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

Building a high-performing growth team is rarely about finding a single "unicorn" employee who can do it all. It requires a systematic approach to hiring, a deep understanding of user psychology, and the discipline to optimize the most critical parts of your product journey. Adam Fishman, a veteran growth leader who led efforts at Lyft, Patreon, and Imperfect Foods, has spent the last decade refining the frameworks that define modern growth strategy.

From the early days of driving cars with pink mustaches into offices at Lyft to building creator economies at Patreon, Fishman has identified the specific competencies that make growth leaders successful. Beyond hiring, his approach to onboarding challenges the industry obsession with conversion rates, arguing instead for "opinionated defaults" that drive long-term retention.

Whether you are a founder looking to make your first growth hire or a candidate evaluating your next career move, these frameworks provide a blueprint for sustainable scaling.

Key Takeaways

• The Growth Competency Model: Successful growth leaders aren't perfect at everything; they balance skills across four quadrants: Growth Execution, Customer Knowledge, Growth Strategy, and Communication.
• Hire for Trajectory, Not Just Seniority: For early growth roles, prioritize internal transfers or "up-and-coming" talent with strong execution skills and customer empathy over expensive senior specialists.
• Onboarding is a Retention Lever: Onboarding is the only feature 100% of users see. Optimizing it shouldn't just boost conversion—it should filter for high-intent users who will retain long-term.
• Use Opinionated Defaults: Don’t paralyze users with choice. effective onboarding uses data to guide users toward the settings and behaviors that correlate with success.
• PMF for Candidates: When choosing a company, evaluate "Product-Market Fit" through three lenses: People, Mission, and Financials.

The Growth Competency Model

One of the most common mistakes founders make is looking for a "silver bullet" hire—someone who can magically fix growth without a clear strategy. To combat this, Fishman developed the Growth Competency Model, a framework designed to help companies identify gaps in their team and hire with precision.

The model breaks down growth leadership into four distinct quadrants. No single individual scores an 11/10 in all categories. Instead, the goal is to build a team that collectively covers these bases.

1. Growth Execution

This is the foundational skill set required for early-stage growth. It involves the ability to get things done without excessive hand-holding.

• Channel Fluency: Understanding how different acquisition channels work.
• Experimentation: The ability to design, run, and analyze valid tests.
• Productizing Learnings: Taking insights from a scrappy experiment and translating them into scalable product features.

2. Customer Knowledge

Growth cannot exist in a vacuum; it must be rooted in user psychology. This quadrant focuses on the emotional frame of the user.

• Data Fluency: The ability to instrument and interpret user data.
• User Psychology: Understanding that users often approach a product with an emotional need, not just a logical one. Addressing the emotional "why" is often more critical than explaining the technical "how."
• Narrative & Creative: Crafting the story that connects the user to the value proposition.

3. Growth Strategy

As growth leaders become more senior, their focus shifts from execution to strategy. This involves modeling how the business grows rather than just running isolated tests.

• Loop Modeling: Identifying acquisition, retention, and monetization loops.
• Capital Allocation: Forecasting where to deploy money and people for maximum return.
• Prioritization: Sequencing work to balance quick wins with long-term bets.

4. Communication and Influence

The most advanced skill for a growth leader is the ability to align the organization. Growth teams often sit at the intersection of product, marketing, and engineering, making influence a critical currency.

• Strategic Communication: explaining how individual experiments fit into the company’s larger vision.
• Stakeholder Management: Overcoming the misconception that "growth" is at odds with "quality craftsmanship."
• Team Leadership: Building and managing balanced teams.

Hiring: Painters, Architects, and Surgeons

When applying the competency model, it is vital to understand the archetype of the person you need. Fishman categorizes growth talent into three buckets:

1. The Painter: Creative, often generalist marketers who are great at early-stage experimentation.
2. The Architect: Strategic thinkers who build systems and models for scaling.
3. The Surgeon: Deep specialists in specific channels like SEO or paid acquisition.

For a first growth hire, founders should avoid the "Surgeon." While specialists are valuable later, early growth requires flexibility. Fishman advises leaning toward internal transfers—employees who already possess deep "Customer Knowledge" and have proven they can execute. It is often easier to teach an existing high-performer growth frameworks than to teach an external growth expert the nuances of your specific customer base.

"I believe in creating opportunity inside a company... You have faster time to results, you know what you're getting better, and much less likelihood of making the wrong hire."

Why Onboarding is the Ultimate Growth Lever

Many product teams view onboarding as a necessary evil or a simple tutorial. In reality, it is the highest-leverage territory in the entire product experience. Fishman argues that onboarding is the only part of your product that 100% of your users will touch. It is the first opportunity to deliver on the brand promise made during marketing.

From Conversion to Retention

The metric for successful onboarding isn't just conversion; it is retention. A high friction onboarding process that filters out low-intent users can actually be beneficial if it leads to higher lifetime value (LTV) for the users who remain.

At Patreon, Fishman’s team found that connecting high-potential creators with a human during onboarding increased their first and second-month revenue by 25%. This early intervention significantly boosted their long-term LTV. While human intervention doesn't scale indefinitely, it provides the data needed to automate success later.

The Power of Opinionated Defaults

One of the most effective strategies for scaling onboarding is the concept of "opinionated defaults." This means designing the product to make it difficult for users to make mistakes.

At Patreon, data showed that creators who set up 3-5 membership tiers were more successful than those with only one tier or twenty tiers. Instead of leaving the user with a blank slate, the product began defaulting to the optimal structure. Users could still change it, but the interface added friction to suboptimal choices. By guiding users toward behaviors that correlated with success, the platform improved activation rates without removing user agency.

PMF: A Framework for Career Decisions

Just as investors conduct due diligence on companies, candidates must conduct due diligence on their potential employers. Fishman suggests a "PMF" framework for evaluating job offers, which stands for People, Mission, and Financials.

People

Who will you be working with? Can you have hard conversations with them? To evaluate this, candidates should ask to attend an executive meeting or offsite to observe the team dynamic in real-time. Look for how disagreements are resolved. Are they productive, or is there infighting?

Additionally, candidates should "backchannel" references. Ask to speak to people the manager has managed previously—even those who were let go. A confident leader will not hide their track record.

Mission

Does the company’s success improve people's lives? For Fishman, this means ensuring that as the company grows, it generates positive outcomes for its users, such as creators on Patreon earning a sustainable living.

Financials

In the current economic climate, fiscal discipline is non-negotiable. Candidates must ask hard questions about burn rate, runway, and capital allocation. A company that hired recklessly during the pandemic boom without a plan for sustainability poses a significant career risk.

Conclusion

Building a growth engine requires more than just hacks and A/B tests. It demands a rigorous approach to hiring balanced teams, a commitment to optimizing the "first mile" of the user experience through onboarding, and the strategic foresight to join companies with sustainable business models.

Whether you are implementing "opinionated defaults" to guide user behavior or using the Competency Model to evaluate your own skills, the common thread is intentionality. Growth is not an accident; it is a discipline.

For more insights on growth, product strategy, and leadership, you can subscribe to Adam Fishman’s newsletter at FishmanAF Newsletter.