Skip to content
Lenny's PodcastLenny's Podcast

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

Adam Fishman has decades of experience building and scaling some incredible businesses, like Lyft, Patreon, and Imperfect Foods. He is currently an Executive in Residence at Reforge and an advisor to numerous companies on growth, product, strategy, and company building. In today’s episode, Adam shares his growth PM competency model to help founders identify specific skills when hiring growth leaders, how to structure feedback, and how to identify gaps in your growth team. He also discusses the role of onboarding in retention and how to evaluate a company as a prospective employee. Find the full transcript here: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/how-to-build-a-high-performing-growth — Where to find Adam Fishman: • Twitter: https://twitter.com/fishmanaf • LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/adamjfishman/ • Website: https://www.adamfishman.com/ • Adam’s newsletter: https://www.fishmanafnewsletter.com/ — Where to find Lenny: • Newsletter: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com • Twitter: https://twitter.com/lennysan • LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lennyrachitsky/ — Thank you to our wonderful sponsors for making this episode possible: • Linear: https://linear.app/lenny • Coda: http://coda.io/lenny • Eppo: https://www.geteppo.com/ — Referenced: • Stream Super Pumped on Showtime: https://www.sho.com/super-pumped • Super Pumped: The Battle for Uber: https://www.amazon.com/Super-Pumped-Battle-Mike-Isaac/dp/0393652246 • HitRecord: https://hitrecord.org/ • Adam’s growth competency model: https://www.reforge.com/blog/the-growth-competency-model • Adam’s LinkedIn series: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/adamjfishman_ive-now-published-my-complete-series-on-activity-6979198793992802305-VtCu/ — In this episode, we cover: (00:00) Adam’s background (06:16) Lyft’s launch press release (09:56) Adam’s newsletter and growth competency framework (10:34) Myths and mistakes founders make (15:12) The growth competency model (18:47) Customer knowledge and user psychology (21:23) Why strategy and communication are more advanced competencies (25:45) Why to hire a junior-level growth executive and how to support them (31:20) Why Adam skews toward internal hiring (33:25) Generalists vs. specialists (35:59) The importance of onboarding (41:49) Opinionated defaults (45:03) Balancing conversion and retention with successful onboarding (48:46) Guidelines for redesigning onboarding (52:22) The PMF criteria for candidates (57:57) What Adam would have done differently at Imperfect Foods — Production and marketing by https://penname.co/. For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, email podcast@lennyrachitsky.com.

Adam FishmanguestLenny Rachitskyhost
Oct 13, 20221h 5mWatch on YouTube ↗

At a glance

WHAT IT’S REALLY ABOUT

Building High-Impact Growth Teams, Onboarding Engines, and Careers with PMF

  1. Adam Fishman, former growth/product leader at Lyft, Patreon, and Imperfect Foods, shares a structured growth competency model to help companies hire and develop growth talent and help candidates position themselves. He breaks growth skills into four core buckets—growth execution, customer knowledge, growth strategy, and communication/influence—and explains how to use them for hiring, feedback, and career planning.
  2. He argues that onboarding is one of the most underleveraged growth levers because it is the only experience 100% of users go through, shapes expectations set by the brand, and is where users are most motivated. Through examples from Patreon and Lyft, he shows how intelligent onboarding and opinionated defaults can materially improve retention and long-term revenue.
  3. Finally, Adam introduces a “PMF for candidates” framework (People, Mission, Financials) for choosing companies, emphasizing rigorous evaluation of leadership dynamics, mission alignment, and fiscal discipline—especially in a turbulent market. He shares hard-earned lessons from both great and poor company picks and offers concrete tactics for doing real diligence as a candidate.

IDEAS WORTH REMEMBERING

5 ideas

Use a structured growth competency model instead of hiring for a ‘unicorn’ profile.

Break growth into four buckets—growth execution, customer knowledge, growth strategy, and communication/influence—then hire and develop against specific competencies rather than pattern-matching on a single archetype or senior resume.

Prioritize growth execution and customer knowledge when hiring earlier-career growth talent.

For first or more junior growth hires, look for people who can reliably execute experiments and deeply understand users; higher-order strategy and influence can be layered on with mentorship, whereas basic execution and customer fluency are much harder to teach.

Treat onboarding as a primary retention and habit-formation lever, not just a conversion funnel.

Onboarding is the only part of the product every user experiences and the first moment where the brand promise meets reality; improving it can shift retention curves by double digits, even if it slightly reduces raw sign-up conversion.

Leverage human-led interventions to discover what works, then productize those learnings.

At Patreon, high-touch onboarding with select creators boosted early revenue by ~25%; the team then encoded those human best practices into product features and “opinionated defaults,” turning a non-scalable win into a scalable system.

Design ‘opinionated defaults’ or ‘smart defaults’ to guide users toward proven-success paths.

Use defaults and gentle friction to make it easy to do the right thing and harder to do the wrong thing (e.g., recommended tier structures and price points), while preserving user choice for edge cases and advanced users.

WORDS WORTH SAVING

5 quotes

Onboarding is the only part of your product experience that 100% of people are ever gonna touch.

— Adam Fishman

Your brand is the promise that you're making and your product experience is your delivery of that promise.

— Adam Fishman

Executing a growth strategy takes time and patience, and they didn't really have it.

— Adam Fishman

If you join a company and do your job well, a lot of people out in the world should have a better outcome because that company exists.

— Adam Fishman

When you're interviewing at a company, you're investing an even more scarce resource than money—you're investing your time.

— Adam Fishman

Adam Fishman’s background in growth and product at Lyft, Patreon, and Imperfect FoodsThe Growth Competency Model for hiring and evaluating growth talentEssential growth skills: execution, customer knowledge, strategy, communication/influenceOnboarding as a core growth and retention leverDesigning opinionated/smart defaults and productizing human learningsTradeoffs between conversion and retention in onboardingThe “PMF for candidates” framework: People, Mission, Financials, and how to evaluate companies

High quality AI-generated summary created from speaker-labeled transcript.

Get more out of YouTube videos.

High quality summaries for YouTube videos. Accurate transcripts to search & find moments. Powered by ChatGPT & Claude AI.

Add to Chrome