onboarding is the only part of your product experience that a hundred percent of people are ever going to touch good luck getting a hundred percent 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 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 Adam Fishman was the first growth in marketing hired Lyft where you spent two and a half years is 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 boots 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 level
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 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 foreign 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
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CODA dot IO slash let me to sign up and get a thousand dollar credit on your first statement that's c-o-d-a dot IO slash Lenny to sign up and get a thousand dollars in credit on your account Adam Fishman welcome to the podcast thanks for having me Lenny super excited
to be here it's a pleasure to be on chatting with you today 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 I'm setting my timer for 45 seconds so I've been a chief product officer and VP of growth and product at a bunch of different companies imperfect Foods patreon Lyft the precursor to lift 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 nailed it wow that was very contained and clear let's plug the newsletter real quick what's the URLs at Fishman AF
newsletter.com it is fishmanafnewsletter.com I am blessed with great initials that allow me to have that name for a newsletter that'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 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 interest and learning about new companies 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 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 a Lyft when we sort of were bringing it out of private beta we had this press event at the office which is in Soma and it had these doors these big
huge like garage style doors and so we opened them up and we actually drove a car into 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 we're high-fiving people and stuff like that and then we
also served a giant pink mustache cake at this event so that's uh you know of all of the things there that one kind of sticks in my head the most I love that I hope there was no hair in this mustache cake no no there was not it was
delicious 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 is like watching that if you've seen it what it's like watching the story of uber and especially yeah
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 it's 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 relitigating 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 oh 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 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 hit record while he was filming super pumped and 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 kalanet obviously they're both super successful but he's a really jgl
is a 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 that is amazing did you slip in a couple lift facts to help lift look a little a little happier 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 fun fact my mom wanted me to dress like Joseph
Gordon-Levitt that was like it should look like this guy where are some vests this guy's looking good kind of looks like a little bit I see that I do see that that's awesome way to go mom yeah and then I'll follow her advice maybe I should have it didn't
work out so well 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 out 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 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 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 fisherman afnewsletter.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 have to write this what mistakes have you found Founders make when hiring and evaluating
growth leaders 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 one is it really it felt necessary to write it and it it 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 group 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 and it's usually something like hey how
do we find you but 10 years earlier in your career and it feels like that question is missing the first principles approach to hiring a growth person if 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 balance teams and this is going to be a really important component of that program so it was just really top of mind so yeah that's why I wrote it let
me ask one quick question and I think you're about to start answering why like when 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
appreciate that you put in the time to think this through 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 canonical eyes 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 a 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 I did a very brief stint at a company called the wisance in between Lyft and patreon and the founders of that company so why isn't it as 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 as part of them evaluating me it would have given me a lot of confidence
that you know it was the Rex higher to make 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 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 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 okay to follow along it's like a tick tock the whole thing looks like a big circle and there's four sort of wedges in that Circle for equal parts and I think that 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 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 because 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 across your team and 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 was 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 and so you can
evaluate 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 nvp 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 to throw in a question real quick is one way to use
this model coming back to your wisant example whether it's because 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 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 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 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 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 awesome so we've talked about growth execution what's next 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 other approach I could have taken in my career but it's not too late not too late second career yeah action announcing today on pivoting the newsletter to just talk about therapy and psychology going to be the title of
the podcast awesome so like user psychology I think one of the things that that people don't usually 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 chat bot 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 so that's sort of the second competencies is customer knowledge 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 we use the research you do the more your model
evolves to help you understand the customer that's been really helpful for me because I never thought of it that way 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 competition I'll try to be a little more brief on that um
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 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 a very right or
getting it very wrong and so you got to put in the time to develop these but in growth strategy there 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 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 the third one is prioritization and Road mapping 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 in a series of solutions to test against this 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 atom 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 one of the challenges of hiring a senior person is that they're all off like writing newsletters and making a podcast not that we know anybody who does that or anything 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 gonna 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 excellent metaphor yeah thank you and so like I have some examples of both firing people and moving people over in my in my career so 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 my mind is a guy named Ben lazier 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 one was he was an avid lift 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 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 and the two things you said are customer knowledge and execution is that the two 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 Lyft 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 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 at work and deploy this 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 to do work at the job that he was trying to leave what are the chances that was staged he seemed very innocent so I think he's 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 the phone call yeah I don't need you to fix something 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 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 and execute if a Founder is listening trying to decide or hiring how to growth or a new growth person
would you push them one way or the other internal higher versus finding someone up and coming smart 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 I bias towards internal hires
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 and go to 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 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 or that kind of like surgeon is the right approach once you've got some of the foundational stuff in place awesome great yeah it feels like there's
like still a lot of Dark Art in those two Specialties that take years of experience this episode is brought to you by EPO EPO is a Next Generation a b testing platform built by Airbnb alums for modern growth teams companies like
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second topic which is onboarding I know you're a big proponent of spending time on onboarding optimizing onboarding have you found onboarding to be as a lever for growth and just what gets you excited about investing in onboarding I love onboarding I probably do at least
an onboarding project to at least one with every company that I 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 a hundred percent of people are ever going to touch good luck getting a
hundred percent 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 so this is the first chance that a customer has to be really excited or really just 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 wiseant 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 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 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 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 in the onboarding experience and what has 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
percent 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 and so that was a 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 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 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 managed communities Twitter Facebook Instagram Discord YouTube Etc 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 it's
every time you publish a video all million of those people watch it comment on it share it Etc and so we would ask creators to connect various accounts to patreon maybe through authoring with YouTube or Spotify or Instagram or 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 scientists 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 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 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 price 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 the Universe of creators hundreds of thousands of people what worked best and so putting in those guard rails 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 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 it's smart defaults what
was your terminal opinionated defaults opinionated defaults yeah I like that so with Airbnb we we had a bunch of calendar settings like when a host signs up on the host side that's where I spent a lot of my time oh 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 yeah 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 he'll sign up they get
booked for a day they don't want to host they're like 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
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 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 gonna stick around because they're gonna 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 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 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 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 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 her new users yep maybe our last question onboarding is at Airbnb at 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 and he answers yeah I would say first like I very strongly dislike the idea of redesigning something for redesigning's 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 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 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's sake make sure there's a a new hard-earned insight that you've got before you do it do you think that 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 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 was 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 we're 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 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 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 oh nice 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 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 of a 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 set 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 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 resolution Solutions what do I think about my peer set the leaders the people
below me if that's the role I'm stepping into Etc 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 really important the mission aspect that's got to exist 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 letting 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 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 why isn't 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 shortcuted my criteria where I've settled for two out of three or thought one was great when
really it wasn't 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 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 you 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 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 if you sign an NDA you promise you won't tell anybody about it 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 Etc 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 off-site 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 admission a little easier to evaluate but 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 that 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 gonna spend so much time with these people and you meet them like once in a half hour interview
and then you yeah decide if that's your life for the next four four five ten years well one thing that I would say is like you're an investor right you invest in a lot of companies your 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 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 and because they are not on the interview circuit their role as a salesperson 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 give you a really good example that was super impressive a PM who worked for me at patreon who you know tall review um shout out to all shout outs it's all um who works on this product that we're
recording on right now shout out Riverside 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 she was getting himself into and he was an icpf 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 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 I imagine you have pmf
with your current world so maybe just a 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 first thanks for having me on Lenny this was super fun I'm I love
talking about this stuff and it was great chatting with you so thank you again for having me my pleasure 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 Fishman afnewsletter.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
exploring an advisory relationship with me or learning more what 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 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 fishermanaf newsletter.com Adam thank you for being here yeah thanks a lot Lenny this was awesome thank you so much for listening if you found valuable you can subscribe to the show on Apple podcast 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 can find all past episodes or learn more about the show at lennyspodcast.com see you in the next episode [Music]