Oct 13, 2022 · 1h 5m · lennys-podcast
How to build a high-performing growth team | Adam Fishman (Patreon, Lyft, Imperfect Foods)
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gold bands on the timeline = statements, start to end. Hover to read, click to jump. CC turns on captions
Growth executive Adam Fishman joins Lenny Rachitsky to deliver tactical masterclasses on hiring growth talent using the Growth Competency Model, optimizing product onboarding for retention, and vetting startup employers through a candidate-focused product-market fit framework.
How this conversation actually went
Every chapter scored 0–10 on four independent dynamics. Hover any point for the reasoning behind the score. Lenny holds 22.1% of the talking time here. How this is scored →
Lenny as informed peer 4.2 Guest teaching 4.2 Guest disagreement 0.3 Lenny pushing back 0.5
speaking balance: gold is Lenny, purple is the guest (3 minute bins)
Sharpest disagreement ▶ 45:32 Embracing reduced onboarding conversion
Adam directly challenges conventional growth wisdom by arguing that great onboarding should sometimes intentionally decrease conversion in order to screen out poor-fit users.
Hardest push from Lenny ▶ 33:30 Pushing on external specialists for SEO and paid growthLenny pushes back on Adam's preference for internal transfers by pointing out that deep specialized channels like paid growth and SEO require external domain specialists.
Biggest teaching moment ▶ 38:50 Patreon human-assisted onboarding case studyAdam provides an end-to-end breakdown of how human intervention drove a 25 percent lift in creator revenue before being translated into opinionated software defaults.
Lenny holds their own ▶ 44:18 Lenny parallels Airbnb smart defaultsLenny demonstrates deep product expertise by drawing an exact parallel between Patreon's approach and Airbnb's smart defaults system for host calendar availability.
the scores for every segment, with the reasoning behind each
| Chapter | Topic | Lenny as informed peer | Guest teaching | Guest disagreement | Lenny pushing back | Why |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Welcome and Career Overview | 3 | 2 | 0 | 0 | Lenny opens with a warm welcome and asks Adam to summarize his background in 45 seconds, which Adam delivers crisply before sharing an anecdote from Lyft's early launch days. | |
| Reactions to Super Pumped and Meeting Joseph Gordon-Levitt | 3 | 1 | 0 | 0 | Lenny asks Adam about watching Super Pumped, prompting Adam to recount his Zoom interview with Joseph Gordon-Levitt while on set dressed as Travis Kalanick. | |
| Origin of the Growth Competency Model | 4 | 4 | 1 | 1 | Adam explains why he created the Growth Competency Model to address flawed founder expectations, sharing a personal misfire at Wyzant where silver-bullet thinking replaced systematic loop building. | |
| Growth Competency Model: Execution and Structure | 5 | 5 | 0 | 1 | Adam details the structure of his four-part competency model and breaks down growth execution, while Lenny notes how the framework can be applied as a reverse interviewing tool. | |
| Growth Competency Model: Customer Knowledge and Psychology | 5 | 4 | 0 | 0 | Adam explains customer knowledge and user psychology, prompting Lenny to cite a relevant insight from the Collison brothers about user research shaping customer mental models. | |
| Growth Competency Model: Strategy, Communication, and Influence | 5 | 5 | 0 | 0 | Adam discusses advanced competencies in strategy and influence, and Lenny draws parallels between the soft skills required in PM leadership versus growth leadership. | |
| Hiring Growth Talent: Internal Moves vs. External Specialists | 5 | 5 | 1 | 2 | Lenny pushes on whether founders should favor internal up-and-comers over seasoned hires, leading to an exchange contrasting generalists against niche technical specialists. | |
| Sponsor Message: Eppo | 2 | 2 | 0 | 0 | Following a sponsor read for Eppo, Lenny introduces the second topic and Adam makes the case for why onboarding is a uniquely high-leverage growth touchpoint. | |
| Case Study: Optimizing Onboarding at Patreon | 5 | 6 | 0 | 0 | Adam walks through Patreon's onboarding experiments, showing how pairing top-tier creators with human guides boosted revenue by 25 percent before being encoded into opinionated defaults. | |
| Onboarding: Balancing Conversion Against Retention | 6 | 5 | 1 | 1 | Lenny shares Airbnb's smart defaults case study and asks how to balance conversion drop-offs against long-term retention, with Adam asserting intentional friction can weed out bad-fit users. | |
| Tracking Onboarding Success with Proxy Metrics | 4 | 5 | 1 | 1 | Adam warns against redesigning onboarding for its own sake without genuine user insights, suggesting proxy velocity metrics instead of waiting 90 days for retention data. | |
| The PMF Framework for Job Candidates | 3 | 5 | 0 | 0 | Adam introduces his candidate PMF framework covering people, mission, and financials, contrasting positive runs at Lyft and Patreon with painful mismatches at Wyzant and Imperfect Foods. | |
| Diligencing Culture, Leadership, and Management Fit | 4 | 5 | 0 | 0 | Adam advises job seekers to reverse-interview leaders and conduct back-channel references on potential managers, citing a Patreon PM candidate who proactively vetted him. |
Statements from this episode (18)
Lyft launched by driving a pink mustache car into their SoMa office
“When we launched a Lyft, when we sort of 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, like garage style doors. And so we opened them up and we actually drove a car into …”
Super Pumped accurately portrayed Uber's aggressive tactics against Lyft
“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, oof, I remember that. God, that was hard. Another part of me was happy that to see that all of the things were out in…”
Founders shouldn't hire growth talent by pattern-matching specific senior leaders
“I get asked all the time that 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. If …”
Fishman had to lay off his own team and himself at Wyzant
“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.”
Product teams must address users' emotional mindsets before making logical appeals
“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 sort of mindset that people are in.”
Executive function and execution skills cannot be taught on the job
“Teaching somebody how to execute is not that fun, right? That's a hard skill. Like the ability to execute is something like executive function skills and things like that. If you haven't developed those by the time you were an adult, I don't know that I'm goin…”
Founders should hire first growth roles internally to reduce risk
“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…”
Deep growth specialties like SEO and paid acquisition require external hires
“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. …”
High user motivation during onboarding allows deliberate friction for data collection
“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 moti…”
Human onboarding interventions boosted Patreon creator revenue by 25 percent
“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%.”
Onboarding should use opinionated defaults without eliminating user choices
“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.”
Effective onboarding can intentionally decrease top-of-funnel conversion to boost retention
“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…”
Patreon used time to first $100 as a primary retention proxy
“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 hundred dollars processed on the p…”
Micro-optimizing onboarding flows rarely moves metrics without fundamentally new insights
“Tweaking the onboarding experience and trying to tune it in a very micro way, because the reality is like, 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 r…”
Tech industry layoffs are far from finished, Fishman predicted in 2022
“And I don't think we're done yet. I think we're pretty far from being done, but it's really important.”
Severe executive infighting at Imperfect Foods impaired company planning and progress
“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 kind of at o…”
Job candidates invest a scarcer resource than angel investors: their time
“When you're interviewing at a company, you are actually investing in 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.”
Hiring managers refusing to allow reverse reference checks are red flags
“And if a company says no, or a person says no. I think that actually says a bit more about them than, you know, anything else, if they're trying to kind of withhold that from you, because why would you? If I'm a great manager, I'm happy to have you talk to peo…”