Adam Fishman: evaluation

Transcript context

…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 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 it very right or getting it very wrong. And so you've got to put in the time to develop these. But in growth strategy, 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. 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 then 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 those hypotheses so that you can learn and then productize to those learnings. And there's a lot of ways to test this stuff. Situational, behavioral, interviewing, I talk a lot about this in my post 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. takeholders? 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 win people over on what it means to do growth. And I would say, this is 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 never done. That component of the competency models, we're the PM of the growth PM role feels like if you were to do these Venn diagram of the two roles, feels like that's a big part of the overlap.…

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