Adam Fishman on Growth, Onboarding, and Choosing the Right Company

Adam Fishman on Growth, Onboarding, and Choosing the Right Company

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Adam Fishman on Growth, Onboarding, and Choosing the Right Company

Source: Lenny’s Podcast Speaker: Adam Fishman Date: ~2022 Link: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/how-to-build-a-high-performing-growth

Key ideas

  • Growth Competency Model. Four quadrants for hiring and evaluating growth talent: Growth Execution (channel fluency, experimentation, productising learnings); Customer Knowledge (data fluency, user psychology, creative/narrative approach); Growth Strategy (loop modelling, capital allocation, prioritisation and roadmapping); Communication & Influence (strategic communication, team leadership, stakeholder management). Goal is a balanced team — not a unicorn hire who scores 11/10 everywhere.
  • Onboarding as universal growth lever. The only product surface 100% of users must touch; the first delivery on the brand promise; the moment when users are most motivated. At Patreon, routing high-potential creators to human coaches at sign-up improved second-month revenue by 25%, then productised this insight into “opinionated defaults” — three-tier pricing, $3–5 entry-point guardrails — making best practice the path of least resistance without eliminating choice.
  • Onboarding optimises for retention, not just conversion. Counter-intuitively, better onboarding can decrease raw conversion while improving retention, because it screens out poor-fit users who would churn anyway. Measure with proxy metrics (velocity to first patron, first $100 processed) rather than waiting 90 days for retention data.
  • PMF for candidates. People, Mission, Financials — evaluate job offers as investments of time (your scarcest resource). Back-channel references from people no longer on the interview circuit; ask to observe an executive meeting; probe the last major strategic disagreement and how it was resolved.
  • Internal hires for early growth roles. Bias towards moving strong internal candidates into growth rather than external hires — faster time to results, less hiring risk, existing customer knowledge already in place. The two foundational competencies to test for in junior/early hires: execution and customer knowledge.

Overview

Adam Fishman — VP Growth at Lyft, VP Product & Growth at Patreon, CPO at Imperfect Foods, now an advisor and Reforge EIR — covers three frameworks: the Growth Competency Model (structured hiring and evaluation tool), onboarding as a retention lever (Patreon case study), and PMF for candidates (how to evaluate job offers with the rigour of an investor).

His central argument: most companies treat growth hiring as pattern-matching to a known person (“find another Adam”) rather than first-principles competency mapping, and most candidates evaluate job offers without the diligence they would apply to a financial investment — even though time is the scarcer resource.