YouSaid · the spoken record

Adam Fishman

lines on the record: 79
first: 2022-10-13
most recent: 2022-10-13
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“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. That's what I do.”
2022-10-13 · Lenny's Podcast · How to build a high-performing growth team | Adam Fishman (Patreon, Lyft, Imperfect Foods) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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, 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.”
2022-10-13 · Lenny's Podcast · How to build a high-performing growth team | Adam Fishman (Patreon, Lyft, Imperfect Foods) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“First, thanks for having me on, Lenny. This was super fun. I love talking about this stuff, and it was great chatting with you. So thank you again for having me”
2022-10-13 · Lenny's Podcast · How to build a high-performing growth team | Adam Fishman (Patreon, Lyft, Imperfect Foods) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I have 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 taking 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.”
2022-10-13 · Lenny's Podcast · How to build a high-performing growth team | Adam Fishman (Patreon, Lyft, Imperfect Foods) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 had 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 was 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 about them than 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.”
2022-10-13 · Lenny's Podcast · How to build a high-performing growth team | Adam Fishman (Patreon, Lyft, Imperfect Foods) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You do back channel references, right? A company is going to backchannel 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. And because they are not on the interview circuit, their role as a sales person in the process is greatly diminished. And they can, especially 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.”
2022-10-13 · Lenny's Podcast · How to build a high-performing growth team | Adam Fishman (Patreon, Lyft, Imperfect Foods) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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. But time is fleeting. And so one of the other things, and this is a thing that you do when you're an investor,”
2022-10-13 · Lenny's Podcast · How to build a high-performing growth team | Adam Fishman (Patreon, Lyft, Imperfect Foods) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“People really require getting to know teams. So it is hard. 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 off sites maybe, ask this question that you shared. Any other tips for folks just like to understand if the people are a good fit? 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 decide if that's your life for the next four, four, five, ten years. One thing that I would say is 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 scary.”
2022-10-13 · Lenny's Podcast · How to build a high-performing growth team | Adam Fishman (Patreon, Lyft, Imperfect Foods) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But observe what is happening and the dynamics of that room, 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. Those are the things that I do to evaluate the people dimension, which is one of the hardest, I will say. Financials and mission, a little easier to evaluate.”
2022-10-13 · Lenny's Podcast · How to build a high-performing growth team | Adam Fishman (Patreon, Lyft, Imperfect Foods) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Bear the brunt of the angst that people have. So, anyway, so those are a couple examples and some of the characteristics of PMF. In the case of imperfect foods, what could you have done to have avoided that issue and seen if it was true PMF? 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 joined them on an off-site. 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, your more experience. 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.”
2022-10-13 · Lenny's Podcast · How to build a high-performing growth team | Adam Fishman (Patreon, Lyft, Imperfect Foods) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 WiseN 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. If 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 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”
2022-10-13 · Lenny's Podcast · How to build a high-performing growth team | Adam Fishman (Patreon, Lyft, Imperfect Foods) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 in it and imperfect foods are two times where I personally don't think I've done a good enough job evaluating. Anytime where I've shortcutted my criteria where I've settled for two out of three or thought one was great when really it wasn't.”
2022-10-13 · Lenny's Podcast · How to build a high-performing growth team | Adam Fishman (Patreon, Lyft, Imperfect Foods) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 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.”
2022-10-13 · Lenny's Podcast · How to build a high-performing growth team | Adam Fishman (Patreon, Lyft, Imperfect Foods) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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, 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 they weren't a starving artist and they weren't living kind of paycheck to paycheck. So that's a really important, the mission aspect. That's got to exist.”
2022-10-13 · Lenny's Podcast · How to build a high-performing growth team | Adam Fishman (Patreon, Lyft, Imperfect Foods) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 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. 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 lead?”
2022-10-13 · Lenny's Podcast · How to build a high-performing growth team | Adam Fishman (Patreon, Lyft, Imperfect Foods) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Show notes for folks that are hoping. Yeah, I somehow stumbled on that name, and it just made sense because of the acronym. But I think 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. 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.”
2022-10-13 · Lenny's Podcast · How to build a high-performing growth team | Adam Fishman (Patreon, Lyft, Imperfect Foods) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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.”
2022-10-13 · Lenny's Podcast · How to build a high-performing growth team | Adam Fishman (Patreon, Lyft, Imperfect Foods) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 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 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.”
2022-10-13 · Lenny's Podcast · How to build a high-performing growth team | Adam Fishman (Patreon, Lyft, Imperfect Foods) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 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 really fundamentally net new will it have an outsized impact on retention or the success of early users. So don't just redesign for redesign's sake. Make sure there's a new hard earned insight that you've got before you do it.”
2022-10-13 · Lenny's Podcast · How to build a high-performing growth team | Adam Fishman (Patreon, Lyft, Imperfect Foods) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I would say, first, 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 influence. So as we learned at Patreon what like the right tier construction was or the right way to kind of talk about”
2022-10-13 · Lenny's Podcast · How to build a high-performing growth team | Adam Fishman (Patreon, Lyft, Imperfect Foods) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 behavior. 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.”
2022-10-13 · Lenny's Podcast · How to build a high-performing growth team | Adam Fishman (Patreon, Lyft, Imperfect Foods) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think 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. 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”
2022-10-13 · Lenny's Podcast · How to build a high-performing growth team | Adam Fishman (Patreon, Lyft, Imperfect Foods) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You have to look at sort of these push and pull metrics of these 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.”
2022-10-13 · Lenny's Podcast · How to build a high-performing growth team | Adam Fishman (Patreon, Lyft, Imperfect Foods) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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? 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,”
2022-10-13 · Lenny's Podcast · How to build a high-performing growth team | Adam Fishman (Patreon, Lyft, Imperfect Foods) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 tier structure, how you actually write your page, all of that sort of stuff.”
2022-10-13 · Lenny's Podcast · How to build a high-performing growth team | Adam Fishman (Patreon, Lyft, Imperfect Foods) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 tier a dollar instead of what we recommended which was like three or five dollar 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”
2022-10-13 · Lenny's Podcast · How to build a high-performing growth team | Adam Fishman (Patreon, Lyft, Imperfect Foods) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Facebook or something like that, Twitter. And then we would pull in the data into our back end 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 team that we worked very closely with to kind of figure out what was important, 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 to them about the best things to do. 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 is”
2022-10-13 · Lenny's Podcast · How to build a high-performing growth team | Adam Fishman (Patreon, Lyft, Imperfect Foods) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Gosh, we did so much. So I'll try to pull out like a couple 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 the 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 million of those people watch it, comment on it, share it, et cetera. And so we would ask creators to connect various accounts to Patreon, maybe through authing with YouTube or Spotify or Instagram or”
2022-10-13 · Lenny's Podcast · How to build a high-performing growth team | Adam Fishman (Patreon, Lyft, Imperfect Foods) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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. And we get back to that growth execution thing that I talked about in 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.”
2022-10-13 · Lenny's Podcast · How to build a high-performing growth team | Adam Fishman (Patreon, Lyft, Imperfect Foods) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You connect a human being with a creator and the onboarding experience? And what does 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%. 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”
2022-10-13 · Lenny's Podcast · How to build a high-performing growth team | Adam Fishman (Patreon, Lyft, Imperfect Foods) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 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 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.”
2022-10-13 · Lenny's Podcast · How to build a high-performing growth team | Adam Fishman (Patreon, Lyft, Imperfect Foods) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Everywhere at some point. 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?”
2022-10-13 · Lenny's Podcast · How to build a high-performing growth team | Adam Fishman (Patreon, Lyft, Imperfect Foods) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 out. 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. 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, Wisant, Imperfect Foods just released some onboarding improvements that we”
2022-10-13 · Lenny's Podcast · How to build a high-performing growth team | Adam Fishman (Patreon, Lyft, Imperfect Foods) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I love onboarding. I probably do at least 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 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.”
2022-10-13 · Lenny's Podcast · How to build a high-performing growth team | Adam Fishman (Patreon, Lyft, Imperfect Foods) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 whether 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. And I can't just teach someone SEO over the course of a weekend and expect that they're really going to get it. In those cases, I think hiring that specialist or that kind of like surgeon is the right approach once you've got some of the foundational stuff in place.”
2022-10-13 · Lenny's Podcast · How to build a high-performing growth team | Adam Fishman (Patreon, Lyft, Imperfect Foods) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 biased towards internal hires.”
2022-10-13 · Lenny's Podcast · How to build a high-performing growth team | Adam Fishman (Patreon, Lyft, Imperfect Foods) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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.”
2022-10-13 · Lenny's Podcast · How to build a high-performing growth team | Adam Fishman (Patreon, Lyft, Imperfect Foods) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's right. So that's Ben. And then on the other side, and I'll cover this one really quickly. And 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, 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.”
2022-10-13 · Lenny's Podcast · How to build a high-performing growth team | Adam Fishman (Patreon, Lyft, Imperfect Foods) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 check in some work.”
2022-10-13 · Lenny's Podcast · How to build a high-performing growth team | Adam Fishman (Patreon, Lyft, Imperfect Foods) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He can 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.”
2022-10-13 · Lenny's Podcast · How to build a high-performing growth team | Adam Fishman (Patreon, Lyft, Imperfect Foods) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 and 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's like, hey, does anybody have a computer that I can borrow? And so we gave him this like kind of old crappy Chromebook. I was like, why do you need a computer? He's like, I have to go like edit this file and do this thing and check something in it work and deploy this thing or whatever. And I'm like, wow, this is a guy that really knows how to get stuff done and is so much so that he's like pausing his interview process so that”
2022-10-13 · Lenny's Podcast · How to build a high-performing growth team | Adam Fishman (Patreon, Lyft, Imperfect Foods) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 developed those by the time you were an adult. 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 of people that have those things if I'm hiring that generally inexperienced growth practitioner.”
2022-10-13 · Lenny's Podcast · How to build a high-performing growth team | Adam Fishman (Patreon, Lyft, Imperfect Foods) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, thank you. And so, like, I have some examples of both firing people and moving people over 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 Lausier. You should have him on the podcast at some point. He's French. It's very nice to listen to. He was most recently a VP of product at Thumptack, but he was definitely not that when I hired him. He was kind of a jack of all trades, a 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. 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.”
2022-10-13 · Lenny's Podcast · How to build a high-performing growth team | Adam Fishman (Patreon, Lyft, Imperfect Foods) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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, 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.”
2022-10-13 · Lenny's Podcast · How to build a high-performing growth team | Adam Fishman (Patreon, Lyft, Imperfect Foods) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 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,”
2022-10-13 · Lenny's Podcast · How to build a high-performing growth team | Adam Fishman (Patreon, Lyft, Imperfect Foods) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One of the challenges of hiring a senior person is that they're all off writing newsletters and making podcasts. Not that we know anybody who does that or anything.”
2022-10-13 · Lenny's Podcast · How to build a high-performing growth team | Adam Fishman (Patreon, Lyft, Imperfect Foods) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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.”
2022-10-13 · Lenny's Podcast · How to build a high-performing growth team | Adam Fishman (Patreon, Lyft, Imperfect Foods) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To 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.”
2022-10-13 · Lenny's Podcast · How to build a high-performing growth team | Adam Fishman (Patreon, Lyft, Imperfect Foods) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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.”
2022-10-13 · Lenny's Podcast · How to build a high-performing growth team | Adam Fishman (Patreon, Lyft, Imperfect Foods) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of experiments and a series of things that you're trying 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 in 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. 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.”
2022-10-13 · Lenny's Podcast · How to build a high-performing growth team | Adam Fishman (Patreon, Lyft, Imperfect Foods) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source