The "Best Of" The FishmanAF Newsletter

A collection of 3 years worth of articles from the newsletter organized by topic, insight and job to be done.

Hi there, it’s Adam. 🤗 Welcome to my weekly newsletter. I started this newsletter to provide a no-bullshit, guided approach to solving some of the hardest problems for people and companies. That includes Growth, Product, company building and parenting while working. Subscribe and never miss an issue. I’ve got a podcast on fatherhood and startups - check out Startup Dad here. Questions? Ask them here.

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This past year was more of a “maintenance year” for this newsletter. My interim executive work at Mozilla (leading new product development) took me away from writing consistently for myself and this audience. Not to say I didn’t write A LOT… just quite a bit more for an internal audience than an external one. On the flip side, I released nearly 50 podcast episodes for Startup Dad (one per week!) and continued to push forward on getting entrepreneurs and leaders to talk more about parenting and less about work.

Here are a few outcomes I’m really proud of this year:

• I grew the newsletter to over 11,000 subscribers and still maintain at a 40-50% open rate with every send.

• I made the front page of Hacker News with my take on evaluating two different types of engineering culture.

• I got a few more Hot Takes off my chest; those sure felt good—including one on OKRs and another on performance reviews.

• I continued my track record of really great guest posts—this year featured some bangers, including co-writing “Is It Time To Leave Your Job?” with Ravi Mehta, featuring “Finding Your Company's Next Growth Opportunity” with Ruslan Nazareno, “Navigating Growth Roles in the U.S. and Europe” with Barron Ernst, “Altitude Maps” with Crystal Widjaja, and “A Structured Approach to International Expansion” with Scott Coleman.

• I launched a Merch Store for Startup Dad!

I’m taking a few weeks off for the rest of 2024, but before I do I went back through everything I’ve written since launching the FishmanAF Newsletter and helped organize them by topic, insight and job to be done.

You can bookmark this newsletter and come back to it whenever you need help on one of the topics below. And if you ever want to work with me to implement something I’ve written about, get in touch.

Without further ado…

📈 Denotes a Top 5 article 📈

Hiring Successfully

• How to hire for Growth Part 1

• How to hire for for Growth Part 2

• The Growth Competency Model: A guide to building high performing Growth teams

• Org Structure: To Centralize or Decentralize Growth Teams?

• The Growing Specialization of Product Management (1 of 2)

• How to Navigate Product Management Specializations (2 of 2)

Choosing The Right Company Or Career

• Which Type of Product Manager Are You? And Part 2

• The New PMF: A framework for candidates to evaluate companies

• Reverse Interviewing: How to interview a company as well as they interview you

• Your Activation Experience: Onboarding successfully in your first 90 days

• Why Play Is Important At Work

• Navigating Growth Roles in the U.S. and Europe

• Is It Time To Leave Your Job? Use The Career Escalator and Reverse 9-Box to Help Decide

• Unlocking Optionality in your Career - All The Revenue Streams Available to You

• Skill Building and Your Career

• What does a Growth Advisor do?

• How to find and choose a Coach

• How and Why to Create a User Manual

• The Role of Luck in Career

• Do Performance Reviews Better

Get Better At Strategy

• WTF is Strategy? What it takes to build great strategy. 📈

• When Branding is a Growth Strategy (Part 1) 📈

• When Branding is a Growth Strategy (Part 2)

• Building a Growth Strategy

• A Simple Growth Strategy

• How to do annual planning better than you’re doing it today

• The Strategies that Led Us to 2023

Improve Your Product Building

• Balancing Engineering Cultures: Debate Everything vs. Just Tell Me 📈

• Build and Measure Trust With Your Customers

• Organizing and Making Sense of Customer Feedback

• How To Do Things That Don’t Scale

• Leveraging Opinionated Defaults To Power Growth

• Mastering Product Discovery Part 1 - What Discovery Is and Isn’t

• Mastering Product Discovery Part 2 - Quantitative Discovery 📈

• Motion vs. Progress - changing product culture to deliver results

• Product Briefs, not PRDs (with template)

• How to Improve the Relationship between Product and Marketing

• Evaluating Product Investments

• Single Player to Multiplayer Products

• Chris Hatfield’s lessons on Building the Wrong Product then Doubling Down on Your Mistake

• Tom Willerer’s lessons from Netflix and Facebook - a product executive shares his biggest product flop

• How to setup a Weekly Business Review

Grow Faster

• Finding Your Company’s Next Growth Opportunity 📈

• Building a Growth Strategy

• A Simple Growth Strategy

• Leveraging Opinionated Defaults To Power Growth

• How To Grow In The Age of AI

• Dissecting the Growth Strategy of ChatGPT

• How To Land A Pricing Change

• A Structured Approach to International Expansion

• My Favorite Acquisition Loops - Invites

• My Favorite Acquisition Loops - Profiles

• My Favorite Acquisition Loops - Templates

• Experimentation - Creating an Experiment Document

• PLG to PLS - A Case Study

• Single Player to Multiplayer Growth Strategies

• Stop Calling it Growth Hacking

• Unlocking Growth for High Friction Products

Become More Metrics Oriented

• OKRs - where companies go wrong and how to do them right

• Stop Data Theater: Use Altitude Maps

• Figure Out Metrics Ownership

• Mastering Product Discovery Part 2 - Quantitative Discovery

• How to setup a Weekly Business Review

• Growing Revenue at a Pumpkin Patch 🎃 - 2023 Edition

• Growing Revenue at a Pumpkin Patch 🎃 - 2024 Edition

• Evaluating Product Investments

• Motion vs. Progress - changing product culture to deliver results

• How to do annual planning better than you’re doing it today

Get Better At Communicating

• How To Communicate Effectively With Board Members

• Communicating Product Progress

• How to Improve the Relationship between Product and Marketing

• Communication Mistakes as a First Time Manager

• Figure Out Metrics Ownership

Successfully Balance Career and Family

• How To Actually Build Lasting Memories With Your Kids (Podcast)

• Managing Parenthood and a Career in Product Leadership

• Taking a Parenting Class Made Me a Better Manager (and Parent)

• More Time vs. More Energy (Startup Dad Podcast)

• Does Parenting Have To Be So High Stakes (Startup Dad Podcast)

• Managing Weekends As A Founder (Startup Dad)

• Integration Over Balance (Startup Dad Podcast)

• Work-Life Balance Is Overrated (Startup Dad Podcast)

• Fighting Off The “Should” Gremlins (Startup Dad Podcast)

• Leveraging FOMO to be Present and Purposeful (Startup Dad Podcast)

• On Parenting and Balance (Startup Dad Podcast)

• Founding a Multiple Companies and Raising a Family (Startup Dad Podcast)

• Balancing Career Ambition with Prime Parenting Years (Startup Dad Podcast)

• Amazing Parenting Frameworks (Startup Dad Podcast)

Thank you for all of your support this year and I’ll be back in your inboxes in January!