The Growth Competency Model
Four competency buckets for hiring, evaluating, and balancing a growth team without chasing a unicorn.
- Difficulty
- Moderate
- Time to result
- ~weeks to results
- Steps
- 4
- Confidence
- 95%
A hiring-and-evaluation framework that breaks growth capability into four equal buckets, each with three specific competencies. The goal is not to find one person who scores an 11/10 on everything, but to build a well-rounded team with no gaps in the portfolio. It doubles as a reverse-interview tool for candidates and a concrete feedback language for performance reviews.
Origin
Created by Adam Fishman (first growth/marketing hire at Lyft, later VP growth/product at Patreon, CPO at Imperfect Foods) and published in his Fishman AF newsletter. He explicitly modeled it on an existing product-management competency model, extending the same career-ladder concept to the growth function.
Core principles
- 01The goal is a balanced team, not a mythical unicorn who is a 10/10 on everything
- 02Which competencies to hire for depends on the current state of the team and where the skill gaps are
- 03Junior growth people are expected to index lower on the more advanced buckets (strategy, communication); execution and customer knowledge come first
- 04Use the model as a shared vocabulary so feedback is concrete rather than vague ('be more strategic')
- 05There is heavy overlap between exceptional PMs and exceptional growth practitioners; the skills are just applied differently
How to run it
- 1
Assess Growth Execution
Evaluate the three execution competencies: channel fluency, experimentation, and productizing learnings. Productizing learnings means generating hypotheses, learning from them, and translating that into product changes with hooks into different areas of the product.
Pro tip Execution and customer knowledge are the two competencies to weight most heavily when hiring an earlier-stage or more junior growth person.
Watch out Execution is very hard to teach an adult; if someone hasn't developed executive-function/get-it-done skills by adulthood, don't expect to install them yourself.
- 2
Assess Customer Knowledge
Evaluate data fluency and instrumentation, user psychology, and the ability to develop narrative and creative approaches to talking to customers. User psychology is the core: people arrive with an emotional frame, and you must address that before appealing to their logical brain.
Pro tip Internal hires often already have this bucket nailed because they know the customer base deeply.
Watch out Don't seek the solution in a customer interview. Research informs your model of the customer, and the model informs what you build.
- 3
Assess Growth Strategy
Evaluate growth-loop modeling (what acquires, retains, monetizes users), capital allocation and forecasting (deploying money and people, managing the portfolio, projecting forward), and prioritization and roadmapping (sequencing the work against the growth models).
Pro tip Test strategy with situational/behavioral interviewing and case studies with very specific questions about what people have done or would do.
Watch out This is an advanced bucket; don't expect a junior growth hire to be a 10/10 here. To do capital allocation well you have to become best buddies with your finance team.
- 4
Assess Communication & Influence
Evaluate strategic communication (how experiments ladder into a bigger bet), team leadership, and stakeholder management. This is the hardest, most senior bucket because growth is often wrongly seen as at odds with quality craftsmanship, so you must win people over.
Pro tip The 'currency' people trade in differs by company, so treat this as something you relearn from square one every time you join a new company or get a new leader.
Watch out It is never truly done; it's a lifelong journey that relies extensively on understanding the specific people you're working with.
In the wild
Founders repeatedly asked Fishman to help them find 'me but 10 years earlier.' He argues this skips a first-principles approach and just pattern-matches to one person who may not be the right fit. The model lets founders instead define which specific competencies the role actually needs.
→ Reframes hiring from cloning a person to filling defined competency gaps, reducing mismatched hires.
Instead of telling someone 'you need to be more strategic' (which everyone has heard and finds useless), a manager can point to the growth-strategy bucket and say specifically: I need to see better modeling of loops and better communication of what those loops are.
→ Feedback becomes concrete and actionable rather than vague.
Common mistakes
Hunting for a unicorn who scores top marks on every competency
That person does not exist; even a seasoned growth executive isn't an 11/10 on all twelve competencies. Chasing one wastes the search and ignores the real goal of a balanced team.
Expecting a junior hire to be strong in strategy and communication
These are advanced, softer skills learned over years by getting things very right or very wrong. Screening a junior candidate on them leads to rejecting good execution-and-customer-knowledge talent.
Is it for you?
Best for
Founders and heads of growth hiring, evaluating, or building out a growth team, and candidates who want to self-assess their gaps.
Not ideal for
Hiring a narrow specialist (e.g. SEO or paid) where deep single-channel expertise, not a balanced competency spread, is what's needed.
From the transcript
“there are four main components to the growth competency model and the four big components or buckets are growth execution customer knowledge growth strategy and…”
“the goal of the competency model is not to find a unicorn human being that is like an 11 out of 10 on every one…”
“The goal is to create a well-rounded team so that you're hiring and balancing skills across your team and you don't have any gaps in…”
“within this competency grouping there's three individual competencies that are Channel fluency experimentation and what I'd call productizing learnings”
“rather than saying Adam you really need to be more strategic which everybody's heard that at some point and it's kind of like what do…”
From the episode
How to build a high-performing growth team
Adam Fishman (Patreon, Lyft, Imperfect Foods)