How to build a high-performing growth team | Adam Fishman (Patreon, Lyft, Imperfect Foods)

**Adam Fishman** (0:00)
Onboarding is the only part of your product experience that 100% of people are ever gonna touch. Good luck getting 100% feature adoption of anything else in your product, right? But onboarding is the thing that you have to go through in order to use the product. It's also the first opportunity that you have as a company to kind of deliver on the promise that you made out in the marketplace.
So I like to think of like, your brand is the promise that you're making and your product experience is your delivery of that promise. And those two things have to be in lockstep with each other or you're gonna 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.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:55)
Adam Fishman was the first growth and marketing hired at Lyft where he spent two and a half years leading their growth efforts. Then he went on to lead product and growth at Patreon where he spent over four years building one of the most successful and lasting creator platforms out there. And most recently he was CPO at Imperfect Foods.
Today, he spends his time advising companies on product and growth, and he's also doing a lot more writing. And in this episode, we cover three things. His growth competency model, which helps you hire and evaluate growth talent and also get a job as a growth person. We go deep into why onboarding is such an underappreciated growth lever and all of the impact that you could have optimizing your onboarding flow. Adam also shares a super cool framework for choosing which company to work at. 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.
This episode is brought to you by Linear. Let's be honest, the issue tracker that you're using today isn't very helpful. Why is it that it always seems to be working against you instead of working for you? Why does it feel like such a chore to use? Well, Linear is different. It's incredibly fast, beautifully designed, and it comes with powerful workflows that streamline your entire product development process, from issue tracking all the way to managing product roadmaps. Linear is designed for the way modern software teams work. What users love about Linear are the powerful keyboard shortcuts, efficient GitHub integrations, cycles that actually create progress, and built-in project updates that keep everyone in sync. In short, it just works. Linear is the default tool of choice among startups, and it powers a wide range of large established companies such as Vercell, Retool, and Cash App. See for yourself why product teams describe using Linear as magical. Visit linear.app slash Lenny to try Linear for free with your team and get 25% off when you upgrade. That's linear.app slash Lenny.
This episode is brought to you by Coda. Coda is an all-in-one doc that combines the best of documents, spreadsheets, and apps in one place. I actually use Coda every single day. It's my home base for organizing my newsletter writing. It's where I plan my content calendar, capture my research, and write the first drafts of each and every post. It's also where I curate my private knowledge repository for paid newsletter subscribers. And it's also how I manage the workflow for this very podcast.
Over the years, I've seen Coda evolve from being a tool that makes teams more productive to one that also helps bring the best practices across the tech industry to life. With an incredibly rich collection of templates and guides in the Coda doc gallery, including resources for many guests on this podcast, including Shreyas, Gokul, and Shashir, the CEO of Coda. Some of the best teams out there, like Pinterest, Spotify, Square, and Uber, use Coda to run effectively, and have published their templates for anyone to use. If you're ping ponging between lots of documents and spreadsheets, make your life better and start using Coda. You can take advantage of a special, limited time offer just for startups. Head over to coda.io/lenny to sign up and get a thousand dollar credit on your first statement.
That's C-O-D-A dot I-O slash Lenny to sign up and get a thousand dollars in credit on your account.
Adam Fishman, welcome to the podcast.

**Adam Fishman** (4:29)
Thanks for having me Lenny. Super excited to be here. It's a pleasure to be on chatting with you today.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (4:36)
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?