Onboarding is the Only Thing
100% of Users Ever Touch

Adam Fishman

Former VP Growth, Lyft · Head of Product, Patreon
CPO, Imperfect Foods · Advisor & EIR at Reforge

GROWTH · ONBOARDING

Framework

The Growth Competency Model

Growth Execution: channel fluency, experimentation, productizing learnings
Customer Knowledge: data fluency, user psychology, creative experimentation
Growth Strategy: modeling loops, long-term roadmap, cross-functional vision
Comms & Influence: storytelling, stakeholder buy-in, feedback fluency

The goal Don't hire a unicorn 11/10 on everything. Build a balanced team with no gaps in the portfolio.

The Big Idea

Onboarding: Your Only Shot at 100% Feature Reach

"Onboarding is the only part of your product experience that 100% of people are ever going to touch. Good luck getting 100% feature adoption of anything else."

100%

users touch onboarding

+20%

max retention lift seen

churn risk: earliest usage

Brand = the promise you make. Product = how you deliver it. Onboarding is where they must match.
Users are most motivated at onboarding start, they knocked down doors to get here.
Friction in onboarding is actually valuable: use it to learn about your user.
Fixing onboarding shifts the whole cohort retention curve outward, it's a compounding lever.
Adam ran onboarding projects at Lyft, Patreon, Wyzant, and Imperfect Foods, every time it moved the needle.

Hiring Playbook

How to Hire (and Avoid Mis-Hiring) Growth Leaders

"They didn't have a really strong set of criteria on what it meant to hire a great growth person, that led to fewer mismatches in the hiring process."

Avoid silver-bullet hiring: founders who want a magic solution hire wrong. Growth requires strategy + a system to execute.
Reverse-interview founders: ask what competencies they value first, surface misalignment before you start.
Don't pattern-match to a person: "find me you 10 years ago" misses first-principles thinking about what the role needs.
Internal hires first: faster ramp, known track record, creates opportunity inside the org.

Archetypes: Painter · Architect · Surgeon

Painter, broad creative generalist. Architect, systems thinker who builds loops. Surgeon, precision specialist (SEO, paid). Hire surgeon only after foundational strategy is in place; these are dark arts that take years.

For junior hires: two non-negotiables

Strong Growth Execution (can get things done; hard to teach) + strong Customer Knowledge (understands users deeply). Everything else can be developed on the job.

Onboarding Tactics

Make the First Experience Unforgettable

Your brand promise and product experience must be in lockstep, mismatches destroy trust instantly
Use friction intentionally: early onboarding is where users will tolerate questions and setup steps
Focus on habit formation, onboarding drives retention by building early usage patterns
Churn is most likely in earliest product usage, getting users past the first hump is everything
Use feedback loops to learn what jobs users are hiring your product to do, then reflect that back in onboarding

Adam's punchline "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."

Contrarian

Adam Fishman's Most Counterintuitive Growth Takes

✗ Hire a growth unicorn who's great at everything INSTEAD → ✓ Build a balanced team that collectively covers all four competencies. No single person should be an 11/10 across the board, they don't exist.

✗ Remove friction from onboarding to maximize conversion INSTEAD → ✓ Add strategic friction. Users are maximally motivated at signup, they will knock down doors. Use that window to learn about them.

✗ Hire externally first, you need proven growth expertise INSTEAD → ✓ Bias toward internal hires. Faster results, known track record, far lower mis-hire risk. Only go external for precision specialists (SEO, paid) once foundations are solid.

✗ A growth hire needs a silver-bullet strategy to unlock scale INSTEAD → ✓ What you really need is a system: a strategy to add new growth loops plus a disciplined process to execute against it over time. Patience is a prerequisite.