Pod Insights Lenny's Podcast How to build a high-performing growth team | Adam Fishman (Patreon, Lyft, Imperfect Foods) About this episode Adam Fishman has decades of experience building and scaling some incredible businesses, like Lyft, Patreon, and Imperfect Foods. He is currently an Executive in Residence at Reforge and an advisor to numerous companies on growth, product, strategy, and company building. In today’s episode, Adam shares his growth PM competency model to help founders identify specific skills when hiring growth leaders, how to structure feedback, and how to identify gaps in your growth team. He also discusses the role of onboarding in retention and how to evaluate a company as a prospective employee.
Find the full transcript here: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/how-to-build-a-high-performing-growth
—
Where to find Adam Fishman:
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/fishmanaf
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/adamjfishman/
• Website: https://www.adamfishman.com/
• Adam’s newsletter: https://www.fishmanafnewsletter.com/
—
Where to find Lenny:
• Newsletter: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/lennysan
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lennyrachitsky/
—
Thank you to our wonderful sponsors for making this episode possible:
• Linear: https://linear.app/lenny
• Coda: http://coda.io/lenny
• Eppo: https://www.geteppo.com/
—
Referenced:
• Stream Super Pumped on Showtime: https://www.sho.com/super-pumped
• Super Pumped: The Battle for Uber: https://www.amazon.com/Super-Pumped-Battle-Mike-Isaac/dp/0393652246
• HitRecord: https://hitrecord.org/
• Adam’s growth competency model: https://www.reforge.com/blog/the-growth-competency-model
• Adam’s LinkedIn series: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/adamjfishman_ive-now-published-my-complete-series-on-activity-6979198793992802305-VtCu/
—
In this episode, we cover:
(00:00) Adam’s background
(06:16) Lyft’s launch press release
(09:56) Adam’s newsletter and growth competency framework
(10:34) Myths and mistakes founders make
(15:12) The growth competency model
(18:47) Customer knowledge and user psychology
(21:23) Why strategy and communication are more advanced competencies
(25:45) Why to hire a junior-level growth executive and how to support them
(31:20) Why Adam skews toward internal hiring
(33:25) Generalists vs. specialists
(35:59) The importance of onboarding
(41:49) Opinionated defaults
(45:03) Balancing conversion and retention with successful onboarding
(48:46) Guidelines for redesigning onboarding
(52:22) The PMF criteria for candidates
(57:57) What Adam would have done differently at Imperfect Foods
—
Production and marketing by https://penname.co/. For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, email [email protected] .
Transcript 12,151 words · 2 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 Speaker 00 Onboarding is the only part of your product experience that 100% of people are ever going to touch. Good luck getting 100% feature adoption of anything else in your product, right? But onboarding is the thing that you have to go through in order to use the product. It's also the first opportunity that you have as a company to kind of deliver on the promise that you made out in the marketplace. So I like to think of like, your brand is the promise that you're making, and your product experience is your delivery of that promise. And those two things have to be in lockstep with each other, or you're going to have mismatched expectations and some really disappointed customers.
0:43 Speaker 00 So this is the first chance that a customer has to be really excited or really disappointed in what they thought they were getting. So don't mess that up.
0:55 Lenny Rachitsky? Adam Fishman was the first growth and marketing hire at Lyft, where he spent two and a half years leading their growth efforts. Then he went on to lead product and growth at Patreon, where he spent over four years building one of the most successful and lasting creator platforms out there. And most recently, he was CPO at Imperfect Foods. Today, he spends his time advising companies on product and growth, and he's also doing a lot more writing. And in this episode, we cover three things. His growth competency model, which helps you hire and evaluate growth talent, and also get a job as a growth person. We go deep into why onboarding is such an underappreciated growth lever, and all of the impact that you could have optimizing your onboarding flow. Adam also shares a super cool framework for choosing which company to work out.
1:40 Lenny Rachitsky? Adam is hilarious, and he's so full of wisdom, and I can't wait for you to hear this episode. With that, I bring you Adam Fishman.
1:50 Lenny Rachitsky? This episode is brought to you by Linear. Let's be honest, the issue tracker that you're using today isn't very helpful. Why is it that it always seems to be working against you instead of working for you? Why does it feel like such a chore to use? Well, Linear is different. It's incredibly fast, beautifully designed, and it comes with powerful workflows that streamline your entire product development process, from issue tracking all the way to managing product roadmaps. Linear is designed for the way modern software teams work. What users love about Linear are the powerful keyboard shortcuts, efficient GitHub integrations, cycles that actually create progress, and built-in project updates that keep everyone in sync. In short, it just works.
2:33 Lenny Rachitsky? Linear is the default tool of choice among startups, and it powers a wide range of large, established companies, such as Vercel, Retool, and Cash App. See for yourself why product teams describe using Linear as "magical." Visit linear.app/leni to try Linear for free with your team and get 25% off when you upgrade. That's linear.app/leni.
2:59 Lenny Rachitsky? This episode is brought to you by Coda. Coda is an all-in-one doc that combines the best of documents, spreadsheets, and apps in one place. I actually use Coda every single day. It's my home base for organizing my newsletter writing. It's where I plan my content calendar, capture my research, and write the first drafts of each and every post. It's also where I curate my private knowledge repository for paid newsletter subscribers, and it's also how I manage the workflow for this very podcast. Over the years, I've seen Coda evolve from being a tool that makes teams more productive to one that also helps bring the best practices across the tech industry to life with an incredibly rich collection of templates and guides in the Coda doc gallery, including resources from many guests on this podcast,
3:43 Lenny Rachitsky? including Shreyas, Gokul, and Shashir, the CEO of Coda. Some of the best teams out there, like Pinterest, Spotify, Square, and Uber, use Coda to run effectively and have published their templates for anyone to use. If you're ping-ponging between lots of documents and spreadsheets, make your life better and start using Coda. You can take advantage of a special, limited-time offer just for startups. Head over to coda.io/leni to sign up and get $1,000 credit on your first statement. That's C-O-D-A dot I-O slash leni to sign up and get $1,000 in credit on your account.
4:26 Lenny Rachitsky? Adam Fishman, welcome to the podcast.
4:29 Speaker 00 Thanks for having me, Lenny. Super excited to be here. It's a pleasure to be on chatting with you today.
4:36 Lenny Rachitsky? It's even more my pleasure. Thank you for being here. To set a little context for listeners that don't know too much about you yet, can you spend 45 seconds giving us a little overview of all of the wonderful things that you've done in your career?
4:50 Speaker 00 I'm setting my timer for 45 seconds.
4:52 Lenny Rachitsky? And start.
4:55 Speaker 00 So I've been the Chief Product Officer and VP of Growth and Product at a bunch of different companies. Imperfect Foods, Patreon, Lyft, the precursor to Lyft, which was Zimride, to name a few. Now I do three things primarily. I'm an EIR at Reforge and a program partner, which means I create courses. I run an advisory practice on growth and product strategy, which keeps me pretty busy. And then I recently started a newsletter, which was pretty much inspired by your work in this area over the last several years. Those are the three pillars of my life these days, my professional life at least.
5:31 Lenny Rachitsky? Nailed it. Wow, that was very contained and clear. Let's plug the newsletter real quick. What's the URL? Is it fishmanafnewsletter.com?
5:39 Speaker 00 It is fishmanafnewsletter.com. I'm blessed with great initials that allow me to have that name for a newsletter.
5:47 Lenny Rachitsky? It's not obvious. Adam Fishman AF. There you go. That's the acronym. And then in terms of the advising, just to set this expectation, are you looking for more clients or are you capped out? How should people think about that as they listen?
5:58 Speaker 00 Well, I'm pretty busy, but it is a bit of a revolving door. So there's always some pipeline. So even if I can't work with folks right now, sometimes it makes sense for me to work with them a few months down the road. So always open to new interests and learning about new companies.
6:12 Lenny Rachitsky? All right, great. We'll share how to contact you at the end of this and it'll be in the show notes. One question I wanted to ask off the bat is Lyft, you were there super early. I imagine it was an incredibly wild ride. I'm curious, what's the most tangible memory you have of your time at Lyft?
6:29 Speaker 00 I have a ton of memories from the almost three years that I was there, but I think. The biggest one and probably the most tactile or memorable thing was when we launched 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 the office with a pink mustache on the front of it, and then a bunch of drivers piled out of it and met the press members and were high-fiving people and stuff like that. And then we also served a giant pink mustache cake at this event. So that's, you know, of all of the things there, that one kind of sticks in my head the most.
7:14 Lenny Rachitsky? I love that. I hope there was no hair in this mustache cake.
7:17 Speaker 00 No, no, there was not. It was delicious.
7:21 Lenny Rachitsky? Okay, awesome. Another question I always have for folks that worked at Lyft or at Uber is how they feel about Super Pumped and what it's like watching that, if you've seen it, what it's like watching the story of Uber and especially where you're at.
7:35 Speaker 00 I have seen it. I actually read the book first. I've been a pretty big fan of Mike Isaac, who's the New York Times reporter who wrote it. So I've been a big fan of his reporting for a long time. I connected with him a bit while he was writing the book. And I would say like, there were parts of it that were painful. It was like re-navigating, re-litigating a history that I had lived through already. And 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 the open finally. Things that like, were hard to talk about, like about competitive practices and stuff like that and just like shady things.
8:20 Speaker 00 And some part of me was happy that it was out there. And then one other thing separately, so I actually was interviewing with Joseph Gordon-Levitt to be an advisor with his company HitRecord while he was filming Super Pumped. And we had this conversation over Zoom when he was on break in between scenes of filming the show. And for those who don't know, he's the guy that plays Travis Kalanick, the CEO and founder of Uber. So he did this interview with me and he was like in his trailer on set, fully decked out as TK in his look with like his hair slicked back. And it was really kind of funny and also cool to see him in this context. And he is probably the polar opposite from Travis Kalanick.
9:05 Speaker 00 Obviously, they're both super successful, but he's a really, JGLs are really down to earth, like nice, very like family oriented, kind of calm guy. So anyways, this is a funny story of my time meeting and interviewing with him.
9:19 Lenny Rachitsky? That is amazing. Did you slip in a couple of Lyft facts to help Lyft look a little happier?
9:25 Speaker 00 I did. We talked a bit about that journey and I asked him some questions about how he like prepared for the role and stuff like that. And so, yeah, it was, it was, it was pretty fun. We kind of swapped some, some stories and stuff. So, yeah, it was neat.
9:37 Lenny Rachitsky? Fun fact, my mom wanted me to dress like Joseph Gordon-Levitt. And I was like, she should look like this guy. Wear some vests. This guy's looking good. Kind of looks like you a little bit.
9:48 Speaker 00 I see that. I do see that. That's awesome. Way to go, mom.
9:51 Lenny Rachitsky? Yeah, and then I'll follow her advice. Maybe I should have.
9:54 Speaker 00 Didn't work out so well.
9:56 Lenny Rachitsky? Yeah. Okay. So transitioning to kind of the meat of our chat, there's kind of three things I wanted to spend our time chatting about. One is your growth competency model, which essentially is this post you wrote recently that kind of tells founders how to hire and how to evaluate growth people. Two, I want to chat about onboarding flows. You have a lot of really interesting experience optimizing onboarding flows and the impact that's had. And then three is how to choose a company to work at. You've chosen a lot of really interesting companies and you have some cool insights around how to think about that. Does that sound good?
10:26 Speaker 00 Sounds great. I've also chosen some bad companies in my time too, so we can talk about the good, the bad and the ugly.
10:32 Lenny Rachitsky? Okay, excited to hear about that. So first, we talked about this briefly. You've started to do a lot more writing. You have this newsletter, FishmanAFnewsletter.com. And you recently wrote this really epic piece called the Growth Competency Model, which essentially lays out what to look for in a growth leader, how to hire, how to evaluate, what to concentrate skills on, things like that. First question, just what made you feel like you had to write this? What mistakes have you found founders make when hiring and evaluating growth leaders?
10:59 Speaker 00 Yeah. So first I'm going to put up my new background here, which is my growth competency model background. For those watching on YouTube, I have a funny graphic in the background for this. So I guess the reason that I wrote this, there were sort of a few reasons that I wrote it. And one is it really, it felt necessary to write it. And it, at first it's, I don't think I've ever come across this type of canonical reference before around how to hire and plan for growth. So that's number one. I didn't think it existed. It needed to exist. Two, as an advisor and someone who has held the head of growth role many times, I get asked this question a lot. I get asked all the time that, how do you hire growth people?
11:43 Speaker 00 And it's usually something like, hey, how do we find you 10 years earlier in your career? And it feels like that question is missing the first principles approach to hiring a growth person. If you're doing that, you're just pattern matching to me. And I may not be the best person, right? Or somebody who looks like me may not be the best person. So I think we're missing that. And then third, one of the programs that I'm currently creating is around growth leadership. And so I've been thinking a lot about what it takes to be an exceptional growth leader, how you hire other people onto your team and create balanced teams. And this is going to be a really important component of that program.
12:26 Speaker 00 So it was just really top of mind. So yeah, that's why I wrote it.
12:30 Lenny Rachitsky? Let me ask one quick question. And I think you were about to start answering why, like one mistakes founders make. But I guess it's less of a question. I know this was kind of built on another model for product management, which is really awesome. And I love that there's this kind of growing fountain of career ladders, competencies per function. And so I don't know if there's been one that's really great for design and engineering. But I love that this is happening. And so first of all, I just want to say, I appreciate that you put in the time to think this through.
12:54 Speaker 00 Cool. Thank you. Thank you. Yeah, I do think we need more of these. I think we need one for marketers. I think we need one for engineers, designers, research, probably. There's probably a bunch of functions that could benefit from some canonicalized like resource around this stuff. So yeah, some myths and mistakes that I think founders made and that I've made. I've definitely lived through some mistakes, a few experiences where I was hired into a company where the founder had really messed up expectations of what a growth person should be doing, what I should be doing. And I wanted to kind of set the record straight for founders because they are the folks who hire for this and other leaders. So one example that comes to mind is
13:37 Speaker 00 I did a very brief stint at a company called Wiseant in between Lyft and Patreon. And the founders of that company, so Wiseant was a tutoring marketplace. It was acquired by a company not too long ago, so it's now part of a bigger learning company. And the founders of that company were looking for what I would call like a silver bullet strategy to their growth challenges. And what they really needed, and I was sort of naive and didn't think about asking these questions or about evaluating this properly. What they really needed was to create a strategy to add on new growth loops and a system for how to execute against that strategy. If we had talked about that as part of evaluating each other,
14:17 Speaker 00 as part of them evaluating me, it would have given me a lot of confidence that, you know, it was the right hire to me. But the problem was they didn't approach it that way. They didn't ask me those questions. And I was too naive to recognize that like, hey, they're not actually evaluating this with the competencies that you would expect for a growth leader. Executing a growth strategy takes time and patience, and they didn't really have it. And overall, like it ended rather unsuccessfully. 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. And I think all of it comes back to that they didn't have a really strong set of criteria on what it meant to hire a great growth person.
15:02 Speaker 00 And so if I can help even just a little bit with founders making that decision better, it'll lead to fewer mismatches, I think, in the hiring process.
15:11 Lenny Rachitsky? Awesome. Let's get into it. What are the components of this model? And you can pull it back up again for folks on YouTube.
15:16 Speaker 00 Okay.
15:17 Lenny Rachitsky? To follow along.
15:17 Speaker 00 Coming back.
15:18 Lenny Rachitsky? It's like a TikTok.
15:19 Speaker 00 The whole thing looks like a big circle and there's four sort of wedges in that circle, four equal parts. And I think the answer of what are the components, what should people look for really? You know, I'll give the PM answer, which is it depends. And what does it depend on? It depends on the state of the team and where the skill gaps are. So the goal of the competency model is not to find a unicorn human being that is like an 11 out of 10 on every one of these things. Cause frankly, that person doesn't exist. Like I am not an 11 out of 10 on these skills and I have been a growth executive at many companies. I consider myself to be pretty good at the job. The goal is to create a well-rounded team so that you're hiring and balancing skills
16:03 Speaker 00 across your team and that you don't have any gaps in your portfolio. And so when you think about it, there are four main components to the growth competency model. And the four big components or buckets are growth execution, customer knowledge, growth strategy. And then the last one is communication and influence. And each of those has three really specific skills. And so to give an example, let's like break down growth execution, for example, which is kind of one of the very first ones that you should be good at if you're a growth practitioner. Within this competency grouping, there's three individual competencies that are channel fluency, experimentation, and what I'd call productizing learnings.
16:45 Speaker 00 And so you can evaluate and ask questions to understand how good people are at these different things and what their experience has been with them. So like in productizing learnings, for example, one of the key things that a growth person has to do is generate hypotheses, learn from those hypotheses, and then translate that into changes that they're making in the product. And you want to find somebody who has a track record of at least understanding how to take something they have learned. That might be an experiment or something that's very MVP and turn that into something that has hooks into different areas of the product. And so that's a critical skill to evaluate and one of like an example of the overall set of competencies.
17:26 Lenny Rachitsky? To throw in a question real quick, is one way to use this model, coming back to your Wysant example, where there's this misalignment between you and the founder, to like sit down and look at this circle here and be like, here's where I'm strong, here's where maybe we need to hire someone to take over.
17:40 Speaker 00 Yeah, absolutely. You can almost use it as a reverse interviewing characteristic and say, what are the competencies you, founder, CEO, care about? What's really important to you for the first person in this role? Or the expectations that you have of what I will bring to the table? And then you can be really candid about what you're good at and what you're not good at, where you're kind of developing. So yeah, I agree with that for sure.
18:06 Lenny Rachitsky? Awesome. I know this also plays into evaluating your performance and it could be like, hey, Adam, here's the three things that we want to focus on in the next cycle.
18:13 Speaker 00 For sure. Yeah, it's really a good sort of foundational framework for being really concrete and specific in the feedback that you provide someone. So rather than saying, Adam, you really need to be more strategic, which everybody's heard that at some point and it's kind of like, well, what do you mean? You can say, hey, we need to work on the area of growth strategy and that means I need to see better modeling of loops out of you, better understanding, communication of what those loops are. And you can give really concrete feedback.
18:44 Lenny Rachitsky? Awesome. So we've talked about growth execution. What's next?
18:47 Speaker 00 The next one is what I would call customer knowledge. And within customer knowledge, there's a set of things. And really this is about sort of data fluency and instrumentation, understanding user psychology, which is a big one. And then this idea of being able to kind of experiment and learn over time and how you develop your narrative and your creative approach to talking to customers. I love user psychology and it's like one of the things that I think attracted me to growth and to product. I studied consumer psychology when I was in college and I'm just probably would have been a psychologist if not for a growth practitioner, which is sort of a weird.
19:33 Speaker 00 Other approach I could have taken in my career, but
19:35 Lenny Rachitsky? It's not too late. It's not too late to pivot.
19:37 Speaker 00 Second career. Yeah. Actually announcing today, I'm pivoting the newsletter to just talk about therapy and psychology.
19:43 Lenny Rachitsky? This is gonna be the title of the podcast.
19:47 Speaker 00 Awesome. So like user psychology, I think one of the things that that people don't easily understand is that 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. How low are their lows? How high are their highs? Why are they seeking out your product? And it often, as I mentioned, stems from some emotional challenge that they're having or something that they're seeking. And it's not because your product is the best chatbot or because it gives the best answers. There's a different kind of thing that they're trying to solve. And only when you address that can you move on to those other sorts of things.
20:30 Speaker 00 So that's sort of the second competency is is customer knowledge.
20:34 Lenny Rachitsky? It reminds me of something I mentioned on some podcasts recently. This tweet that one of the Collison brothers tweeted about how user research is often misunderstood in that people think you do user research and that informs what you build. And instead, the way you think about it is user research informs your model of your customer. And that model informs what you build. And the more user research you do, the more your model evolves to help you understand the customer. And that's been really helpful for me because I never thought of it that way.
21:04 Speaker 00 Yeah, I think that's a great example. I mean, seeking the solution in a customer interview is never, never gonna work, right? You seek to understand and then you take that away. And you can think through what the model should look like and how things should change as a result. Yeah, that's great. I can cover the third and fourth competency and I'll try to be a little more brief on that.
21:26 Lenny Rachitsky? No, no, no.
21:28 Speaker 00 The third competency is growth strategy. And now the third and fourth competencies, I would say, are a bit more advanced topics. And again, remember when I said people index higher or lower on these as they go across their career? I would expect a a more junior growth person to not necessarily.
21:49 Speaker 00 Be a 10 out of 10 on strategy and communication. These are things that you really have to work at a long time. They tend to be softer skills in a lot of cases. And you learn best by either getting it very right or getting it very wrong. And so you've got to put in the time to develop these. But in growth strategy, there's three. The first one is growth loop modeling. So really understanding how you grow and where you should be spending your time. What acquires users, what retains them, what monetizes them. The second one is capital allocation and forecasting. This is basically where are you deploying either your money, your people? How are you managing the portfolio? And how are you projecting that out into the future? And that's a really hard one.
22:33 Speaker 00 Like you have to become best buddies with your finance friends in order to do that. And so anyways, that's capital allocation and forecasting. And then the third one is prioritization and roadmapping. So you have to be able to sequence the work, much like in building a product, right? Building your growth strategy. You have to sequence it. That sequence has to make sense based on your growth models. You have to have the capital or the people to allocate to that stuff. And you have to be able to build a series of hypotheses and a series of solutions to test against those hypotheses. So that you can learn and then productize those learnings. And there's a lot of ways to test this sort of stuff. Situational behavioral interviewing. I talk a lot about this in my posts on hiring growth.
23:17 Speaker 00 There's like very specific questions you can ask to understand what people have done or what they might do in different situations. There's case studies and things like that. So that's the third one. And then the fourth one is communication and influence. And I would say, I think you probably know this as a PM. Influence is one of the biggest and hardest skills to develop. It's no different in a growth practitioner. And in some cases, it can even be harder because sometimes people come in with a preconceived notion of what growth is and isn't, and you have to change their mind. And so within communication and influence, there's strategic communication. So how do a series of experiments and a series of things that you're trying
24:01 Speaker 00 fit into the overall picture of a bigger bet that you're taking? How do you lead a team? So team leadership is a big part of communication and influence. And then how do you manage stakeholders? And this is hard in growth because often growth can be viewed as at odds with really thoughtful and quality craftsmanship and product building, but it's not. Those things go hand in hand. And so you really have to kind of like win people over on what it means to do growth. And I would say this is like the pinnacle, right? This is the hardest one. It's a lifelong journey. It relies very extensively on understanding people and who you're talking to.
24:43 Speaker 00 And those people can be very different from company to company and the currency that they trade in can be really different. And so this one is one where you have to go back to square one and relearn who the people are that you're working with every time you step into a new role or a new company or get a new leader or something like that. So it can be really challenging and it's sort of never done.
25:03 Lenny Rachitsky? That component of the competency model is like the PM of the growth PM role feels like if you were to do these Venn diagram, the two roles feels like that's a big part of the overlap.
25:13 Speaker 00 Yep, absolutely. There's a lot of overlap between exceptional product managers and exceptional growth practitioners. I think sometimes they just use the skills in different ways. So you need to be great at product strategy to be a product leader. You need to be great at growth strategy to be a growth leader. Just what those things look like can be different between the two, but they're both required skills, required competencies to be exceptional at the role.
25:38 Lenny Rachitsky? So just to rehash, the four categories are communication, influence, growth execution, customer knowledge and growth strategy. You mentioned earlier that people often come to you and they're like, how do we find another Adam? And your feedback is one, how do you know that's exactly what you need? And then two, find someone that's up and coming more because it's so hard to find folks like you that are actually ready to like take on a head of growth role. So a question for you is one is do you recommend founders focus on finding someone that's more up and coming and fast learning with a high trajectory? And if so, which of these components would you suggest they look for most?
26:19 Speaker 00 One of the challenges of hiring a senior person is that they're all off like writing newsletters and making podcasts. Not that we know anybody who does that or anything.
26:27 Lenny Rachitsky? Bullshit. What is that?
26:28 Speaker 00 Yeah. So I don't want to, right now, go back and work at a company again. I'm enjoying what I'm doing. And so it's hard to get me, right? But also, you don't want me, I think, when you're doing this for the first time. So I think the key there is smart and driven people, for sure. Age and like youth is a bit relative, I'd say. So like, I would think about hiring somebody who you might say is less experienced in growth. But they could be very senior in another aspect of their career. You can also benefit from hiring somebody internally who wants to branch out into growth. And one of the benefits that you get from that is a lot of time, they have one of those competencies really nailed already.
27:09 Speaker 00 Could be like customer knowledge. They might understand your customer base super well because they're already inside the company. So if you're going to hire a junior person, the key is how do you help them learn? And I think if you don't know what you're doing as the founder or the leader, it's hard. You're not going to be able to help them yourself. So you've got to be willing to invest in advisors like me, outside education, mentorship, coaching. Otherwise, what's going to happen is that very driven and hungry and enthusiastic person is going to run through a lot of brick walls, which is great, except they're going to miss the fact that the door was standing right next to the wall that they just ran through. And you're going to end up with a lot of bricks on the ground.
27:54 Lenny Rachitsky? Excellent metaphor.
27:56 Speaker 00 Yeah, thank you. And so like, I have some examples of both hiring people and moving people over in my, in my career. So I think tangible examples are really helpful here. So when I was at Lyft, I had the privilege of hiring that young, smart and driven person a bunch of times. But one of the people who comes to mind is a guy named Ben Lazzier. You should have him on the podcast at some point. He's French. It's very nice to listen to. He was most recently VP of Product at Thumbtack, but he was definitely not that when I hired him. He was kind of a jack of all trades marketer, working at a corporate catering startup when I hired him at Lyft. And he had nailed most of what the growth execution and the customer knowledge competencies.
28:38 Speaker 00 One was he was an avid Lyft user himself, so he really understood the product really well. And also, he was just very thoughtful about how he executed, how he experimented. He had done a lot of it and he was very skilled at pulling them off in a very small environment because he just had to be. And those are the two kind of most important competencies when you're bringing in a younger, sort of earlier stage person. Because, you know, 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
29:22 Speaker 00 developed those by the time you're an adult, I don't know that I'm going to be able to teach you and I'm certainly probably not the right person to teach you. You should definitely get some outside assistance with that. And so I like to get those types, people that have those things if I'm hiring that generally inexperienced growth practitioner.
29:42 Lenny Rachitsky? And the two things you said are customer knowledge and execution. Is that the two?
29:45 Speaker 00 Yes, customer knowledge and growth execution. And so let me tell you an execution story about Ben really quick. So this is how I knew, this comes also down to work ethic too. So we interviewed Ben and it was like a long day of interviews in a tiny glass conference room and Blift was like, I don't know, 30 people or something at the time. At one of the interview breaks, Ben had come over and he didn't have his computer and like anything like that. And so he was ducking out of work to do the interview. And he actually came out of the office and he is like, "Hey, does anybody have a computer that I can borrow?" And so we gave him this like kind of old crappy Chromebook. And I was like, "Why do you need a computer?" And he's like, "I have to go like edit this file and do this thing and check something in at work and deploy this
30:31 Speaker 00 thing or whatever." And I'm like, "Wow, this is a guy that like really knows how to get stuff done and is so much so that he's like pausing his interview process so that he could go get a thing done for his company that he's actively trying to leave. But he's got this work ethic and this execution. And that really stuck with me and he probably would remember this story if we brought it up. So the time he borrowed a crappy Chromebook laptop to do work at the job that he was trying to leave.
30:59 Lenny Rachitsky? What are the chances that was staged?
31:01 Speaker 00 He seemed very innocent, so I think not staged. But I could be, I could be wrong. But now everyone that interviews is going to ask to borrow a laptop and like check in some work.
31:11 Lenny Rachitsky? The phone call. "Adam, you need to fix something."
31:15 Speaker 00 That's right. So that's Ben. And then on the other side, and I'll cover this one really quickly. On the other side of moving somebody over internally, I had equally great success with that. So there was another person named Sean at Patreon who was a marketer. Again, sort of like a jack of all trades marketer. And I think I have a propensity and a bias towards folks like that because that's one of the ways that I started my career was in marketing. But anyways, I moved him over from marketing to being a growth PM, sort of an entry level growth PM. And he had a ton of the execution skills, ability to prioritize really well and customer knowledge skills as well.
31:56 Speaker 00 More so on the customer side because he was an internal transfer. So he really knew our customers. He'd spent tons of time talking to people, studying data and things like that. And he had a really great fluency with data and a drive to continue improving his ability to access and pull out insights and information. And so he turned out to be really great, but just a very different profile of a person than Ben was. And here's an internal hire versus an external hire. So you can have success with both. But I think you really have to make sure that there's some foundational things that are in place, like that ability to get customer knowledge and execute.
32:33 Lenny Rachitsky? If founders listening, trying to decide we're hiring a head of growth or a new growth person, would you push them one way or the other, internal hire versus finding someone up and coming, smart?
32:44 Speaker 00 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 the practice. And one of the ways that can happen is if you take a chance on somebody who has demonstrated a good track record in some other aspect of your business. So I tend to recommend internal. I think you have faster time to results. I think you know what you're getting better and in much less likelihood of making the wrong hire there. So I bias towards internal hires.
33:25 Lenny Rachitsky? Awesome. And I think partly I feel that too, because there's so much content and training for growth these days, that somebody that has that background in your company and is already motivated and excited, and then can just learn, go to a Reforge course, read certain newsletters, feels like it's a lot easier to ramp up. Except, I always feel like if you need someone for SEO or paid growth, that's a hard thing to learn. What's your take there?
33:50 Speaker 00 I would bucket that type of person into like sort of a specialist. And one of the archetypes that I talk about is this idea of the painter versus the architect versus the surgeon. And the surgeon is your precision person. I don't actually recommend hiring that as your first hire. But when you are on to 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. And I can't just teach someone SEO over the course of a weekend and expect that they're really gonna get it. In those cases, I think hiring that specialist
34:34 Speaker 00 or that kind of like surgeon is the right approach. Once you've got some of the foundational stuff in place.
34:41 Lenny Rachitsky? Awesome. Great. Yeah, it feels like there's like still a lot of dark art in those two specialties that take years of experience.
34:49 Lenny Rachitsky? This episode is brought to you by Eppo. Epo is a next generation A/B testing platform built by Airbnb alums for modern growth teams. Companies like Netlify, Contentful, and Cameo rely on Eppo to power their experiments. Wherever you work, running experiments is increasingly essential, but there are no commercial tools that integrate with a modern growth team stack. This leads to wasted time building internal tools, or trying to run your experiments through a clunky marketing tool. When I was at Airbnb, one of the things that I loved about our experimentation platform was being able to easily slice results by device, by country, and by user stage. Epo does all that and more, delivering results quickly, avoiding annoying prolonged analytics
35:31 Lenny Rachitsky? cycles, and helping you easily get to the root cause of any issue you discover. Epo lets you go beyond basic click-through metrics and instead use your North Star metrics like activation, retention, subscriptions, and payments. And Eppo supports tests on the front end, the back end, email marketing, and even machine learning clients. Check out Eppo at geteppo.com, get E P P O dot com, and 10x your experiment velocity. This is a good time to segue to our second topic, which is onboarding. I know you're a big proponent of spending time onboarding, optimizing onboarding. How have you found onboarding to be as a lever for growth and just what gets you excited about investing in onboarding?
36:12 Speaker 00 I love onboarding. I probably do at least in an onboarding project, at least one with every company that I've worked for and a lot that I advise. The first thing I would say is onboarding is the only part of your product experience that 100% of people are ever going to touch. Good luck getting 100% feature adoption of anything else in your product, right? But onboarding is the thing that you have to go through in order to use the product. It's also the first opportunity that you have as a company to kind of deliver on the promise that you made out in the marketplace. So I like to think of like, your brand is the promise that you're making and your product
36:57 Speaker 00 experience is your delivery of that promise. And those two things have to be in lockstep with each other, or you're going to have mismatched expectations and some really disappointed customers. So this is the first chance that a customer has to be really excited or really disappointed in what they thought they were getting. So don't mess that up. And the third thing I would say is 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 motivated, right?
37:37 Speaker 00 And so it's an opportunity for you to put some friction in place and learn a lot about them. Because they will knock down doors to get to your product. So that's why I think it's a super powerful lever for growth and I've worked on this. We worked on this extensively at Lyft, at Patreon, Yzent, Imperfect Foods just released some onboarding improvements that we had created when I was there, which was nice to see that finally come to light. So yeah, I've done this pretty much everywhere at some point.
38:07 Lenny Rachitsky? What sort of impact have you seen from working on onboarding to give people a sense of like, oh, wow, this is kind of what I can get if I get some time here?
38:15 Speaker 00 One of the things that onboarding really drives is habit formation with the product, which leads to retention. And so you should expect to improve your overall cohort retention curves by focusing on the onboarding and activation experience. I have seen companies shift their curve outward by 10, 15, 20 percentage points from making those changes. Especially when you consider that churn is most likely to happen in the very earliest usage of the product. If you can get people past that hump, it's a really invaluable part of the product to work on. So like, I'll give you a really concrete example. At Patreon, one of the places we worked on onboarding really extensively and the onboarding experience was one of the teams
39:01 Speaker 00 that we had on growth at Patreon. We did a lot of experimentation around kind of the earliest, what we would call product-led sales now. When do you connect a human being with a creator and the onboarding experience? And what is that impact? And how do you connect them with the right person? Or with the right creator when there are tens of thousands going through that onboarding journey every week? 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%.
39:43 Speaker 00 Why that mattered is because the second month that you processed payments on the platform was a key input into your LTV on the platform. So by improving a creator's first and second month revenue by 25%, we were then able to improve their overall value on Patreon by an equivalent amount, which is pretty massive. Moving anything by 25% is really impressive. So that was human intervention. And then we actually started to productize the stuff that the humans were doing. And so what is not scalable when you're using people becomes very scalable if you can replicate components of that with technology. And sort of that was like the next phase.
40:26 Speaker 00 And we get back to that growth execution thing that I talked about and productizing learnings. That is an example of how you go from, we've learned some things by humans that have made a 25% impact to now we're building these into the product. And so that's a really good example, I think, of Patreon and one of the impacts that we had on creator earnings, retention, and their overall success on the platform.
40:49 Lenny Rachitsky? That's an amazing example. In case it's useful to a person working on the onboarding, can you share any more about what you actually did there? You kind of create some algorithm of this type of person will connect them to a person and then you productize it. Is there anything more you could share there that might be useful to folks?
41:06 Speaker 00 Gosh, we did so much, so I'll try to pull out like a couple of examples. So one of the things that we did, and again, I spoke to the fact that people are really motivated in your onboarding experience. One of the first things we did was we tried to identify better who a creator was in the onboarding experience and who they were meant, how big is their audience on a bunch of those channels where they manage communities, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Discord, YouTube, et cetera? And then how engaged was that audience? It's one thing if you make crazy cat videos on YouTube and you have a million subscribers. It's another thing if every time you publish a video, all billion of those people watch it, comment on it, share it, et cetera.
41:49 Speaker 00 And so we would ask creators to connect various accounts to Patreon, maybe through authing with YouTube or Spotify or Instagram or Facebook or something like that, Twitter.
42:04 Speaker 00 And then we would pull in the data into our backend and identify people who had large followings and also heavily engaged followings based on a set of criteria per channel. And again, this was not just like me inventing this, like we had a data scientist's team that we worked very closely with to kind of figure out what was important and what wasn't in this model. And then if you were one of those people that had a high propensity for success, high potential creators, we would siphon them off from the regular self-guided onboarding and basically land them in the lap of a human being who could engage with them, reach out, get them even more excited and start talking about the best things to do.
42:46 Speaker 00 And then the productization of that, the best things to do turned out to be things like one of our product principles, which became opinionated defaults, which was 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. So the creator could still make the choice to do the wrong thing. They could still set up a single tier when we knew that a three-tiered pricing model actually would work better for them. Or they could choose to set up 40 tiers when we knew that the sweet spot was three to five. Or perhaps make their lowest-priced
43:28 Speaker 00 tier a dollar instead of what we recommended, which was like three or $5 entry points. So they could do all that stuff, but we made it difficult for them to do it. We put more friction in place when they were trying to change some of those defaults because we had learned across a universe of creators, hundreds of thousands of people, what worked best. And so putting in those guardrails and those like default things was a huge lever for us to kind of drive the behavior that we wanted. And again, we learned that from human intervention with the right types of creators, then detecting those people and putting in the guardrails in the product themselves and making those recommendations inside the product experience. And they were pricing.
44:13 Speaker 00 Tier structure, how you actually write your page, all of that sort of stuff.
44:18 Lenny Rachitsky? Such a great example. It reminds me, we had exactly the same situation at Airbnb that you just made me think about. We called it smart defaults. What was your term? Opinionated defaults?
44:28 Speaker 00 Opinionated defaults, yeah.
44:30 Lenny Rachitsky? I like that. So at Airbnb, we, we had a bunch of calendar settings, like when a host signs up on the host side, that's where I spend a lot of my time. We had Instant Book, which is basically you sign up as a host and people can book you instantly. That kind of became the default for Airbnb. And so to make that successful, hosts had to have their calendar be accurate from the beginning.
44:49 Speaker 00 Yeah.
44:50 Lenny Rachitsky? And so we got to eventually, as we tried to figure out, are you a professional host that knows what you're doing? Are you a mom and pop that's just like trying this out? And then based on that, either block your entire calendar, keep it all open or somewhere in between. And it's interesting that it connects to your point about, and I was going to come back to this, that a lot of people think of onboarding as a conversion opportunity. And it definitely is, but to your point, even more interestingly, it's a retention opportunity because in the Airbnb case, host sign up. They get booked for a day. They don't want to host. They're like, shit, what the hell's going on here? I'm out. And so I was, I wanted to ask you, how should folks think about onboarding conversion versus retention? And why is it so powerful for retention?
45:32 Speaker 00 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 right people for your product. Which means they wouldn't have been engaged customers. They probably would have churned. So just by the nature of actually weeding out some people, you're going to improve retention. Because the people who are going through are the people who are much more highly qualified. And so I think that's also why onboarding is so challenging, because you have to figure out what that sweet spot is, right?
46:17 Speaker 00 You could actually reduce conversion to a point where it's not offset. By improvements in retention and you'd be doing the wrong thing. So when you're experimenting, you have to look at sort of these push and pull metrics of these like opposing metrics. But overall, I find that the biggest impact that you'll have is on retaining users because you are trying to connect them to the value that your product offers. And form a habit. And if you form that habit early on, they're going to stick around because they're going to get it. They're going to get the benefit of the product and they're going to be excited to stay and then tell more people about it. So that's why I think it's a much bigger impact on retention than conversion.
47:01 Lenny Rachitsky? Obviously, retention is a longer tail metric and conversion is like immediate. Do you have any tips for folks that are like, oh, my God, how do I know if this conversion hit is worth retention increasing potentially?
47:13 Speaker 00 Yeah, I think, you know, the answer is not wait 90 days to find out, right? Like, nobody has that kind of time. And so what I tend to do is look at proxy metrics. So there are proxies for things like 90 day retention. 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 platform and that sort of thing had a lot to do with how big and successful you would be and therefore how well you would retain.
47:52 Speaker 00 And so we looked at very early signals to understand and evaluate how good someone was going to be. We also did a lot of qualitative screening in the beginning. So as people went through, we would take samplings of creators who were onboarding and signing up and launching their pages. And we would actually. Look at who the creator was and what they were doing. And then we would kind of be able to run it through our model to say, oh, it looks like we're getting a lot of the right kind of people going through and doing the right behaviors. Therefore, we're very confident that they're going to retain better and do the right things. So yeah, proxy metrics are the key there.
48:32 Lenny Rachitsky? Awesome. So part of this is find this leading indicator proxy metric. And then to your point, maybe build a little bit of a heuristic that's like, okay, this is qualitatively looking like it's doing the right sort of things to our new users.
48:45 Speaker 00 Yep.
48:45 Lenny Rachitsky? Maybe our last question on onboarding is at Airbnb and I imagine many companies, there's this like constant desire to like, let's just redo this whole thing. Let's just redesign it. Let's start again. And my question to you is just like, how much is too much on redoing, rethinking, onboarding, optimizing, micro optimizing? Any answers there?
49:05 Speaker 00 I would say first, like, I very strongly dislike the idea of redesigning something for redesigning sake. So I think that it is true that you should spend a lot of time on onboarding and you should regularly revisit it as you learn new things about your users. So even at Patreon, we would work on onboarding and then we'd take a beat. We'd sort of let it go for a while, improved. And then as we learn new things, we would find ways to fold those back into onboarding. So I find that it's acceptable to revisit when you are learning net new principles about your customers or something new about your growth model where onboarding can directly
49:50 Speaker 00 influence. So as we learned at Patreon, what like the right tier construction was, or the right way to kind of talk about your Patreon page, or the right way to message it in the beginning. We would go back and say, how do we build this newfound knowledge into an experience that sets someone up for success? But if we weren't gaining new insights, we weren't just 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.
50:33 Speaker 00 And only when you discover something really fundamentally net new, will it have an outsized impact on retention or you know, the success of early users. So don't just redesign for redesign sake. Make sure there's a, a new hard earned insight that you've got before you do it.
50:50 Lenny Rachitsky? Do you think at scale companies, I don't know, maybe like after hundreds of people, they should have a team, like an onboarding optimization team. I find that often is true. And I guess, do you think that makes sense?
51:02 Speaker 00 Yeah, I think it's very helpful. And the reason I think it's helpful is because I do think it's easy to walk away from onboarding because there's so many other things to work on. And to lose sight of the fact is just such a critical part of the experience. And I, I don't know how many times I've come into a company and they're like, oh yeah, we built that a long time ago. And like, we've never looked at it again. It's been a few years, but really having a real problem with retention and people dropping off in the first seven days. And I'm like, yeah, I think it's time we take another look at the onboarding experience. Products change quite a bit, like maybe people are getting something that's different
51:44 Speaker 00 than they expect, or maybe we know a lot more that we can use to influence decisions that they make. So I do think it is beneficial to have that team, or at least a team that part of their job is the activation experience. And therefore some part of their roadmap is working on onboarding and then other aspects of activation. So it may not be what they work on 12 months out of the year, but maybe for a quarter or two in a given year.
52:13 Lenny Rachitsky? Cool. And there's a LinkedIn post you wrote with a bunch of examples of onboarding work you've done. So we're going to include that in the show notes for folks that are hoping for more examples. Yeah. Okay. Third topic, final topic is around company selection and evaluating where to work. And you have this really cool framework that I think you call PMF for candidates. Can you talk about what that is? And then we'll get into it a little bit.
52:34 Speaker 00 Yeah, I somehow stumbled on that name and it just made sense because of the acronym. But I think like I was really motivated to kind of revisit this because as we know in tech, there's been a ton of layoffs, right? And very public layoffs because of the economy, the state of funding, things like that. And I don't think we're done yet. I think we're pretty far from being done. But it's really important, and I've been burned by this a few times, to put some power back in the hands of the people who are actually seeking the jobs, to understand what are some criteria that are important? And these are the criteria that are important to me that help you make decisions about which company I should join, assuming they'll have me.
53:18 Speaker 00 And so the PMF acronym, I mean, we're all familiar with product market fit, right? So in a way, it's both the product market fit for you as a candidate with the company. But then also PMF stands for people, mission, and financials. And these are my three criteria. They may not be yours, Lenny, or they might not be the average person on the, on the street. But the point is that you should have a set of criteria that you are unapologetically rigorous around. And you should learn how to evaluate companies against that set of criteria. First, I guess I'll tell you what I mean by people, mission, and financials.
53:56 Speaker 00 So people is are these folks that I am going to enjoy working with every day, that I'm going to be able to have hard conversations with, that I'm going to be able to disagree with and work through those disagreements and feel better on the other side of that productive disagreement, for example, and get to resolutions. What do I think about my peer set? The leaders, the people below me, if that's the role I'm stepping into, et cetera. So that's like the people dimension. Mission, which is critically important for me, is that if I join a company and I do my job, which often involves growing that company really big, getting a lot of customers,
54:40 Speaker 00 generating a lot of demand and retention and stuff. I want to make sure that a lot of people have a better outcome in life because of that company's existence. And I don't just mean employees and founders having a good financial outcome, which I think is important. But I also mean, like in the case of creators on Patreon. We were building a new way for creators to make money, which they could then use to hire people, create more jobs, make better content, and live their life in a sustainable way so that they weren't a starving artist and they weren't living kind of paycheck to paycheck. So that's really important, the mission aspect. That's got to exist.
55:19 Speaker 00 And then the third one is, and I think really important now, is this idea of financials or fiscal discipline. You've got a lot of companies who raised boatloads of money or did financial planning during the peak of the pandemic and assumed that their business was going to continue operating at the pace that it was operating forever. A lot of those companies are running out of money. They've seen a hit to demand and they've had to lay people off as a result or make really big strategic swings. There are plenty of companies that you're not really hearing about that were more conservative in their approach, that understood
56:00 Speaker 00 and were able to look into the future and be really responsible with their money. And those people are not laying off employees. And so they're not all over LinkedIn talking about it because they're not laying people off. There's no hashtag layoff for them. So that's what I mean by financials. And so that's the PMF framework and evaluating across those dimensions is super important. I've done it two times in the last 10 to 15 years and I've done it poorly two times in the last 15 years. And Lyft and Patreon are two times where I've done it really well. Wise and Imperfect Foods are two times where I personally don't think I've done a good enough job evaluating.
56:41 Speaker 00 Anytime where I've shortcuted my criteria, where I've settled for two out of three or thought one was great when really it wasn't.
56:53 Speaker 00 Has not ended well for me, for the company. It's not that the company imploded, but I found myself out of a job or really frustrated and burned out or something like that. I already talked about the Wising example where we had to lay off a bunch of people because the founders expected something very different than what I expected to be able to deliver. That's a big kind of people miss. And 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
57:38 Speaker 00 because people were kind of at odds with each other all the time and not resolving disagreements productively. And when that happens, it's hard to be a product or a growth leader because you bear the brunt of the angst that people have. So anyways, so those are a couple of examples and some of the characteristics of PMF.
57:57 Lenny Rachitsky? In the case of imperfect foods, what could you have done to have avoided that issue and seen if it was true PMF?
58:04 Speaker 00 I would have tried to observe the inner workings of the C suite a little bit more closely before I accepted an offer to join the company. I would have attended an executive meeting or join them on an offsite. And I think too often candidates don't feel like they can ask for those sorts of things. And it's true, like if you're entering the C suite, you know, you're going to ask for more stuff, you're more experienced. But I also think that's true of a junior employee. You can observe a team meeting. You can observe a product review and understand. You sign an NDA, you promise you won't tell anybody about it, but observe what is happening and the dynamics of that room.
58:48 Speaker 00 Who's doing the talking? How feedback is delivered? Is it constructive? Is it antagonistic, et cetera? So you can observe and then you can also ask questions. So questions that I like to ask are, tell me about the last strategic offsite that you had as a leadership team. Where do people disagree? What was one thing that they disagreed on? And where did you end up on that point? And how did you get there? And I actually asked them to tell me, it's like a reverse behavioral interview question. I asked them to tell me how they navigated it. And I will ask the CEO that and really like dig in on that particular set of questions.
59:28 Speaker 00 Those are the things that I do to evaluate the people dimension, which is one of the hardest, I will say. Financials and mission, little easier to evaluate, but people really require getting to know teams. So it is hard.
59:43 Lenny Rachitsky? That's such a good question to ask. And your point is you can ask that even if you're not a senior leader, you're just like an ICP, I'm joining a team. Is there anything else you think folks can do? So you said join some offsites, maybe ask this question that you shared. Any other tips for folks? Just like to understand if the people are a good fit because, because it's pretty wild. You're going to spend so much time with these people and you meet them like once in a half hour interview. And then you have to decide if that's your life for the next four, four or five, 10 years.
1:00:09 Speaker 00 Well, one thing that I would say is like, you're an investor, right? You invest in a lot of companies, you're an angel investor and you have the Airbnb syndicate and things like that. You evaluate companies when you're making an investment decision, right? Because you're investing a sum of money into that company. And so as a result, you do a lot of diligence on companies or read other people's diligence, something like that. 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. If you make a bad investment decision, okay, we lost there, provided you didn't bankrupt yourself. Even if you did, you can climb out of bankruptcy. There are things that you can do.
1:00:54 Speaker 00 But time is fleeting. And so one of the other things, and this is a thing that you do when you're an investor. Is you do back channel references, right? A company is going to back channel you, the employee. If they're a good company, they're going to talk. If you and I had worked together, Lenny, they might say, hey, let me get in touch with Lenny and see what it was really like working with Adam. Instead of what Adam tells me in the interview process. And you're going to do this as an investor in a company. Let me talk to some people who passed on investing in this company. What did they see that I don't see? And so in this case, you can talk to current or former employees who are not on the interview circuit.
1:01:37 Speaker 00 And because they are not on the interview circuit, their role as a salesperson in the process is greatly diminished. And they can, especially if they're not at the company anymore, give you some pretty candid feedback on what it's like to work there. So I'll give you a really good example that was super impressive. A PM who worked for me at Patreon, who you know, Tal Raviv. Shout out Tal. Shout out to Tal, who works on this product that we're recording on right now. Shout out Riverside.
1:02:08 Speaker 00 When he interviewed at Patreon, he asked me for a list of people who I had managed in the past, and he contacted them to talk to them about what it was like to work for me. That was the first time that it actually ever happened in my career. And I was happy to share that with him. And it represented to me a great level of thoughtfulness and insight around him evaluating what he was getting himself into. And he was an ICPM and he asked that of me, who is a VP, executive level person at the company. So you can do that. And if a company says no, or a person says no, I think that actually says a bit more
1:02:52 Speaker 00 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 people who I've managed before. Even people maybe who I had to let go or something like that, right? Like, I'm confident that those were the right decisions and that those people ended up in a better place and they were taken care of with great care. I would actually. Give a reference, make a reference of somebody who I have let go before, just so that someone could get a real, honest truth of what it was like working with me. So anyways, that's my take on PMF and questions to ask.
1:03:30 Lenny Rachitsky? I imagine you have PMF with your current world. So maybe just to close, can you just remind folks what you're up to now? And where they can find you online and also how listeners can be useful to you?
1:03:42 Speaker 00 First, thanks for having me on, Lenny. This was super fun and I love talking about this stuff and it was great chatting with you. So thank you again for having me.
1:03:50 Lenny Rachitsky? My pleasure.
1:03:51 Speaker 00 There are a few ways to get in touch with me. You can follow me and communicate with me on Twitter. My Twitter handle is Fishman, F I S H M A N A F. And I do respond to messages, provided that they're polite. And you can also find me on LinkedIn. Those are kind of the two platforms I live on most frequently, for better or for worse. And then I now have this newsletter, FishmanAFnewsletter.com. And a lot of what we talked about today are things that I am publishing in written form on that newsletter and plan to continue publishing going forward. And again, it was inspired by the work that you're doing, Lenny. So how can people be helpful to me? I think certainly subscribing to the newsletter and joining that community,
1:04:36 Speaker 00 telling me about the things that are challenging to them so that I can find ways of finding how they meet up with my interests and translating them into written pieces. And then if you're ever interested in exploring an advisory relationship with me or learning more what that looks like, reach out. I'd love to meet you. Advisory work is what pays the bills right now. And my kids need to eat. I probably need to eat a little less, but my kids need to eat. So reach out about an advisory relationship if you're looking for some help on growth or product or general company building, is what I do.
1:05:08 Lenny Rachitsky? Adam, you're so full of insights and lessons and I'm so happy that you've started writing and sharing a lot of these things. Folks should definitely subscribe, FishmanAFnewsletter.com. Adam, thank you for being here.
1:05:18 Speaker 00 Yeah, thanks a lot, Lenny. This was awesome.
1:05:21 Lenny Rachitsky? Thank you so much for listening. If you found this valuable, you can subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. Also, please consider giving us a rating or leaving a review as that really helps other listeners find the podcast. You can find all past episodes or learn more about the show at lennyspodcast.com. See you in the next episode.
Previous Developing a growth model + marketplace growth strategy | Dan Hockenmaier Next Building better roadmaps | Janna Bastow (Mind the Product, ProdPad) Page updated October 26, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated
