Lenny's PodcastHow to build a high-performing growth team | Adam Fishman (Patreon, Lyft, Imperfect Foods)
CHAPTERS
- 0:00 – 4:25
Why onboarding is the highest-leverage part of your product experience
Adam opens with a core belief: onboarding is the only product surface every user experiences, and it’s the first moment your product either fulfills or violates the brand promise. He frames onboarding as the earliest chance to create excitement, trust, and momentum—or to create disappointment that can be hard to reverse.
- •Onboarding is the only flow touched by 100% of users
- •Brand promise must match product delivery to avoid mismatched expectations
- •Early experience sets emotional tone: excitement vs. disappointment
- •Onboarding is a critical, often-underestimated growth lever
- 4:25 – 6:17
Adam’s career in growth and product: Lyft, Patreon, Imperfect Foods, and Reforge
Lenny introduces Adam’s background and current work advising companies, building Reforge content, and writing his newsletter. Adam quickly summarizes the roles and experiences that shaped his perspective on growth leadership.
- •First growth/marketing hire at Lyft; led growth in early years
- •Led product and growth at Patreon; later CPO at Imperfect Foods
- •Now: advisor on product/growth strategy + EIR/program partner at Reforge
- •Started FishmanAFNewsletter.com to publish frameworks and lessons
- 6:17 – 7:21
Early Lyft story: launching out of beta with a pink mustache press event
Adam shares a vivid memory from Lyft’s earliest days—its public launch event—highlighting the scrappy, theatrical energy of the team. The story anchors what “early-stage growth” felt like in practice.
- •Private beta to public launch as a defining moment
- •Press event with a car driven into the office
- •Iconic pink mustache branding and “mustache cake”
- •Scrappy early-stage storytelling and PR as growth accelerants
- 7:21 – 10:33
Watching Uber’s rise through 'Super Pumped': reliving the competitive era
Adam reflects on reading the book and watching the show 'Super Pumped,' describing how it resurfaced the emotional intensity of competing against Uber. He also shares an unusual side story: interviewing with Joseph Gordon-Levitt while JGL was in costume as Travis Kalanick.
- •Competitive pressure vs. Uber was a constant lived experience
- •Mixed feelings: painful to revisit, but validating to see practices exposed
- •Joseph Gordon-Levitt interview while filming as TK
- •How media portrayals can reopen lived company histories
- 10:33 – 15:11
Why Adam created the Growth Competency Model (and what founders get wrong)
Adam explains the motivation for writing a “canonical” resource on hiring and developing growth talent. He unpacks common founder mistakes—especially expecting a silver-bullet growth hire instead of building a system and strategy for sustained growth.
- •Lack of a shared, canonical framework for evaluating growth talent
- •Founders often pattern-match (“find me another you”) vs. first-principles hiring
- •Growth success requires a system (loops + execution), not magic fixes
- •Wyzant example: misaligned expectations led to an unsuccessful outcome
- 15:11 – 18:44
The four pillars of growth competency: execution, customer knowledge, strategy, influence
Adam outlines the model’s four major buckets and emphasizes that the goal isn’t hiring a unicorn, but building a balanced team without critical gaps. He uses growth execution as the first detailed example and describes what great looks like.
- •Model intent: team balance, not 11/10 individuals
- •Four buckets: Growth execution, Customer knowledge, Growth strategy, Communication & influence
- •Execution subskills: channel fluency, experimentation, productizing learnings
- •Using the framework for hiring alignment and performance feedback
- 18:44 – 21:23
Customer knowledge: data fluency and user psychology as a growth superpower
Adam argues that many teams misread what drives user behavior by appealing too early to logic instead of emotions. He highlights user psychology and deep customer understanding as critical inputs to building effective growth experiences.
- •Customer knowledge includes instrumentation/data fluency and qualitative understanding
- •Users often arrive with an emotional frame; logic-first messaging can fail
- •User research informs a model of the customer, not a direct feature spec
- •Psychology-driven insight improves activation, messaging, and product choices
- 21:23 – 26:03
Why strategy and influence are 'advanced' growth skills
Adam explains that growth strategy and communication/influence are typically learned through experience—often by getting things wrong and learning. He breaks down strategy (loops, capital allocation, roadmapping) and influence (narrative, leadership, stakeholder management).
- •Strategy & influence are harder, more experience-dependent competencies
- •Growth strategy: loop modeling; capital allocation/forecasting; prioritization/roadmapping
- •Communication & influence: strategic communication; team leadership; stakeholder management
- •Growth often must counter misconceptions and align cross-functional teams
- 26:03 – 32:34
Hiring for growth: support junior leaders, and prioritize execution + customer knowledge
Adam advises founders to consider high-potential, less-experienced growth leaders—and to invest in their success via mentoring, coaching, and education. He explains which competencies matter most early and shares examples of successful growth hires/transfers.
- •Senior growth leaders are scarce; junior leaders can work with the right support
- •Founders must invest in advisors/mentors to avoid wasted effort and misdirection
- •For junior hires: prioritize growth execution + customer knowledge
- •Examples: Ben Lazier (Lyft) and Sean (Patreon) as different successful profiles
- 32:34 – 35:47
Internal hiring bias and when specialists matter (generalists vs. surgeons)
Adam shares why he tends to favor internal transfers into growth roles: faster ramp, lower risk, stronger customer knowledge, and more opportunity creation. He also explains when to hire specialists—like SEO or paid acquisition experts—after foundations are in place.
- •Bias toward internal hires: faster time-to-results and better known quantity
- •Internal transfers often start strong in customer knowledge
- •Archetypes: generalists vs. specialists ('surgeons' for precision skills)
- •Hire specialists (SEO/paid) when you’ve validated direction and need deep expertise
- 35:47 – 40:49
Onboarding as a retention engine: habit formation and measurable lifts
Adam reframes onboarding as primarily a retention lever through habit formation and value realization. He shares typical retention-curve improvements and a detailed Patreon example where human support during onboarding significantly increased creator revenue and LTV.
- •Onboarding connects users to value fast, shaping habits that drive retention
- •Retention curve shifts of 10–20 points are possible with strong activation work
- •Patreon example: timely human help improved early revenue ~25%
- •Improving early revenue changed LTV inputs and long-term outcomes
- 40:49 – 45:22
Productizing human learnings: identifying high-potential users and 'opinionated defaults'
Adam explains how Patreon used connected accounts and engagement signals to identify high-potential creators and route them to humans, then translated human advice into scalable product defaults. Lenny adds a parallel Airbnb example ('smart defaults') to show the pattern across products.
- •Use onboarding to collect data (auth connections) and classify user potential
- •Route high-potential users to high-touch support at the right time
- •Convert human guidance into scalable product guardrails and recommendations
- •Opinionated defaults: make the right choice easy, wrong choice harder (not impossible)
- 45:22 – 48:46
Balancing conversion vs. retention in onboarding—and how to measure it without waiting months
Adam notes that better onboarding may intentionally lower conversion by filtering out poor-fit users, improving downstream retention. He recommends using proxy metrics and qualitative review to avoid waiting 90 days for retention readouts.
- •Good onboarding may reduce conversion slightly to improve user quality
- •Evaluate onboarding with push/pull metrics across the funnel
- •Use proxy metrics (velocity-to-value) as leading indicators
- •Qualitative sampling helps validate that “the right people” are succeeding
- 48:46 – 52:20
When to revisit or redesign onboarding—and why an activation team helps
Adam argues against redesigning for its own sake and suggests revisiting onboarding only when you have new, hard-earned customer insights. He also recommends having a team (or partial roadmap ownership) accountable for activation so onboarding doesn’t become neglected.
- •Avoid redesign-for-redesign; require new insights to justify changes
- •Periodic revisits: fold new learnings back into onboarding principles
- •Micro-optimizations often stop moving the needle after a solid baseline
- •Activation/onboarding ownership prevents multi-year neglect that hurts retention
- 52:20 – 57:57
Choosing where to work: 'PMF for candidates' (People, Mission, Financials) + Imperfect Foods lessons
Adam introduces his framework for evaluating job fit during a volatile market: People, Mission, and Financials. He contrasts successful choices (Lyft, Patreon) with misses (Wyzant, Imperfect Foods), emphasizing how leadership dynamics can derail otherwise strong missions and economics.
- •PMF for candidates = People, Mission, Financials
- •People: productive disagreement and healthy team dynamics
- •Mission: if the company grows, does it improve customers’ lives meaningfully?
- •Financials: fiscal discipline and runway matter especially in downturns
- •Imperfect Foods: strong mission/finance, but C-suite conflict hurt execution
- 57:57 – 1:03:30
How to evaluate the 'people' dimension: observe meetings and run backchannel references
Adam gives concrete tactics to assess culture and leadership dynamics before joining: observe real meetings, ask behavioral questions about disagreements, and conduct investor-style diligence through backchannels. He shares an anecdote of a candidate (Tal Raviv) requesting references from Adam’s former reports.
- •Ask to observe an exec/team meeting or product review (with NDA)
- •Ask leaders to recount a recent disagreement and how it was resolved
- •Treat your time like capital: do diligence like an investor
- •Backchannel current/former employees for candid truth
- •Signal: reluctance to allow references can be revealing
- 1:03:30 – 1:05:45
Where to find Adam and how he works today
Adam closes by sharing where listeners can follow and contact him, and how they can engage with his writing and advisory work. Lenny reinforces the value of Adam’s frameworks and encourages subscribing to the newsletter.
- •Find Adam on Twitter (FishmanAF) and LinkedIn
- •Newsletter: FishmanAFNewsletter.com for frameworks and writing
- •Advisory work: growth/product strategy support for companies
- •Listeners can help by subscribing and sharing challenges to inspire future writing
