Adam Fishman: recommendation

Transcript context

…Let me ask one quick question and I think you were about to start answering one mistakes founders make, but I guess it's less of a question. I know this was built on another model for product management, which is really awesome. And I love that there's this 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 I appreciate that you put in the time to think this through. Cool. Thank you. Yeah, and 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 canonicalized 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 really messed up expectations of what a growth person should be doing, what I should be doing. And I wanted to 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 Wyzant, in between Lyft and Patreon. And the founders of that company, so Wyzant was 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 we're looking for what I would call a silver bullet strategy to their growth challenges. And what they really needed, and I was 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've given me a lot of confidence that it was the right hire 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, "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 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 put it back up again for folks to follow along in the background.…

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