: And the more user research you do, the more your model evolves to help you understand the customer. And that’s been really helpful for me because I never thought of it that way.

Adam Fishman: Yeah. I think that’s a great example. Seeking the solution in a customer interview is never going to work, right? You seek to understand and then you take that away and you can think through what the model should look like and how things should change as a result. Yeah. That’s great. I can cover the third and fourth competency-

Lenny: That’s good.

Adam Fishman: … and I’ll try to be a little more brief on that.

Lenny: No, no. It’s good.

Adam Fishman: The third competency is growth strategy. And now the third and fourth competencies I would say are a bit more advanced topics. And again, remember when I said people index higher or lower on these as they go across their career, I would expect a more junior growth person to not necessarily be a 10 out of 10 on strategy and communication. These are things that you really have to work at a long time. They tend to be softer skills in a lot of cases and you learn best by either getting it very right or getting it very wrong. And so you’ve got to put in the time to develop these. But in growth strategy, there’s three. The first one is growth loop modeling. So really understanding how you grow and where you should be spending your time. What acquires users? What retains them? What monetizes them?

The second one is capital allocation and forecasting. This is basically where are you deploying either your money, your people, how are you managing the portfolio and how are you projecting that out into the future? And that’s a really hard one. You have to become best buddies with your finance friends in order to do that. And so anyways, that’s capital allocation and forecasting. And then the third one is prioritization and road mapping. So you have to be able to sequence the work much like in building a product, right? Building your growth strategy, you have to sequence it. That sequence has to make sense based on your growth models. You have to have the capital or the people to allocate to that stuff. And you have to be able to build a series of hypotheses in a series of solutions to test against those hypotheses so that you can learn and then productize to those learnings.

And there’s a lot of ways to test this stuff. Situational, behavioral, interviewing, I talk a lot about this in my post on hiring growth. There’s like very specific questions you can ask to understand what people have done or what they might do in different situations. There’s case studies and things like that. So that’s the third one. And then the fourth one is communication and influence.

And I would say, I think you probably know this as a PM, influence is one of the biggest and hardest skills to develop. It’s no different in a growth practitioner and in some cases it can even be harder because sometimes people come in with a preconceived notion of what growth is and isn’t and you have to change their mind. And so within communication and influence, there’s strategic communication. So how do a series of experiments and a series of things that you’re trying, fit into the overall picture of a bigger bet that you’re taking?

How do you lead a team? So team leadership is a big part of communication and influence. And then how do you manage stakeholders? And this is hard in growth because often growth can be viewed as at odds with really thoughtful and quality craftsmanship and product building, but it’s not. Those things go hand in hand. And so you really have to win people over on what it means to do growth. And I would say, this is the pinnacle, right? This is the hardest one. It’s a lifelong journey. It relies very extensively on understanding people and who you’re talking to. And those people can be very different from company to company and the currency that they trade in can be really different. And so this one is one where you have to go back to square one and relearn who the people are that you’re working with every time you step into a new role or a new company or get a new leader or something like that. So it can be really challenging and it’s never done.

Lenny: That component of the competency models, we’re the PM of the growth PM role feels like if you were to do these Venn diagram of the two roles, feels like that’s a big part of the overlap.

Adam Fishman: Yep, absolutely. There’s a lot of overlap between exceptional product managers and exceptional growth practitioners. I think sometimes they just use the skills in different ways. So you need to be great at product strategy to be a product leader, you need to be great at growth strategy to be a growth leader. Just what those things look like can be different between the two. But they’re both required skills, required competencies to be exceptional at the role.

Lenny: So just to rehash, the four categories are communication influence, growth execution, customer knowledge and growth strategy. You mentioned earlier that people often come to you and they’re like, “How do we find another Adam?” And your feedback is one, how do you know that’s exactly what you need? And then two, find someone that’s up and coming more because it’s so hard to find folks like you that are actually ready to take on a head of growth role.

Adam Fishman: Yeah.

Lenny: So a question for you is, one is, do you recommend founders focus on finding someone that’s more up and coming and fast learning with a high trajectory? And if so, which of these components would you suggest they look for most?

Adam Fishman: One of the challenges of hiring a senior person is that they’re all off writing newsletters and making podcast.

Lenny: Right.

Adam Fishman: Not that we know anybody who does that or anything, but-

Lenny: No. That’s bullshit. What is that?

Adam Fishman: Yeah. So I don’t want to right now go back and work at a company again. I’m enjoying what I’m doing and so it’s hard to get me, right? But also you don’t want me, I think, when you’re doing this for the first time. So I think the key there is smart and driven people for sure. Age and youth is a bit relative I’d say. So I would think about hiring somebody who you might say is less experienced in growth, but they could be very senior in another aspect of their career. You can also benefit from hiring somebody internally who wants to branch out into growth. And one of the benefits that you get from that is a lot of time they have one of those competencies really nailed already. Could be like customer knowledge. They might understand your customer base super well because they’re already inside the company.

So if you’re going to hire a junior person, the key is, how do you help them learn? And I think if you don’t know what you’re doing as the founder or the leader, it’s hard. You’re not going to be able to help them yourself. So you’ve got to be willing to invest in advisors like me, outside education, mentorship, coaching, otherwise, what’s going to happen is that very driven, hungry and enthusiastic person is going to run through a lot of brick walls, which is great, except they’re going to miss the fact that the door was standing right next to the wall that they just ran through and you’re going to end up with a lot of bricks on the ground.

Lenny: Excellent metaphor.

Adam Fishman: Yeah, thank you. And so I have some examples of both hiring people and moving people over in my career. So I think tangible examples are really helpful here. So when I was at Lyft, I had the privilege of hiring that young, smart and driven person a bunch of times, but one of the people who comes to mind is a guy named Ben Lauzier. You should have him on the podcast at some point. He’s French, he’s very nice to listen to you. He was most recently a VP of product at Thumbtack, but he was definitely not that when I hired him, he was a jack of all trades marketer working at a corporate catering startup when I hired him at Lyft. And he had nailed most of the growth execution and the customer knowledge competencies.

Adam Fishman: One was, he was an avid Lyft user himself, so he really understood the product really well. And also, he was just very thoughtful about how he executed, how he experimented. He had done a lot of it and he was very skilled at pulling them off in a very small environment because he had just had to be. And those are the two most important competencies when you’re bringing in a younger, earlier stage person because teaching somebody how to execute is not that fun, right? That’s a hard skill. The ability to execute is something like executive function skills and things like that. If you haven’t developed those by the time you are an adult, I don’t know that I’m going to be able to teach you and I’m certainly probably not the right person to teach you. You should definitely get some outside assistance with that. And so I like to get those types of people that have those things if I’m hiring that generally inexperienced growth practitioner.

Lenny: And the two things you said are customer knowledge and execution. Is that the two you said?

Adam Fishman: Yes. Customer knowledge and growth execution. And so let me tell you an execution story about Ben really quick. This comes also down to work ethic too. So we interviewed Ben and it was a long day of interviews in a tiny glass conference room and Lyft was, I don’t know, 30 people or something at the time. At one of the interview breaks, Ben had come over and he didn’t have his computer and anything like that. And so he was ducking out of work to do the interview. And he actually came out of the office and he’s like, “Hey, does anybody have a computer that I can borrow?” And so we gave him this old crappy Chromebook and I was like, “Why do you need a computer?” And he’s like, “I have to go edit this file and do this thing and check something in at work and deploy this thing or whatever.”

And I’m like, “Wow, this is a guy that really knows how to get stuff done and is so much so that he’s pausing his interview process so that he could go get a thing done for his company that he’s actively trying to leave, but he’s got this work ethic and this execution.” And that really stuck with me. And he probably would remember this story if we brought it up. So the time he borrowed a crappy Chromebook laptop to do work at the job that he was trying to leave.

Lenny: What are the chances that was staged?

Adam Fishman: He seemed very innocent. So I think not staged.

Lenny: Okay, great.

Adam Fishman: But I could be wrong. But now everyone that interviews that is going to ask to borrow a laptop and-

Lenny: That’s right.

Adam Fishman: … check in some work.

Lenny: The phone call.

Adam Fishman: Yeah.

Lenny: “Adam, I need to fix something.”

Adam Fishman: That’s right. So that’s Ben. And then on the other side, and I’ll cover this one really quickly, and the other side of moving somebody over internally, I had equally great success with that. So there was another person named Sean at Patreon who was a marketer, again, a jack of all trades marketer. And I think I have a propensity and a bias towards folks like that because that’s one of the ways that I started my career was in marketing. But anyways, I moved him over from marketing to being a growth PM, an entry level growth PM.

And he had a ton of the execution skills, ability to prioritize really well and customer knowledge skills as well, more so on the customer side because he was an internal transfer, so he really knew our customers. He’d spent tons of time talking to people, studying data and things like that. And he had really great fluency with data and a drive to continue improving his ability to access and pull out insights and information. And so he turned out to be really great, but just a very different profile of a person than Ben was. And here’s an internal hire versus an external hire.

So you can have success with both, but I think you really have to make sure that there’s some foundational things that are in place like that ability to get customer knowledge and execute.

Lenny: If a founder is listening and trying to decide or hiring a head of growth or a new growth person, would you push them one way or the other, internal hire versus finding someone up and coming and smart?

Adam Fishman: I tend to skew more towards internal hire to be perfectly honest, because I believe in creating opportunity inside a company. I think it’s not done often enough. And I also believe that helping people transition into new roles is a way to get more people into the practice. And one of the ways that can happen is if you take a chance on somebody who has demonstrated a good track record in some other aspect of your business. So I tend to recommend internal. I think you have faster time to results. I think you know what you’re getting better and in much less likelihood of making the wrong hire there. So I bias towards internal hires.

Lenny: Awesome. And I think partly, I feel that too because there’s so much content and training for growth these days that somebody has that background in your company and is already motivated and excited and then can just learn, go to Reforge course, read certain newsletters, feels like it’s a lot easier to ramp up. Except, I always feel like if you need someone for SEO or paid growth, that’s a hard thing to learn. What’s your take there?

Adam Fishman: I would bucket that type of person into a specialist. And one of the archetypes that I talk about is this idea of the painter versus the architect versus the surgeon. And the surgeon is your precision person. I don’t actually recommend hiring that as your first hire, but when you are onto something and you really need expertise and you don’t have that expertise internally, yes, I think hiring externally is the right thing to do at that point because those are really specific skills that some people have taken years to learn. And I can’t just teach someone SEO over the course of a weekend and expect that they’re really going to get it. In those cases, I think hiring that specialist or that surgeon is the right approach, once you’ve got some of the foundational stuff in place.

Lenny: Awesome. Great. Yeah, it feels like there’s still a lot of dark art in those two specialties that take years of experience.

Lenny: This is a good time to segue to our second topic, which is onboarding. I know you’re a big proponent of spending time on onboarding, optimizing onboarding. How have you found onboarding to be as a lever for growth and just what gets you excited about investing in onboarding?

Adam Fishman: I love onboarding. I probably do at least an onboarding project to at least one with every company that I’ve worked for and a lot that I advise. The first thing I would say is, onboarding is the only part of your product experience that a hundred percent of people are ever going to touch. Good luck getting a hundred percent feature adoption of anything else in your product right? But onboarding is the thing that you have to go through in order to use the product. It’s also the first opportunity that you have as a company to deliver on the promise that you made out in the marketplace.

So I like to think of 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. So this is the first chance that a customer has to be really excited or really disappointed in what they thought they were getting. So don’t mess that up.

And the third thing I would say is it’s also probably the most motivated that someone is going to be about your product since they’re typically starting their onboarding journey with you at a time where they’re like, “I need this thing really badly that you’re selling.” And so they’re really motivated, right? And so it’s an opportunity for you to put some friction in place and learn a lot about them because they will knock down doors to get to your product. So that’s why I think it’s a super powerful lever for growth. And we worked on this extensively at Lyft, at Patreon, Wyzant, Imperfect Foods just released some onboarding improvements that we had created when I was there, which was nice to see that finally come to light. So yeah, I’ve done this pretty much everywhere at some point.

Lenny: What impact have you seen from working on onboarding to give people a sense of like, “Wow, this is what I can get if I put some time here.”

Adam Fishman: Yeah. One of the things that onboarding really drives is habit formation with the product, which leads to retention. And so you should expect to improve your overall cohort retention curves by focusing on the onboarding and activation experience. I have seen companies shift their curve outward by 10, 15, 20 percentage points from making those changes, especially when you consider that churn is most likely to happen in the very earliest usage of the product. If you can get people past that hump, it’s a really invaluable part of the product to work on.

So I’ll give you a really concrete example. At Patreon, one of the places we worked on onboarding really extensively and the onboarding experience was one of the teams that we had on growth at Patreon. We did a lot of experimentation around the earliest, what we would call product led sales now, when do you connect a human being with a creator and the onboarding experience and what is that impact and how do you connect them with the right person or with the right creator when there are tens of thousands going through that onboarding journey every week?

What we realized through a lot of experimentation was the idea of connecting someone with a human being the right person at the right time would improve the first month of revenue or the second month of revenue that a creator made on the platform by 25%. Why that mattered is because the second month that you processed payments on the platform was a key input into your LTV on the platform. So by improving a creator’s first and second month revenue by 25%, we were then able to improve their overall value on Patreon by an equivalent amount, which is pretty massive. Moving anything by 25% is really impressive.

And so that was human intervention, and then we actually started to productize the stuff that the humans were doing. And so what is not scalable when you’re using people becomes very scalable if you can replicate components of that with technology. And so that was the next phase, so we get back to that growth execution thing that I talked about and productizing learnings. That is an example of how you go from, we’ve learned some things by humans that have made a 25% impact to now we’re building these into the product. And so that’s a really good example I think, of Patreon and one of the impacts that we had on creator, earnings, retention and their overall success on the platform.

Lenny: That’s an amazing example, in case it’s useful to a person working on the onboarding. Can you share any more about what you actually did there? You create some algorithm of this type of person, we’ll connect them to a person and then you productize it. Is there anything more you could share there that might be useful to folks?

Adam Fishman: Gosh, we did so much. So I’ll try to pull out a couple of example. So one of the things that we did, and again, I spoke to the fact that people are really motivated in your onboarding experience, one of the first things we did was we tried to identify better who a creator was in the onboarding experience. And who they were meant how big is their audience on a bunch of the channels where they managed communities, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Discord, YouTube, et cetera. And then how engaged was that audience? It’s one thing if you make crazy cat videos on YouTube and you have a million subscribers, it’s another thing if every time you publish a video, all million of those people watch it, comment on it, share it, et cetera.

And so we would ask creators to connect various accounts to Patreon, maybe through authoring with YouTube or Spotify or Instagram or Facebook or something like that, Twitter, and then we would pull in the data into our backend and identify people who had large followings and also heavily engaged followings, based on a set of criteria per channel. And again, this was not just like me inventing this. We had a data scientist team that we worked very closely with to figure out what was important and what wasn’t in this model. And then if you were one of those people that had a high propensity for success, high potential creators, we would siphon them off from the regular self-guided onboarding and basically land them in the lap of a human being who could engage with them, reach out, get them even more excited and start talking to them about the best things to do.

And then the productization of that, the best things to do turned out to be things like one of our product principles, which became opinionated defaults, which is basically making it hard to do the wrong thing when you’re setting up your Patreon page and easy to do the right thing but not eliminating choice.

So the creator could still make the choice to do the wrong thing. They could still set up a single tier when we knew that a three-tiered pricing model actually would work better for them, or they could choose to set up 40 tiers when we knew that the sweet spot was three to five or perhaps make their lowest price tier a dollar instead of what we recommended, which was like three or $5 entry points. So they could do all that stuff, but we made it difficult for them to do it. We put more friction in place when they were trying to change some of those defaults because we had learned across a universe of creators, hundreds of thousands of people what worked best.

Adam Fishman: And so putting in those guardrails and those default things was a huge lever for us to drive the behavior that we wanted. And again, we learned that from human intervention with the right types of creators, then detecting those people and putting in the guardrails in the product themselves and making those recommendations inside the product experience. And they were pricing tier structure, how you actually write your page, all of that stuff.

Lenny: Such a great example. It reminds me we had exactly the same situation at Airbnb that you just made me think about. We called it smart defaults. What was your term? Opinionated defaults?

Adam Fishman: Opinionated defaults. Yeah.

Lenny: Yeah, I like that. So at Airbnb we had a bunch of calendar settings when a host signs up, on the host side is where I spent a lot of my time, we had instant book, which is basically you sign up as a host and people can book you instantly. That became the default for Airbnb. And so to make that successful, hosts had to have their calendar be accurate from the beginning. And so what we got to eventually, is we tried to figure out, are you a professional host that knows what you’re doing? Are you a mom and pop that’s just trying this out? And then based on that, either block your entire calendar, keep it all open, or somewhere in between.

And it’s interesting that it connects to your point about, and I was going to come back to this that, a lot of people think of onboarding as a conversion opportunity and it definitely is. But to your point, even more interestingly, it’s a retention opportunity because in the Airbnb case, hosts sign up, they get booked for a day, they don’t want to host, they’re like, “Shit, what the hell’s going on here? I’m out.”

Adam Fishman: Yeah.

Lenny: And so, I wanted to ask you, how should folks think about onboarding conversion versus retention, and why is it so powerful for retention?

Adam Fishman: I actually think if you’re doing it right, sometimes conversion should actually decrease a little bit. So you might actually have fewer people getting all the way through successfully, but I think that’s okay because a lot of those people were probably not the right people for your product, which means they wouldn’t have been engaged customers, they probably would have churned. So just by the nature of actually weeding out some people, you’re going to improve retention because the people who are going through are the people who are much more highly qualified. And so I think that’s also why onboarding is so challenging because you have to figure out what that sweet spot is, right?

You could actually reduce conversion to a point where it’s not offset by improvements in retention and you’d be doing the wrong thing. So when you’re experimenting, you have to look at these push and pull metrics of these opposing metrics. But overall, I find that the biggest impact that you’ll have is on retaining users because you are trying to connect them to the value that your product offers and form a habit. And if you form that habit early on, they’re going to stick around because they’re going to get it, they’re going to get the benefit of the product, and they’re going to be excited to stay and then tell more people about it. So that’s why I think it’s a much bigger impact on retention than conversion.

Lenny: Obviously retention is a longer tail metric and conversion is immediate.

Adam Fishman: Yeah.

Lenny: Do you have any tips for folks that are like, “Oh my God, how do I know if this conversion hit is worth retention increasing potentially?”

Adam Fishman: Yeah. I think the answer is not wait 90 days to find out, right? Nobody has that time. And so what I tend to do is look at proxy metrics. So there are proxies for things like 90 day retention. As an example at Patreon, one of our proxies around the eventual success of a creator was how quickly they would reach certain dollar thresholds once they launched. And so your velocity to get to your first patron, your first a hundred dollars processed on the platform and that thing had a lot to do with how big and successful you would be, and therefore how well you would retain.

And so we looked at very early signals to understand and evaluate how good someone was going to be. We also did a lot of qualitative screening in the beginning. So as people went through, we would take samplings of creators who were onboarding and signing up and launching their pages, and we would actually look at who the creator was and what they were doing. And then we would be able to run it through our model to say, “It looks like we’re getting a lot of the right people going through and doing the right behaviors, therefore, we’re very confident that they’re going to retain better and do the right things.” So yeah, proxy metrics are the key there.

Lenny: Awesome. So part of this is find this leading indicator proxy metric, and then to your point, maybe build a little bit of a heuristic that’s like, okay, this is qualitatively looking like it’s doing the right things to our new users.

Adam Fishman: Yep.

Lenny: Maybe our last question on onboarding is, at Airbnb and I imagine many companies, there’s this constant desire to, “Let’s just redo this whole thing. Let’s just redesign it. Let’s start again.” And my question to you is just, how much is too much on redoing, rethinking, onboarding, optimizing, micro-optimizing? Any answers there?

Adam Fishman: Yeah. I would say first, I very strongly dislike the idea of redesigning something for redesigning sake. So I think that it is true that you should spend a lot of time on onboarding, and you should regularly revisit it as you learn new things about your users. So even at Patreon, we would work on onboarding and then we take a beat, we’d let it go for a while, improved, and then as we learn new things, we would find ways to fold those back into onboarding. So I find that it’s acceptable to revisit when you are learning net new principles about your customers or something new about your growth model where onboarding can directly influence.

So as we learned at Patreon what the right tier construction was, or the right way to talk about your Patreon page or the right way to message it in the beginning, we would go back and say, “How do we build this newfound knowledge into an experience that sets someone up for success?” But if we weren’t gaining new insights, we weren’t just tweaking the onboarding experience and trying to tune it in a very micro way, because the reality is, that doesn’t really move the needle that often, especially once you’ve got it in a pretty good foundational place. And only when you discover something really fundamentally net new, will it have an outsized impact on retention or the success of early users. So don’t just redesign for redesign sake, make sure there’s a new hard earned insight that you’ve got before you do it.

Lenny: Do you think at scale companies, I don’t know, maybe after hundreds of people, they should have a team, like an onboarding optimization team? I find that often is true. And I guess, do you think that makes sense?

Adam Fishman: Yeah. I think it’s very helpful. And the reason I think it’s helpful is because I do think it’s easy to walk away from onboarding because there’s so many other things to work on and to lose sight of the fact this is such a critical part of the experience. And I don’t know how many times I’ve come into a company and they’re like, “Yeah, we built that a long time ago and we’ve never looked at it again. It’s been a few years, but we’re really having a real problem with retention and people dropping off in the first seven days.” And I’m like, “Yeah, I think it’s time we take another look at the onboarding experience. Products change quite a bit. Maybe people are getting something that’s different than they expect, or maybe we know a lot more that we can use to influence decisions that they make.”

So I do think it is beneficial to have that team, or at least a team, that part of their job is the activation experience and therefore some part of their roadmap is working on onboarding and then other aspects of activation. So it may not be what they work on 12 months out of the year, but maybe for a quarter or two in a given year.

Lenny: Cool. And there’s a LinkedIn post you wrote with a bunch of examples of onboarding work you’ve done. So we’re going to include them in the show notes for folks that are-

Adam Fishman: Nice.

Lenny: … hoping for more examples. Yeah. Okay. Third topic, final topic is around company selection and evaluating where to work. And you have this really cool framework that I think you call PMF for candidates. Can you talk about what that is and then we’ll get into it a little bit?

Adam Fishman: Yeah. I somehow stumbled on that name and it just made sense because of the acronym. But I think I was really motivated to revisit this because as we know in tech there’s been a ton of layoffs and very public layoffs because of the economy, the state of funding, things like that. And I don’t think we’re done yet. I think we’re pretty far from being done. But it’s really important, and I’ve been burned by this a few times, to put some power back in the hands of the people who are actually seeking the jobs to understand what are some criteria that are important and these are the criteria that are important to me that help you make decisions about which company I should join, assuming they’ll have me. And so the PMF acronym, and we’re all familiar with product-market fit, right?

So in a way it’s both the product-market fit for as a candidate with the company, but then also PMF stands for people, mission and financials. And these are my three criteria. They may not be yours, Lenny, or they might not be the average person on the street, but the point is that you should have a set of criteria that you are unapologetically rigorous around and you should learn how to evaluate companies against that set of criteria. First, I guess I’ll tell you what by people, mission and financials.

So people are these folks that I am going to enjoy working with everyday that I’m going to be able to have hard conversations with, that I’m going to be able to disagree with and work through those disagreements and feel better on the other side of that productive disagreement, for example, and get to resolutions. What do I think about my peer set, the leaders, the people below me, if that’s the role I’m stepping into, et cetera. So that’s the people dimension.

Mission, which is critically important for me, is that if I join a company and I do my job, which often involves growing that company really big, getting a lot of customers, generating a lot of demand and retention and stuff, I want to make sure that a lot of people have a better outcome in life because of that company’s existence. And I don’t just mean employees and founders having a good financial outcome, which I think is important. But I also mean in the case of creators on Patreon, we were building a new way for creators to make money, which they could then use to hire people, create more jobs, make better content, and live their life in a sustainable way so that they weren’t a starving artist and they weren’t living paycheck to paycheck. So that’s really important, the mission aspect, that’s got to exist.

And then the third one is, and I think really important now is this idea of financials or fiscal discipline. You’ve got a lot of companies who raised boatloads of money or did financial planning during the peak of the pandemic and assumed that their business was going to continue operating at the pace that it was operating forever. A lot of those companies are running out of money, they’ve seen a hit to demand and they’ve had to lay people off as a result or make really big strategic swings.

There are plenty of companies that you’re not really hearing about that were more conservative in their approach, that understood and were able to look into the future and be really responsible with their money. And those people are not laying off employees. And so they’re not all over LinkedIn talking about it because they’re not laying people off. There’s no hashtag layoff for them. So that’s what by financials. And so that’s the PMF framework and evaluating across those dimensions is super important. I’ve done it two times in the last 10 to 15 years, and I’ve done it poorly, two times in the last 15 years. And Lyft and Patreon are two times where I’ve done it really well. Wyzant and Imperfect Foods are two times where I personally don’t think I’ve done a good enough job evaluating.

Any time where I’ve shortcutted my criteria, where I’ve settled for two out of three, or thought one was great, when really it wasn’t, has not ended well for me, for the company, it’s not that the company imploded, but I found myself out of a job or really frustrated and burned out or something like that. I already talked about the Wyzant example where we had to lay off a bunch of people because the founders expected something very different than what I expected to be able to deliver, that’s a big people miss. And Imperfect Foods was somewhat similar, amazing mission, really great financial strategy, fantastic CFO, but a lot of infighting at the C-suite. And it made it really difficult for us to plan and move the company forward together because people were at odds with each other all the time and not resolving disagreements productively. And when that happens, it’s hard to be a product or a growth leader because you bear the brunt of the angst that people have. So anyway, so those are a couple examples and some of the characteristics of PMF.

Lenny: In the case of Imperfect Foods, what could you have done to have avoided that issue and seen if it was true PMF?

Adam Fishman: I would have tried to observe the inner workings of the C-Suite a little bit more closely before I accepted an offer to join the company. I would’ve attended an executive meeting or joined them on an offsite. And I think, too often, candidates don’t feel like they can ask for those things. And it’s true, if you’re entering the C-suite, you’re going to ask for more stuff, you’re more experienced. But I also think that’s true of a junior employee. You can observe a team meeting, you can observe a product review and understand, you sign an NDA, you promise you won’t tell anybody about it, but observe what is happening and the dynamics of that room. Who’s doing the talking? How feedback is delivered, is it constructive? Is it antagonistic, et cetera. So you can observe and then you can also ask questions.

Adam Fishman: So questions that I like to ask are, tell me about the last strategic offsite that you had as a leadership team. Where do people disagree? What was one thing that they disagreed on and where did you end up on that point and how did you get there? And I actually ask them to tell me, it’s like a reverse behavioral interview question. I ask them to tell me how they navigated it, and I will ask the CEO that and really dig in on that particular set of questions. Those are the things that I do to evaluate the people dimension, which is one of the hardest, I will say. Financials and mission a little easier to evaluate, but people really require getting to know teams. So it is hard.

Lenny: That’s such a good question to ask. And your point is you can ask that even if you’re not a senior leader, you’re just ICPM joining a team. Is there anything else you think folks can do? So you said, join some offsites maybe, ask this question that you shared, any other tips for folks just to understand if the people are a good fit? Because it’s pretty wild. You’re going to spend so much time with these people and you meet them once in a half hour interview and then you have to decide if that’s your life for the next four or five, 10 years.

Adam Fishman: Well, one thing that I would say is, you’re an investor, right? You invest in a lot of companies, you’re an angel investor and you have the Airbnb syndicate and things like that. You evaluate companies when you’re making an investment decision, right? Because you’re investing a sum of money into that company. And so as a result, you do a lot of diligence on companies or read other people’s diligence, something like that. When you’re interviewing at a company, you are actually investing an even more scarce resource. You’re investing your time. There is no way to get more time. We’re all on a finite clock. You can always get more money. If you make a bad investment decision, “Okay, we lost there.” Provided you didn’t bankrupt yourself. Even if you did, you can climb out of bankruptcy. There are things that you can do, but time is fleeting.

And so one of the other things, and this is a thing that you do when you’re an investor, is you do back channel references, right? A company is going to back channel, you the employee, if they’re a good company, they’re going to talk, if you and I had worked together, Lenny, they might say, “Hey, let me get in touch with Lenny and see what it was really like working with Adam instead of what Adam tells me in the interview process.” And you’re going to do this as an investor in a company. “Let me talk to some people who passed on investing in this company. What did they see that I don’t see?”

And so in this case, you can talk to current or former employees who are not on the interview circuit. And because they are not on the interview circuit, their role as a salesperson in the process is greatly diminished. And they can, especially if they’re not at the company anymore, give you some pretty candid feedback on what it’s like to work there. So I’ll give you a really good example. That was super impressive. A PM who worked for me at Patreon, who you know Tal Raviv-

Lenny: Shout out Tal.

Adam Fishman: Shout out to Tal, who works on this product that we’re recording on right now-

Lenny: Shout out Riverside.

Adam Fishman: … when he interviewed at Patreon, he asked me for a list of people who I had managed in the past, and he contacted them to talk to them about what it was like to work for me. That was the first time that had actually ever happened in my career. And I was happy to share that with him. And it represented to me a great level of thoughtfulness and insight around him evaluating what he was getting himself into. And he was an ICPM and he asked that of me, who was a VP executive level person at the company.

So you can do that. And if a company says no or a person says no, I think that actually says a bit more about them than anything else. If they’re trying to withhold that from you. Because why would you? If I’m a great manager, I’m happy to have you talk to people who I’ve managed before, even people maybe who I had to let go or something like that, right? I’m confident that those were the right decisions and that those people ended up in a better place and they were taken care of with great care. I would actually make a reference of somebody who I have let go before just so that someone could get a real honest truth of what it was like working with me. So anyways, that’s my take on PMF and questions to ask.

Lenny: I imagine you have PMF with your current world, so maybe just to close, can you just remind folks what you’re up to now and where they can find you online and also how listeners can be useful to you?

Adam Fishman: First, thanks for having me on, Lenny. This was super fun. I love talking about this stuff and it was great chatting with you. So thanks again for having me.

Lenny: My pleasure.

Adam Fishman: There are a few ways to get in touch with me. You can follow me and communicate with me on Twitter. My Twitter handle is Fishman, F-I-S-H-M-A-N AF. And I do respond to messages provided that they’re polite. And you can also find me on LinkedIn. Those are the two platforms I live on most frequently, for better or for worse. And then I now have this newsletter, fishmanafnewsletter.com. And a lot of what we talked about today are things that I am publishing in written form on that newsletter and plan to continue publishing going forward. And again, it was inspired by the work that you’re doing, Lenny.

So how can people be helpful to me? I think certainly subscribing to the newsletter and joining that community, telling me about the things that are challenging to them so that I can find ways of finding how they meet up with my interests and translating them into written pieces. And then if you’re ever interested in exploring an advisory relationship with me or learning more what that looks like, reach out. I’d love to meet you. Advisory work is what pays the bills right now, and my kids need to eat. I probably need to eat a little less, but my kids need to eat. So reach out about an advisory relationship if you’re looking for some help on growth or product or general company building. It’s what I do.

Lenny: Adam, you’re so full of insights and lessons, and I’m so happy that you’ve started writing and sharing a lot of these things. Folks should definitely subscribe. Fishmanafnewsletter.com. Adam, thank you for being here.

Adam Fishman: Yeah, thanks a lot, Lenny. This was awesome.

Lenny: Thank you so much for listening. If you found this valuable, you can subscribe to the show on Apple Podcast, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. Also, please consider giving us a rating or leaving a review as that really helps other listeners find the podcast. You can find all past episodes or learn more about the show at lennyspodcast.com. See you in the next episode.

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