Adam Fishman
Former CPO & Growth Leader at Patreon / Lyft / Imperfect Foods
Growth and product executive who was the first growth hire at Lyft, led product and growth at Patreon for four years, and served as CPO at Imperfect Foods; now an EIR at Reforge and growth advisor.
Dimension Profile
Key Themes
Episode Summary
Adam Fishman presents his Growth Competency Model — a four-part framework (growth execution, customer knowledge, growth strategy, communication and influence) for hiring and evaluating growth talent. He shares deep insights on onboarding as the highest-leverage growth investment, drawing from experiences at Lyft and Patreon where onboarding optimizations drove 25% revenue improvements, and advocates for internal hires and up-and-coming talent over senior external candidates.
Leadership Principles
- → Onboarding is the only part of your product 100% of users touch — don't mess it up
- → Hire growth people based on competency gaps, not pattern matching to senior leaders
- → Internal hires often outperform external ones for growth roles due to existing customer knowledge
Notable Quotes
"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."
— On why onboarding is the most powerful growth lever
"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."
— On the connection between brand promise and product onboarding
"They didn't approach it that way. They didn't ask me those questions and I was too naive to recognize that they're not actually evaluating this with the competencies that you would expect for a growth leader."
— On his failed stint at Wyzant due to misaligned expectations around growth hiring
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