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| | “There was a large opportunity for the growth team, but it required a much larger investment and expansion of the team.” Adam Fishman is currently a Product and Growth Interim Executive and Advisor. He’s worked with companies like ResortPass, Omaze, Table22, Lyft, and more. In 2019 Adam was the VP Product and Growth at Patreon. Adam takes us behind the scenes of a key inflection point for Patreon’s growth team with his Growth Vision + Strategy artifact. The artifact is a masterclass in:
- Setting an ambitious and inspiring vision for a team.
- How to build alignment and support for a big investment ask.
- Adapting a growth strategy to the specifics of the business.
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| | 🙋♂️ Making A Sizable Investment Ask It was mid 2019. Patreon was coming off a huge company wide initiative to completely restructure pricing. They were starting H2 planning and trying to figure out what was next. Adam says: “ I felt there was a lar ge opportunity for the growth team, but it required a much larger investment and expansion of the team. In addition, going public was on the horizon for us. So we started to get much more rigorous about the future, started benchmarking ourselves against other companies, and were getting more mature as a company. So I felt we needed to put something together that was more comprehensive. There were a few things I was trying to accomplish with this presentation:
- Clearly define the mission of the growth team.
- Tell a story around the vision for the growth team that got people excited about the possibilities.
- Tell the story from a customer-centric point of view.
- Frame the story in the metrics that the company cared about.
- Provide an ROI analysis that supports the vision.”
🔭 Defining The Mission Of The Growth Team Part of building alignment is helping other functions understand the role your function plays in the overall mission. Adam says: “Given the size of investment I was making a case for, I felt that just like a company, the growth team needed a clear mission statement along with the vision. Our mission as a growth org was very creator centric - helping bring more creators onto the platform and help them realize their full potential. That mission aligned with both the creator and the business.” The key that Adam mentions here is how to frame the mission from both the customers and business perspective.
⛰️ How To Provide One Simple View Of The Strategy Before diving into the details, Adam orients everyone to the strategy, how they would deliver on the strategy, his asks, and the ROI in one simple visual.
“Here I wanted to provide a quick overview of how we were going to deliver on the strategy, and start to preview some of my asks around team investment.
- At the top is the Creator journey - Find, Convince, Build, etc. I wanted to show how the teams would align to the different parts of the journey.
The team structures we introduced were:
- The find and convince stages would be our logged-out Website team coupled with an investment in Growth and Performance Marketing. We’d call that group Creator Acquisition. Their role is to generate qualified leads and creator signups.
- The current Creator Acquisition team focused on the onboarding and launch experience, gets re-branded to Creator Activation. Their role is to ensure that creators build powerful, engaging memberships and launch them with great excitement. They’d take the qualified leads and creator signups and help propel them to success.
- Creator Revenue comes in post-launch to help creators continue to grow through the various expansion levers of pledge value acquisition.
- And finally, driving the blended Membership Solutions margin and maximizing Gross Profit is a small investment in Monetization.
For each of the teams I provided an estimated ROI over a 3 year time horizon.” 🤩 How To Get The Team Excited For The Vision Once Adam orients people the complete picture, he starts diving into the details of the strategy and vision for the team. To get people excited, there are a few keys that Adam highlights. Key #1: Visuals Are A Must “At this point in the presentation, we had to tell a story about what it means to be a successful creator on Patreon. The goal was to get the room hyped and excited about what could be before hitting them with what it would take to get there. Everyone on the team was a very visual thinker,so creating screen mockups were key compared to just having words on the page. In general, I think pictures tell a story way better when it comes to a product vision.” Key #2: Tell It From The Customers POV The entire presentation is framed in the journey Patreon’s customer takes from visitor to becoming a successful creator on the platform. For Patreon that journey is:Find → Convince → Build → Launch → Grow → Scale It’s easy for a strategy to get lost in a bunch of fancy frameworks. When in doubt, simplify it down to what the customer is experiencing and how you are going to improve it. Key #3: Provide Evidence For The Ideas Each Step Of The Way It’s not enough to just present a compelling idea, you need to provide evidence. Adam says:“It was important to provide some evidence for the ideas that we were about to show. We did that through customer quotes.” You can see that Adam primes his audience for his ideas by presenting the quotes first and then the idea.
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| | 💰 How To Create an ROI Analysis that Supports The Vision
If you are going to make a big investment ask, you better have an idea of what you are going to get in return. Many meaningful investments have longer term return horizons. As you can see here, Adam goes through each team and provides a full break down of the overall return on a 3 year time horizon, payback period, and additional metrics they will move. “For each team we showed the investment case by forecasting the impact. I've removed the exact amounts from this slide but you can see how we thought about it for each team. The key for each of these was that in the short term, there would be a meaningful increase in investment, but over a 3-year period would return a lot more. We used 3-year time horizons because we were starting to forecast our business growth over that time horizon -- also, as with most investments in a compounding business the return comes in future time periods.” One of Adam’s biggest recommendations is to work with Finance to make your projections more convincing: “One of my biggest recommendations is to work with a partner in Finance to help come up with these numbers. You need to expect that your assumptions are going to be questioned, so it is good to have finance already on board with the assumptions that you are making.” ⏮️ What If Adam Could Do It All Over Again? Knowing what decisions others have already made can help you make your asks more palatable: “If I could go back and do this all over again, I'd keep in mind what decisions the room has already made. People had already made up their minds on some of these investment areas before I got into the room. So I probably would have taken those into account and narrowed in on fewer things that complemented the decisions that were already made. Since I hadn't done that, part of the presentation was viewed as a bit of a kitchen sink approach to building. Over time,even though my team didn't do all these ideas many of the ideas were absorbed and executed by other parts of the org. Ultimately that is a win because if Patreon wins, then I win. ” More Artifacts From Adam Fishman Get the full Growth Vision + Strategy Presentation here along with additional insights from Adam in his newsletter. You can view, save, share, download, and remix this artifact and others so you never have to start from scratch. Adam will also be leading the Growth Leadership and Growth Series programs during the upcoming Fall Cohort. Stay tuned for more information on enrollment!
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