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Levesque: Growth teams perform best as standalone, cross-functional units
“Personally, I find that it works best when it's standalone. It really comes down to Who you're able to hire to bring on the team and the skill sets that that person, because that's the constraint. The constraint is going to be that who can you find to lead the…”
Levesque: Facebook growth hires often struggle without internal company scaffolding
“If this person's from Facebook, they'll have a very specific set of knowledge because they're supported with a lot of scaffolding at Facebook.”
Levesque: True growth mastery enables high-accuracy intuition without extra testing
“And to me that differentiates a good growth person from a truly exceptional growth person, somebody who understands all the levers because that deep understanding is what will let you use your intuition. To launch new experiments and drive new growth without h…”
Levesque: Rapid promotion in growth roles can be a counter-signal
“In most professions, if somebody's at a company and they're promoted very quickly, that would be a good sign that this person is you know, exceptional. And in growth, because there's so few people in the space, It could suggest that they're exceptional, but it…”
Levesque: Public speaking and social media presence do not correlate with growth ability
“The social media halo or public speaking halo does not correlate with ability. So I've seen people make hires for people that are, you know, on the stage often and great speakers and great evangelists that doesn't always translate to somebody who's, who's grea…”
Levesque: A new hire's success should be obvious within 30 to 60 days
“We like to say that, you know, the best people come in and leave an impact greater when they land. So they get hired. So everything around them gets better. So within frankly, 30 to 60 days, you should have a sense of whether you made a good hire and they've e…”
Levesque: Elite growth hires deliver 10x to 100x performance increases
“Spaces growth is one of those things where if you make the right hire, it's not a, you know.5% increase. It's literally a 10 or a hundred X increase.”
Levesque: The Head of Growth should report directly to the CEO
“If I were designing from first principles, I would say the head of growth reports to the CEO meets weekly and is flagging issues and also discussing potential, you know, strategy changes and approaches at a very high level.”
Levesque: A great product cannot scale without a strong growth loop
“Building a great product is important, but if you don't have a strong growth loop for it doesn't matter because you can't scale the product.”
Levesque: Best viral loops are built directly into core product features
“You can have the best is when the core product itself has a viral loop. For example, a photo sharing product. Using a photo sharing product and not sharing it is not a very useful product. So the loop, the viral loop is baked into the product itself.”
Levesque: Product growth includes M&A and new products, not just channels
“Not to look at growth or even product building as one specific thing to grow your product. You can look at it in terms of SEO or paid loops or viral, but it's also about M&A and building entirely new products.”
Levesque: Building Messenger Kids was his team's biggest win at Facebook
“I had a variety of teams at Facebook, but the one that was the biggest win for us was building messenger kids and engaging an entirely new segment of the population and by building this kind of safe family messaging product.”
Luc Levesque: Growth is whatever it takes to move one key metric
“It's basically whatever it takes to move that one metric you're trying to increase.”
Levesque: Developing growth intuition requires extensive pattern matching experience
“Growth takes a really long time to build intuition around. So you need to have done a lot of experiments, tried a lot of different things, and growth is a lot about pattern matching.”
Levesque: Pair junior growth hires with advisors if senior talent is unavailable
“So one other approach, if the ability to hire somebody very senior is not possible, then you can hire somebody who's a bit more junior. But in that case, I would surround them with a set of advisors.”
Levesque: A former manager re-hiring someone is a top talent signal
“When somebody's leader left a company and went to another company and came back to get them. And if you think about the social dynamic that, that takes place there. The only person that, or one of the only people that really knows how good a growth leader is, …”
Levesque: Exceptional candidates receive backchannel references without caveats
“Great people usually come without caveats.”
Levesque: Requiring interview tests risks losing top-tier growth candidates
“So I'd say in a smaller percentage of times I get somebody to do a test, but also growth people are in a very high demand. So You know, many times candidates, if they're not really interested in the role may just choose not to do the test.”
Levesque: Ideal growth teams directly own all key product surfaces
“I think ideally you want the growth team to own all of the services. That matter the most to growth. That's the ideal state. Senior leader, multi disciplined. They know how to do engineering. They know how to do growth. They know how to do product, and they ha…”
Luc Levesque: Moving metrics with low-quality code is a growth failure
“That's a common, I think failure state where you build something that moves the needle. But the quality is terrible. It looks awful. It's bad for the other team's goals. It's bad for consumers. That's a failure state for growth.”
Levesque: Six months is the right timeframe to evaluate growth projects
“So projects when you run out of like six months is a good chunk of time. If you're not exiting six months with a sense of, okay, we have some levers. We see line of sight into some levers that could move the needle for an individual product or project. If you …”
Levesque: Relational breakdown is more fatal to growth teams than slow speed
“You know, speed and velocity can be improved. A relationship falling apart can be completely dysfunctional and just cause the whole thing to fall apart.”
Levesque: Root Knowledge of Growth Experiments Is More Transportable Than Results
“So if an experiment worked, that's just knowing that experiment worked is interesting, but may not be repeatable. The most important thing is understanding the why behind it. Why did it actually work? It goes back to some of my interview questions. It'd be, I …”
Levesque: TripWow saw diminishing returns after three homepage iterations
“We did seven iterations of the homepage and after three, we saw a lot of impact, but then there was very much diminishing returns to whether it's button colors or changing the UI or adding free to the button.”
Levesque: Removing friction stops driving growth past user intent threshold
“You get to a point where you've just removed enough friction proportional to the intent of the users coming through, and removing more friction is not going to move the needle.”
Levesque: Paid Search is Essential as Google Deprioritizes Organic Results
“Paid channels in general have become more important because a lot of these services, a lot of these engines like Google are moving away from showing organic results and showing paid. So paid, certainly paid search, for example, works very well. And it's still …”
Luc Levesque: Growth leaders should say no at least monthly to unaligned requests
“And I think you know, an important part of leading growth is probably saying no, you know, once a week or at least once a month to something that doesn't align with that North star.”
Levesque: Advisors are the fastest way for founders to gain knowledge
“I really, I actually do think more people, more founders should leverage advisors. It's probably the fastest way to get wins and get knowledge.”
Levesque: Founders should compensate advisors with equity to align incentives
“Ideally you want to hire an advisor who you're aligning incentives. So you bring in an advisor and you compensate them with equity. That's the ideal.”
Levesque: Merchant recommendations are a top driver of Shopify's growth
“So we're always iterating on making it easier for merchants to do that, but it's because we have such a great product and one of the highest cited reasons for joining Shopify is that somebody had recommended them in that it's, again, it's kind of part of the c…”