YouSaid · the spoken record

Luc Levesque

lines on the record: 91
first: 2023-06-15
most recent: 2023-06-15
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

“Not to disqualify all the people on Twitter. Some of them are tweeting me out, but my point is just don't. Just do your look at their past performance. What teams have they been on? What environment they have? Do they really know growth? And sometimes they do, but I think it's a common mistake to say, oh, yeah, they have a large following. Let's hire this person.”
2023-06-15 · Lenny's Podcast · Leveraging growth advisors, hiring well, mastering SEO, and honing your craft | Luc Levesque (Shopify, Meta, TripAdvisor) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm not saying that the people on SubStack have this, but as advice to the people listening is when you're vetting for a growth advisor or growth talent, don't just wait it on the public halo of somebody. That's a common mistake I've seen where maybe somebody's done presentations at a conference or somebody's done, I don't know, but their Twitter following is broad. They can be excellent. That's not a disqualifier immediately, but just make sure. Not to make the hire just exclusively on that. I've made that mistake a few times, and it's a common one to get into. So make sure you're vetting properly, even if somebody with a large following on substack or Twitter. That's, I think, an important thing to keep in mind.”
2023-06-15 · Lenny's Podcast · Leveraging growth advisors, hiring well, mastering SEO, and honing your craft | Luc Levesque (Shopify, Meta, TripAdvisor) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, that's a good idea. It kind of goes back to something I mentioned earlier, which is companies that have a lot of traffic and that have a lot of users are a great learning ground for growth people and for advisors because no matter how smart you are, you need the reps. You got to go to the growth gym and put in the reps, which is experiments. You've got to try things. Things are going to work. Things aren't going to work. And there's a discipline of like when something doesn't work, you can learn almost as much as when something works. But you need that traffic. You need that environment. And that's why certain companies have these great people coming out like Casey at Pinterest and other people that have been at these companies that have the traffic, have the culture to support it, to support growth. And I think that's, I don't think it's a coincidence why some of these companies have some great people coming from them.”
2023-06-15 · Lenny's Podcast · Leveraging growth advisors, hiring well, mastering SEO, and honing your craft | Luc Levesque (Shopify, Meta, TripAdvisor) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Then bring on advisor, even if you bring on an advisor, some advice to founders would be you want to surround your team or one person that you've identified who's just an amazing world-class doer, even if they don't know growth, with a set of growth advisors so that they're learning that's being put through the culture of the company and that that knowledge stays inside of the company. So I'd say you generally prefer, I would prefer to go internal surround these people with great advisors and then in and then take it from there. That would be how I would approach it.”
2023-06-15 · Lenny's Podcast · Leveraging growth advisors, hiring well, mastering SEO, and honing your craft | Luc Levesque (Shopify, Meta, TripAdvisor) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I would say your ideal setup is always your preference should always be to have somebody in house. I'll start there because you want to have that as part of the culture. There's so much more that they can do when they're in house. That being said, if you can't find somebody in-house,”
2023-06-15 · Lenny's Podcast · Leveraging growth advisors, hiring well, mastering SEO, and honing your craft | Luc Levesque (Shopify, Meta, TripAdvisor) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Reached out. One of the companies they were working with needed some help on SEO, got connected. I was still in Canada at the time, got connected with them, had a phone call, had. Significant impact through that one phone call. And rather than joining as an advisor, I essentially helped them out pro bono in exchange for, hey, I want to get connected in the valley. So I was in Canada. I want to start another company. I wanted to get connected. So through that tactic where they reached out to a company that was known to be world-class at SEO, I think that was really smart on this VC's part. And then maybe some advice to up incoming growth advisors would be that first one I didn't take a single shred of equity or money and just tried to have as much impact as possible and to help out this company as much as possible and then make sure that I was able to get connected to other people that I wanted to meet in the Bay Area and then kind of things snowballed from there.”
2023-06-15 · Lenny's Podcast · Leveraging growth advisors, hiring well, mastering SEO, and honing your craft | Luc Levesque (Shopify, Meta, TripAdvisor) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I'll say there's more of them these days than there were even just five years ago or ten years ago. I would start with, depending on your situation, if you're a founder, I would start with your investors. I think VCs have an amazing network of advisors. I get, I don't know, a couple requests a week that I'm not taking right now. But that from my experience and what I've seen, that's probably the high NVCs, the very talented VCs will have this network. And frankly, it's a great partnership as an advisor for you to have. You can help the companies. You can help the VCs and it helps you so that everybody wins. Just asking other founders that have had good experience, much like hiring. The third advice I would give is to find companies that are world class at what you're trying to grow, what channel or skill you're looking at, and then reach out and see if there's a way to help that way. That's actually how I got started. I was a trip advisor and prominent.”
2023-06-15 · Lenny's Podcast · Leveraging growth advisors, hiring well, mastering SEO, and honing your craft | Luc Levesque (Shopify, Meta, TripAdvisor) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A bunch of ways to do it. Honestly, it's hard enough to find growth advisors that have capacity. So you got to also say, what can you do that the advisor is comfortable with? But yeah, I mean, just to be candid, I think you want to structure in a way where you're not dependent on the advisor over time. They're adding a ton of value. They're helping teach the team. They're probably bouncing around because your company's changing, your team's changing, your leaders are changing. But over time, and it can be years, but it shouldn't be indefinite. You shouldn't need an advisor forever. I've seen a scenario where there's desire to keep the advisor almost as insurance. Like if something goes wrong, I just wanted to be able to pick up the phone. That can make sense. But I do think a good growth advisor is incentivized to share as much as possible, as fast as possible, to have impact, to train your team. And then whether you want to keep them on or not long term as an insurance policy or just answer questions as things change, that should be a choice.”
2023-06-15 · Lenny's Podcast · Leveraging growth advisors, hiring well, mastering SEO, and honing your craft | Luc Levesque (Shopify, Meta, TripAdvisor) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Do actually listen in the first three months, you'll know both sides if it's working or not. And you want to de-risk that on both sides because it really should be seen as a partnership between the advisor and the founder. And if the founder thinks you're not adding value in the first few months, I think they should just tear it up and both sides move on. It's not good for the founder to continue the deal. And it's not good, frankly, for the advisor because they're not for some reason able to add value in that environment. So I love a three-month cliff at the beginning where If it's not working in the first three months, you tear up the deal and both parties walk away and it de-risks the entire thing. And again, drives incentives in the right way where the”
2023-06-15 · Lenny's Podcast · Leveraging growth advisors, hiring well, mastering SEO, and honing your craft | Luc Levesque (Shopify, Meta, TripAdvisor) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Couple of things. I'm a big fan of equity because of the alignment of incentives. You should think about without getting into too much detail of the actual structure of the deals, but think about how you vest the equity. The last thing you want is an advisor holding back on sharing knowledge. The ideal engagement would be an advisor comes in, delivers as much value as possible quickly, and then trains your team. And then maybe it's a one-year engagement. Hopefully they've learned because the advisor has been incentivized to share as much as possible and to train the team as much as possible. And then ideally, you don't need them anymore after. So there's something there about structuring equity vesting. I'm a big fan of vesting earlier rather than later. So think about it in terms of structure you're vesting commensurate with the value you want, which is very much front-loaded. I'm also a big fan of three month cliffs, something I've done, I always.”
2023-06-15 · Lenny's Podcast · Leveraging growth advisors, hiring well, mastering SEO, and honing your craft | Luc Levesque (Shopify, Meta, TripAdvisor) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That you want as a founder. So if you can do it, I would definitely advise founders to bring advisors in for equity if you can. And I think the same applies for your internal growth team. You want to make sure that the teams are incentivized not on activities, on doing stuff because there's a lot of stuff to be done in growth, but really driving the outcomes that you want. And equity is just a great way of saying, hey, we're in this together, we're on the same side of the table. Let's grow, grow this company.”
2023-06-15 · Lenny's Podcast · Leveraging growth advisors, hiring well, mastering SEO, and honing your craft | Luc Levesque (Shopify, Meta, TripAdvisor) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exactly. And it's something I've experienced several times in hindsight when you're like, okay, here's the needle in the haystack. And then it's implemented. And you can see hundreds of percentages, sometimes over a thousand percent lift when you get it right. It's exhilarating. It's great. I have something I used to say, which is you want your impact to be so big. Does a slide in the next board deck on trying to explain what happened? And that can happen when your advising companies because you're able to share a very quickly insights. But one way to drive alignment is not everybody can do this. Not all advisors do it this way. But I personally love just when I do these, which is not that frequent, just purely doing equity. And because I love the alignment in outcomes where the founder will be successful and you will be successful. So the incentives are really good to drive the right performance and the right outcomes.”
2023-06-15 · Lenny's Podcast · Leveraging growth advisors, hiring well, mastering SEO, and honing your craft | Luc Levesque (Shopify, Meta, TripAdvisor) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I think that's really important because, like you say, there's a lot of advisors out there, some of them are great, some of them different qualities, and you really want to make sure that if you are an advisor, you want to be in the camp of when this person comes in, they have a lot of impact. It takes time and focus and energy and alignment. And there's a bunch of things we can talk about that helps to drive that alignment, but having impact is the most important thing. Whether you're an advisor or if you're hiring and because it's one of those weird disciplines where the right person at the right time can literally say a sentence that changes the trajectory of your company. You can't say that for a lot of different disciplines, but this is one of them.”
2023-06-15 · Lenny's Podcast · Leveraging growth advisors, hiring well, mastering SEO, and honing your craft | Luc Levesque (Shopify, Meta, TripAdvisor) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Funnels and their landing pages. And I could see very quickly that there was something they were doing that was a little off. And I asked them, why are you doing it that way? And they said, well, we think it just looks better that way. And I said, well, just do it this other way. And I remember this because it was such a short conversation. And then three weeks later, we connected and I heard they had rolled it out and it was a large impact that they had from this one change. And it's just a good example of this has happened many times with the companies I work with, but it's a good example that it's not actually, once you know it, it's not hard to recognize it. And to, if you deeply understand it, to give advice, but it takes a long time to get the base knowledge. So I don't do these too often anymore, but when I do advise, I take them very seriously. I focus exclusively on having impact.”
2023-06-15 · Lenny's Podcast · Leveraging growth advisors, hiring well, mastering SEO, and honing your craft | Luc Levesque (Shopify, Meta, TripAdvisor) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Definitely. And I think what I would point to is the advantage of a growth advisor is it takes a long time to understand a channel. And certainly people have to know their stuff. They have to be very good at their craft, their growth craft, but also they have to be exposed to a large set of experiments or an environment where they've just seen what works and what doesn't. So no matter how good somebody is, if they haven't been exposed to an environment where there's a lot of experimentation, a lot of learning, it's very hard for them to internalize that. So once a growth advisor has that, it takes years to learn it, but it literally can take seconds, literally, to communicate that. So I've worked with some companies that you've mentioned and certainly have had impact very, very quickly. One example would be a company that I worked with, now a public company. At the time they weren't. On day one, walked in, they presented their strategy, their plans, their”
2023-06-15 · Lenny's Podcast · Leveraging growth advisors, hiring well, mastering SEO, and honing your craft | Luc Levesque (Shopify, Meta, TripAdvisor) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I've never been asked that, which is, I mean, I don't know if I'll start getting asked this now, but it does seem like that's a really simple way to add a ton of value. And as a founder, I mean, even if you have to pay this person or whatever you have to do, but it's such an important hire to get right. We talk about the 10x engineer and we don't really talk about the 10x growth advisor or 10x growth person, but the same dynamic applies. You could argue applies even more because the right growth advisor can have literally company changing impact where they're either building or helping to ideate or helping to implement a growth loop that literally changes the company. As we know, you need a great product and you need a great growth loop. And it's usually just one loop that you need to get right. Most companies have gotten to where they are just off of one really strong channel that they've just dominated. So it's important to get right.”
2023-06-15 · Lenny's Podcast · Leveraging growth advisors, hiring well, mastering SEO, and honing your craft | Luc Levesque (Shopify, Meta, TripAdvisor) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Applies to hiring good growth talent. So if you have somebody you know, whether it's already an advisor or somebody you know who knows growth, you can solicit their help in trying to flesh out whether somebody you're trying to hire is of high talent. So if you have an advisor, you can make that one of their roles is vet out any new talent coming in. And if you're looking for an advisor, try to find somebody that you know and trust who can do that first pass because for”
2023-06-15 · Lenny's Podcast · Leveraging growth advisors, hiring well, mastering SEO, and honing your craft | Luc Levesque (Shopify, Meta, TripAdvisor) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, what makes a great growth advisor is somebody who really understands what to do, but also why certain growth levers work. It's that kind of deep understanding of levers of onboarding or whatever area they're focusing on that really makes growth advisors stand out. So when you're looking for a growth advisor, you want to have those discussions to see how much depth does this person have? seen a playbook and they're just good at repeating the playbook or are they evolving are they growing and the best way to get to know that is to start really asking them questions about growth and growth advising and there's certain things that they've done and why they think those have worked this can be tricky if you don't yourself know growth so i think one thing that i have not seen a lot of founders do that i would advise is if you have an advisor already because this applies to fining growth advisors but it also”
2023-06-15 · Lenny's Podcast · Leveraging growth advisors, hiring well, mastering SEO, and honing your craft | Luc Levesque (Shopify, Meta, TripAdvisor) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Some English speaking country that's a bit off the grid that you can isolate your marketing to so you can start getting dozens or a couple hundred people per day coming in and giving you feedback. I've seen that work too. So I'd say wait till you have product market fit. If you do start growing your product early because you need that signal from people actually using it beyond just focus groups and friends or small numbers of people. Try to do it off the grid in smaller markets that you can kind of contain the growth and get what you're really trying to get, which is that signal on, is it working or not?”
2023-06-15 · Lenny's Podcast · Leveraging growth advisors, hiring well, mastering SEO, and honing your craft | Luc Levesque (Shopify, Meta, TripAdvisor) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Advocate with myself and something that I've done actually in one of the products I've built several consumer products and grown them is that sometimes to know if you have a product you need users to use it. So this is like some subtlety in here. But I would say if you are trying to get users in to start playing with it at scale, I mean, try to focus in on a market that is maybe off the grid, like pick a country that's”
2023-06-15 · Lenny's Podcast · Leveraging growth advisors, hiring well, mastering SEO, and honing your craft | Luc Levesque (Shopify, Meta, TripAdvisor) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“With advice is generally always applicable. And if you can start thinking about how to build your product early, even if it's pre product market fit, you're not going to do any damage, but you may be wasting some capital on an advisor or growth person too early. The problem that I see is if you start growing a product that doesn't have product market fit, you're actually doing more damage than good because you have a product that is now being exposed to the market through growth levers and through optimization that is giving a bad experience with your product. And you want that product that you know is tight and you know has product market fit to start building a flywheel and start growing you don't want it to be growing if it doesn't satisfy that need that you're trying to build out for so i can see it having more damage than good because when somebody tries something they're unlikely to try it again and so it's that's that's the dangerous game you can get into so you you're better off with a good product that's satisfying a need and then growing from there i will say to kind of play devil's”
2023-06-15 · Lenny's Podcast · Leveraging growth advisors, hiring well, mastering SEO, and honing your craft | Luc Levesque (Shopify, Meta, TripAdvisor) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Few thoughts in terms of when I don't think you can probably come into early, it's probably harder to find really good ones than it is to time it. But generally speaking, I would say you don't want to focus too much on growth until you have product market fit. So make sure you have a product that users love that's either showing strong signs of retention or has some good loop that you can see that you can start thinking about growth.”
2023-06-15 · Lenny's Podcast · Leveraging growth advisors, hiring well, mastering SEO, and honing your craft | Luc Levesque (Shopify, Meta, TripAdvisor) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exactly. Yeah, it would be, I mean, I suppose it's possible, but it would be pretty rare that somebody would come in without some sign that they stand above the crowd. And again, I'm talking about you generally want to hire the top 1% of candidates. So when you're looking for the best of the best, you definitely are looking for those signals.”
2023-06-15 · Lenny's Podcast · Leveraging growth advisors, hiring well, mastering SEO, and honing your craft | Luc Levesque (Shopify, Meta, TripAdvisor) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, just thinking off the top, it depends on the type of person you're hiring, but have they, are their founder, have they tried to do something? Did they won an award somewhere? Are they a gold medalist at something? Have they done something that others have not, that shows grit, that shows drive, that shows the ability to succeed. And I've seen that you can apply that to any candidate you're hiring.”
2023-06-15 · Lenny's Podcast · Leveraging growth advisors, hiring well, mastering SEO, and honing your craft | Luc Levesque (Shopify, Meta, TripAdvisor) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Unless this person was really, really good. So you don't want to over pivot on one signal. You want to look at the full picture, but those are the types of things I look at to bring in top talent. And I've got this whole playbook, mistakes I've made that I've learned from, things to avoid. And over the years, I've put together this playbook that I try to follow. And I'm always running little experiments to try to make it better.”
2023-06-15 · Lenny's Podcast · Leveraging growth advisors, hiring well, mastering SEO, and honing your craft | Luc Levesque (Shopify, Meta, TripAdvisor) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“For myself personally, I'm looking for kind of three different signs of excellence to tell me that it doesn't have to be three. The mental model I have is there's, as you're talking to them, you're getting pluses and negatives. There's red flags you're hearing and there's really great things. And then at the end, you can make an opinion of how good this person is. Another great sign of excellence, and this was just through reflecting on my team and stars on the team and thinking, what makes them unique? What about them? One of them is when somebody's boss leaves the company and then comes back to poach them, that is such a strong signal because if you think of what just happened, the person left the leader who knows exactly how good this person you're talking to is. They have the most knowledge of the performance of this individual. They left the company. They've come back to poach them, putting their own reputation at risk by coming back, depending on the situation. And they would never do that.”
2023-06-15 · Lenny's Podcast · Leveraging growth advisors, hiring well, mastering SEO, and honing your craft | Luc Levesque (Shopify, Meta, TripAdvisor) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I show them my blueprint, which is basically a list of my quirks so we can really quickly align. That's something that just being in Ottawa and trying to figure out how to be a leader and avoid mistakes. I was like, wouldn't it be nice if you had a blueprint? When somebody joined, you can just tell them all of your corks and you can just quickly calibrate on how it is to work together versus through awkward long discussions over the course of a year. My hire you playbooks a similar thing. So I think of it in three different chapters, if you will. There's finding talent, assessing talent, and closing talent. In terms of finding talent, I do believe that the best predictor of future performance is past performance. So I'm looking for what I call signs of excellence. So I want to know, the top people generally have done multiple amazing things in their life, repeated success, not just once. Maybe.”
2023-06-15 · Lenny's Podcast · Leveraging growth advisors, hiring well, mastering SEO, and honing your craft | Luc Levesque (Shopify, Meta, TripAdvisor) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think you reach a point in your career where you realize that hiring is the skill you now need to become world class at because you're no longer doing the work yourself. You're still, of course, involved and doing some of the work and getting your hands dirty. But the bulk of your team's success now will be the quality of the hires you make. And you truly need to be world class at that. So yeah, I built this playbook out. I was in Canada, in Ottawa when I sold a company at TripAdvisor and really started growing my team and becoming more of a leaning into leadership at the time through that experience. And one of the benefits of being in Ottawa and kind of off the grid, if you will, is it's a curse and a benefit is that you don't have a ton of people you can learn from. So it does mean you need to go to first principles and think things through from the ground up. It takes a little longer, but you come up with your own playbooks on how to do things. And I think you've seen my blueprint, which is a good example of that, where I have this blueprint I put together and when new people join the team.”
2023-06-15 · Lenny's Podcast · Leveraging growth advisors, hiring well, mastering SEO, and honing your craft | Luc Levesque (Shopify, Meta, TripAdvisor) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A variety of leaders there were in discussions for months and months and months and never letting the momentum die. And that's something that I think is really important. No, it doesn't necessarily mean no. And in this case, it definitely wasn't the case. And I had the same experience with Toby at Shopify where we've been talking about working together for over 10 years now. And then finally, the timing was right. And I was able to join the company. So just be relentless. involve the family, involve the spouse if you can. and recruit some some help from other executives in the company those are some of the things that stood out and through my experience but yeah it was a it was a pretty wild time in my life”
2023-06-15 · Lenny's Podcast · Leveraging growth advisors, hiring well, mastering SEO, and honing your craft | Luc Levesque (Shopify, Meta, TripAdvisor) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Talking through Was holding us back, why we couldn't come potential options and ideas for how we could come down. But involving somebody's spouse and family, I think is a really good idea because it's a very personal decision to change company. It involves more than just that person you're talking to. It involves their whole family. So that was something that I think is an important thing to have in your kind of playbook for hiring is really think about the whole person's family and involve them if you can. In fact, Toby did this as well at Shopify. He flew down here with Fiona and we had breakfast with Andrea and them and reviewed a few offers when I joined Shopify. And then the third thing is just to be absolutely relentless and don't give up and don't let momentum drop. Took seven months for me to go from there's, you know, this is amazing, exciting, but there's no way I can make this work to, okay, let's move to Palo Alto. And Mark, the exact.”
2023-06-15 · Lenny's Podcast · Leveraging growth advisors, hiring well, mastering SEO, and honing your craft | Luc Levesque (Shopify, Meta, TripAdvisor) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Don't take advantage of. I've seen leaders, I've certainly done this at times where you go it alone or you're working with recruiting, but the reality is all the leaders, all the execs in the company know how important it is to bring in talent and they're always more than happy to help. So that's something that I think more leaders should do is really recruit all of their peers and their leaders in the company to help close. And that's certainly something that happened when I was in discussions with Mark and Facebook about joining. The second one, which I had, I suppose never experienced before, was that they made it very personal. I had these reasons why I couldn't leave. So initially I was excited by the opportunity, but I couldn't see myself moving at California for personal reasons. And through discussions, Mark basically involved my wife, involved my spouse in this, Andrea. And we flew down, had dinner with him and Priscilla, his wife, and Andrea had ended up meeting with many of the executives of Facebook.”
2023-06-15 · Lenny's Podcast · Leveraging growth advisors, hiring well, mastering SEO, and honing your craft | Luc Levesque (Shopify, Meta, TripAdvisor) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It was an interesting experience, very intense, but also one of the reasons for it was I was living in Canada and my family was there and I had some strong personal reasons why I couldn't leave Canada. But yeah, we had a lot of discussions with Mark. I won't get into the micro details of it. That's more Mark's story to tell than mine. But a few takeaways from going through that experience as a leader hiring is the most important thing. As we all know, it's a craft and a skill that I'm always working on, refining. I have my own playbook that I'm constantly tweaking, testing out different approaches, trying to find the best talent and assessing them and trying to close them and bring them on board. So I learned a lot through that experience with Mark and a couple things that stood out were the first one would be that Mark really involved the entire executive team. It wasn't just me talking to recruiting or talent or HR or just Mark. It was the entire executive team. And that's something that I think a lot of leaders”
2023-06-15 · Lenny's Podcast · Leveraging growth advisors, hiring well, mastering SEO, and honing your craft | Luc Levesque (Shopify, Meta, TripAdvisor) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Top level North Star outcome we want is that having the impact and then basically doing everything around that singular North Star. So it's very, very important. And I think it's more profound than it might seem just from the outside. But if you've worked in different companies, you've probably experienced different versions of this too.”
2023-06-15 · Lenny's Podcast · Leveraging growth advisors, hiring well, mastering SEO, and honing your craft | Luc Levesque (Shopify, Meta, TripAdvisor) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Being in that culture and having it really ingrained in everything you do, and whether it's performance reviews or strategies or reviews with the executive team, it all gravitates around impact. And I think it's that laser focus on it that matters so much. But I mean, I've certainly seen it go in other ways where it's more about working long hours. And certainly there's a correlation, to be clear, between working hard and the impact. But I find it's just such a precise way to think about how people are performing or what you're doing in terms of is your strategy working, is the direction you're moving in, having the intended outcomes that you want. And yeah, I do think it's all about that. And being a growth leader where everything's so measurable, impact is something that can be very clearly measured and you know whether you have it or not. So the most important thing that we work on constantly is reviewing what's our strategy. What are we working on? Is that driving towards the”
2023-06-15 · Lenny's Podcast · Leveraging growth advisors, hiring well, mastering SEO, and honing your craft | Luc Levesque (Shopify, Meta, TripAdvisor) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, I think it's easy for a lot of leaders and companies to get caught up in how hard are people working, what did they do, and recognizing and rewarding activity. I mean, everybody wants to have impact. And the companies that truly focus on that are the ones that break through and really make a lot of progress towards a mission. So that seems obvious, I think, when I say it out loud.”
2023-06-15 · Lenny's Podcast · Leveraging growth advisors, hiring well, mastering SEO, and honing your craft | Luc Levesque (Shopify, Meta, TripAdvisor) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We had funny enough already started having impact, so I was able to at least respond with hey, we've kind of already started in a few ways and walked through where we were having impact and just focus on the strategy, what our plans forward were, and where we wanted to go from there. So that's. I think that's how he responded.”
2023-06-15 · Lenny's Podcast · Leveraging growth advisors, hiring well, mastering SEO, and honing your craft | Luc Levesque (Shopify, Meta, TripAdvisor) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What is the impact you're having? And I actually really love that word impact and focusing on it because it's vague enough that it covers off any work that is impactful towards the mission. And it's precise enough to know what does that mean when you say, are you having impact or what is the impact we're having? So it's a great way to approach things. That was my first experience there within a few months. And yeah, and we jumped in and started focusing on having a lot of impact from there.”
2023-06-15 · Lenny's Podcast · Leveraging growth advisors, hiring well, mastering SEO, and honing your craft | Luc Levesque (Shopify, Meta, TripAdvisor) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When are we going to start seeing results? And that was my introduction to Facebook. It was kind of my introduction to working with Mark and was a pretty kind of intense thing to go through. Again, I just joined. The strategy was very much a draft at that point. But I think what it highlights is something that Facebook does really, really well, which you get very quickly when you join Facebook. And it's why there's such an execution machine and can build a lot of great product. It's because they focus exclusively on that magic word, which is impact. And that was kind of my first introduction of working with Mark and just that laser focus on, all right, got it. Now, when are we going to start seeing impact and kind of moving from there? So it's something that is very much in the culture there and something that is so important. It's something, of course, that we focus on a lot at Shopify, but it's that difference between, I don't care how hard you worked, I don't care what you're working on with the activities are, what are the outcomes.”
2023-06-15 · Lenny's Podcast · Leveraging growth advisors, hiring well, mastering SEO, and honing your craft | Luc Levesque (Shopify, Meta, TripAdvisor) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I sit down, and it's quiet for what felt like five minutes. I'm sure it was not, but it was quiet for a while just sitting there waiting for what's going to happen now. And at some point, Mark kind of looks over. Says, hey, we saw your presentation, saw your strategy.”
2023-06-15 · Lenny's Podcast · Leveraging growth advisors, hiring well, mastering SEO, and honing your craft | Luc Levesque (Shopify, Meta, TripAdvisor) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I remember the story well. Basically, I had just started at Facebook about I'll use those two interchangeably. I remember as Facebook and always will. Now I was three months in and was working on a new area for me. So came in, started putting together our thoughts on a strategy and was asked to do a presentation in front of the company with Mark on the strategy. So I whipped up a draft strategy, put together some plots and plans presented in front of the company, went well. Every six months there is something called the M team review at Facebook. And you basically product area leads will go in and present their strategy, how it's going. Again, I just joined three months before. So I walk in, no idea what to expect. I'm sitting at a table. You can kind of envision it's a big room, really big room with a bunch of tables set up in a big square with a little microphone. So I sit in there. There's Mark and all the executives sitting on the other side.”
2023-06-15 · Lenny's Podcast · Leveraging growth advisors, hiring well, mastering SEO, and honing your craft | Luc Levesque (Shopify, Meta, TripAdvisor) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We talk about the 10x engineer, and we don't really talk about the 10x growth advisor or 10x growth person, but the same dynamic applies. You could argue applies even more because the right growth advisor can have literally company changing impact. The advantage of a growth advisor is it takes a long time to understand a channel. And certainly people have to know their stuff. They have to be very good at their craft, their growth craft, but also they have to be exposed to a large set of experiments or an environment where they've just seen what works and what doesn't. Once a growth advisor has that, it takes years to learn it, but it literally can take seconds, literally, to communicate that. It's one of those weird disciplines where the right person at the right time can literally say a sentence that changes the trajectory of your company. And you can't say that for a lot of different disciplines, but this is one of them.”
2023-06-15 · Lenny's Podcast · Leveraging growth advisors, hiring well, mastering SEO, and honing your craft | Luc Levesque (Shopify, Meta, TripAdvisor) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source