Apr 6, 2022 · 39m · 20growth
20 Growth: Why Retention Defines Product Market Fit, What is Good Retention Levels Today, The Most Counterintuitive Elements of Product and Growth & Why So Many Startups Mess Up Hiring For Growth Teams with Brian Hale, Head of Consumer Product & Growth @
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In this episode of 20 Growth, DoorDash VP of Product and Growth Brian Hale shares key insights on defining product-market fit through cohort retention, structuring full-stack growth teams, and optimizing product growth by focusing on marginal users and friction reduction.
How this conversation actually went
Every chapter scored 0–10 on four independent dynamics. Hover any point for the reasoning behind the score. Harry holds 20.6% of the talking time here. How this is scored →
Harry as informed peer 2.8 Guest teaching 4.0 Guest disagreement 1.0 Harry pushing back 2.1
speaking balance: gold is Harry, purple is the guest (3 minute bins)
Sharpest disagreement ▶ 30:14 Calling literal magic moment thresholds ridiculous
The guest dismisses popular growth industry narrative by declaring the notion of an abrupt, 100 percent retention magic threshold as a total myth and absolutely ridiculous.
Hardest push from Harry ▶ 9:47 Challenging retention flattening at 1 percentThe host cuts in on the guest's definition of product-market fit to point out that a retention curve can flatten out at 1 percent without actually signifying viable product-market fit.
Biggest teaching moment ▶ 30:14 Explaining retention diminishing returns curvesThe guest breaks down the reality of user retention dynamics, educating the host on why connections follow a smooth diminishing returns curve rather than arbitrary step-function milestones.
Harry holds his own ▶ 9:47 Spotting the 1 percent retention anomalyThe host demonstrates domain grasp by challenging the guest's simplified definition of cohort retention flattening, pressing on the nuance of low single-digit plateaus.
the scores for every segment, with the reasoning behind each
| Chapter | Topic | Harry as informed peer | Guest teaching | Guest disagreement | Harry pushing back | Why |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Brian Hale's Origin Story and Journey to DoorDash | 1 | 1 | 0 | 0 | The host opens with an introductory question about the guest's background and entry into tech. The guest shares a humorous personal story about his non-traditional path, keeping the dynamic light and conversational. | |
| Organizational Innovations and Facebook's Growth Structure | 2 | 4 | 1 | 1 | The host asks about Facebook learnings and team organization. The guest educates the host on how Facebook redefined growth teams by assigning them metrics as products rather than UI pixels or specific channels. | |
| Defining Product Market Fit Through Cohort Retention | 4 | 5 | 1 | 5 | When the guest defines product-market fit as flat retention curves, the host directly pushes back, noting that a curve could flatten out at an unusable one percent retention. The guest acknowledges the edge case and clarifies the percentage thresholds required for viable business models. | |
| Building Full-Stack Growth Teams and Organizational Fit | 3 | 4 | 1 | 3 | The host asks tactical questions about team composition and interrupts to clarify how PMs and designers should be allocated. The guest outlines full-stack growth pod structures and warns against creating top-down growth initiatives without experienced domain leaders. | |
| Power Users, Marginal Users, and Friction Reduction | 2 | 5 | 1 | 1 | The host prompts the guest for counterintuitive growth insights. The guest explains why companies over-index on power users while growth teams must focus on marginal users and friction reduction like login usability. | |
| Hiring, Interviewing, and Evaluating Growth Leaders | 3 | 4 | 0 | 2 | The host steers a detailed line of inquiry into interviewing and evaluating growth talent. The guest outlines structured interview techniques, data testing requirements, and case studies on neutral app environments. | |
| Onboarding Growth Leaders and Mitigating Cross-Team Friction | 3 | 4 | 1 | 2 | The host asks how to prevent growth teams from irritating core engineering groups when altering codebase features. The guest highlights organizational alignment prerequisites, collaborative code reviews, and cross-functional diff reviews. | |
| Practical Growth Case Studies and Debunking the 'Magic Moment' | 5 | 6 | 2 | 4 | The host invokes the famous '7 friends in 7 days' growth narrative to ask if the magic moment is real. The guest firmly debunks the concept as a myth, clarifying that retention follows a smooth diminishing returns curve rather than a magical step-function threshold. | |
| Quick Fire Round: Growth Tactics, Myths, and Standout Companies | 2 | 3 | 2 | 1 | In a rapid-fire sequence, the guest strongly rejects the term 'growth hacking', explaining that real growth comes from sustainable optimization rather than temporary platform hacks. |
Statements from this episode (23)
Brian Hale built his career in tech without attending college
“I didn't go to college. I didn't drop out. I just didn't go.”
Facebook's biggest innovations were organizational rather than product features
“A lot of the things that Facebook did that really, really mattered were like sort of organizational innovations or inventions about how the company was set up.”
Facebook's growth team innovated by defining their product as a metric
“And the core innovation of this Facebook growth team is the product is a goal and not some pixels or some channel.”
Startups must not build dedicated growth teams before finding product-market fit
“In the very, very early days, the first thing you need to know about having a growth team, I feel really strongly about this, you should not have a growth team set up the way Facebook does or conceptualize it that way until you have product market fit.”
Product-market fit is fundamentally defined by user cohort retention
“Product market fit is retention.”
Low single-digit cohort retention means a startup lacks product-market fit
“If you're down in low single digit percentages, you don't have product market fit yet.”
Facebook's active advertiser base grew hundreds of percent in one year
“And lo and behold, it did, and we were able to massively increase the number of active advertisers, like, from almost no growth to multiple hundred percent growth year on year after one year.”
Growth teams built without experienced growth leaders are destined to fail
“None of the people inside that group have any experience doing this. That is like a recipe for complete and utter failure. So I would say most of the time when I see these teams fail, there isn't really anyone who has done, has deep expertise in this sort of t…”
Reducing product friction is much easier than increasing user intent
“And the truth is that it is way easier to reduce friction and make things easier than it is to increase people's intent.”
Creating a dedicated login team inside Facebook's growth org drove massive impact
“One of the teams, and it took us a long time, honestly, Facebook, to, like, really figure out that we needed to have an explicit login team inside growth, but when we did, it was fantastically impactful.”
Password resets should log users in if they type their current password
“It says, you cannot use your existing password again. And you're just like, are you effing kidding me? Just like, let them log in, and that, like, they're trying to get into, they're not actually trying to reset their password. They're trying to just get it. A…”
Growth teams fail by solving power user problems instead of marginal friction
“I think a lot of times teams are trying to think of solving their problem to try and increase growth, but their problem is a power user problem, not a marginal user problem, and they're focused on the wrong people.”
Growth decisions should be heavily data-driven with minimal gut feel
“I would say 95% data. Very, very tiny amount gut.”
Facebook specifically recruited product managers who knew SQL for growth roles
“When we look for product growth people at Facebook, we tried to find people who knew SQL. You would try to get PMs who know SQL, and you would try to get a lot of data scientists and data engineers in these teams.”
Hiring a solo growth leader without full-stack team support will fail
“It will fail if you're just thinking about hiring just like the one person. Think about hiring a person who's going to hire a team and set it up the right way.”
Interview growth candidates by having them tear down neutral third-party apps
“It's important not to be biased by your own knowledge, so it's better to look at someone else's app, and then have them do, like, a breakdown”
Facebook allowed its growth teams to modify other departments' codebases
“So it really worked at Facebook pretty well because there was a culture that other teams were allowed to touch other people's code.”
Google's strict code ownership culture hinders cross-team growth efforts
“A good friend of mine was working at growth at Google, and they really have a totally different culture about this at Google, where it's really hard to go and change anyone else's code if you're not in that department or you're not in that team.”
Reusing past playbooks without analyzing current data is a major failure
“They're not really data-oriented, and they are assuming the thing that worked at their last company is exactly the same at this company, and they're just doing that, that's a real common Fuck up, right?”
Changing Facebook's ad button to 'Boost Post' increased purchases by 17%
“So then we changed it to say boost post, and that increased dramatically. I think I said this publicly so I can talk about it. It increased people buying ads by 17%. So just changing the word on the button was a 17% increase.”
Product retention has no magic moment, only a diminishing returns curve
“But actually, it's a curve, and it's a smooth curve where the biggest jump is from zero to one, and then from one to two, it goes down slightly as a diminishing return curve. So mostly, these things are diminishing return curves, and there is no magic moment.”
Startups should never rely on platform hacks as a primary growth strategy
“The lesson is, like, don't do that stuff, because one day, if that's your strategy, there's a whole group of people trying to kill what you're doing. You never want your whole, like, growth strategy to be something where there's someone out there trying to sto…”
Using the term 'growth hacking' is a yellow flag, says Brian Hale
“I would banish the term growth hacking. So it's not hacking if you're doing it properly, and I would say, actually, if you're talking about growth hacking, at least a yellow flag, because ultimately, if you're doing it well, what you're doing is you're doing g…”