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all right so as Rob said this talk is all about product managers how to find great PMS how to evaluate them through interviews and then how to close them and convince them to work for your company so I thought I'd start by asking a question which is what do product managers do anyway because if you ask different people you'll probably get different answers and I think that's because it turns out the PM role is actually pretty vague even to the engineers and designers that we work with every day so let me give an example of this I was at Twitter earlier this year and we ran an internal survey to all of engineering product and design and we asked when thinking about each of the following functions how clear are the roles and responsibilities to you and we ask this about engineers designers and product managers to engineers designers and product managers so let's start with engineering engineering was actually pretty clear pretty much everyone knows what engineers do what the what the role of engineering is all three functions say they know what engineers do and that's because engineers write code you can see what an engineer does designers were a little less clear so it turned out that only 50% of engineers say they knew what a designer did but I can explain that one too because a lot of engineers work on back-end systems they work on infrastructure they don't work with great designers every day so they don't know and so I get that one but then when you get to product managers only half of designers and half of engineers said they knew what PM's actually do so that's interesting we should dig into that but the other funny thing before I do that is the other funny thing the takeaway in this slide is that in all three cases product managers know exactly what everyone else does so that maybe says something about product managers okay but so why is this why is the PM role vague I think it's because the PM role varies a lot by company team and even individual and so people have come up with different ways of describing what is the PM job if you read the tech blogs you might have seen this Venn diagram the PM is at the center of UX tech and business I think that's pretty accurate or maybe you've seen this quote the PM is the CEO of their product that I think is another good sort of shorthand way of describing the PM function but after working with hundreds of PM's across different companies here's my definition the PM is responsible for articulating what a winning product looks like rallying the team to build it and iterating until they get it right so there's a lot going on there let me just say it one more time articulating what a winning product looks like rallying the team to build it and iterating until they get it right that's kind of an interesting job description when you think about it who can do this job what kind of people can do this job what qualities do they need to have I think there's some must have qualities some should have qualities and some bonus qualities and so I'm going to go through each one because this way we'll figure out what kind of people were looking for so on the must-have qualities I think they need to have these four things an outstanding intellectual ability and in particular the ability to synthesize information they need that in order to know what the winning product is and then also excellent communication leadership and strong culture fit at your company those things are going to be required to articulate the winning product and also to rally the team to build it and I will tell you after working with many many product managers I've never seen a great product manager that didn't have all four of those I really believe there must haves okay on this should have so also nice to have many things in this column a knack for knowing what users or customers want to know what the winning product is strong analytical and strategic thinking that gets that's very important on the iterating till you get it right part and then a technical background and entrepreneurial spirit that's so you can rally the team to build it and so a great product manager will have everything in column a and column B a good product manager I'll probably take half the things in column B and that's that's a pretty solid person and then bonuses stuff like can they write code can they make designs themselves in Photoshop can they run their own analysis at a start-up this stuff is great because it's like you know you're short you're short on hands at a bigger company you tend to actually have people who do these things specialize so you don't need the PM to do it but it's nice to have so that's sort of my definition of what a product manager does and the qualities they must have but the thing you should ask yourself is what do you want PM's in your company to do what qualities are you looking for and I think my definition is probably like 70% correct for most companies but if you're a two thousand person sass company with a large sales team you might have sort of a different p.m. archetype in mind than if you're a 50-person social company so ask yourself these questions then once you have the answer we're ready to go actually like look for these PM's so how do we find them so we're starting we're searching LinkedIn we're browsing profiles what are we gonna look for I would say that there is no single p.m. archetype but there's probably a handful of personas and so what I've done here is I've picked five anonymized LinkedIn resumes we're gonna step through them one by one all five come from very diverse backgrounds all five of them turned out to be great product managers so let's go through them so I wanted to start with the slam dunk this is the the sort of resume with all the pedigree the classic product manager pedigree so computer science at Brown which is a great CS school then was a software engineer writing Xbox 360 games associate product manager at Google and then a product manager at YouTube the associate product manager at Google program I'm biased obviously but I think it's a fantastic program any any program that sort of prepares product manager straight out of school and turns them into great product managers is good in my book and also I like the diversity of experience here at Google as the APM they worked on Adsense which is very advertiser and publisher facing but then at YouTube on search and discovery very end user facing so I like the diversity I see in this resume you definitely want to talk to this person they might not be a slam dunk at your company but I think it's worth a conversation to find out okay next profile the rookie prospect so this one I think is very high risk but very high reward because this person has no full-time work experience you're hiring them relatively straight out of college so what I like here the signs that I see that I might want to take a chance on this person or that number one they went to Olin College which for whatever reason is a fantastic product manager school because it tends to produce these people who are very technical so robotics major but also very creative very in touch with the humanities in this person also you can see was a course assistant in history and then was a PM intern at Microsoft where they worked on Windows and various UI things so again I like the diversity here the technical background married was sort of the creative user facing aspects I think this person is definitely worth the phone call you have to see whether you trust the you know twenty-one-year-old sort of running product at your company but I think it's worth a phone call okay next one the McKinsey refugee so I think I I thought I had to talk about this one because you see a lot of this these days people from consulting and finance who want to come over into tech and I think a lot of people from McKinsey make great product managers because they have that analytical thinking that strategic mindset but you have to check for do they have a passion for users and technology and are they going to be bossy to engineers because for whatever reason these are the two pitfalls that I've found in in in sort of people with this background is that you got to make sure they're in it for the right reasons they're excited about technology and so this person I see that you know study computer science in college was an engineer and then you just have to talk to them in person to figure out are they going to be the kind of person who can lead through example and not through kind of bossiness and and you know this person whose resume this is actually works on my team now he's a fantastic product manager so I assure you this is can be done ok next one the engineer or designer turn p.m. I love this I love this because if a person is a great engineer or designer and then has the product skills you know they're going to be good at the part that comes you when working with engineers and designers so the things you have to look for here now this is a pretty straight forward engineering resume engineer at VMware engineer at Facebook how do where are the signs that this person is a product thinker I found them up here in the summary so I have a strong focus on usability and I like direct interaction with the users of whatever I'm working on not every engineer will say that some will say the opposite and also the second part familiar with many different kinds of programming languages and will learn whatever is necessary for the task at hand that's super super entrepreneurial I really like that and this person has gone back and forth from being a product manager to an engineer back to an engineer back to flipping back and forth at Facebook and he's great at both ok last one the marketer or bizdev return p.m. this one is a little more challenging because you will talk to many many great marketing people and many great biz dev people and they can kind of dazzle you they sound really really good at talking about products but you have to measure can they actually build stuff is this a person who has built something and so again I see the signs in this resume that this person has typically led deals that had deep technical or product integrations as a co-founder prototype dozens of ideas and launched three products on FB platform and then again the computer science degree and this person also a great product manager so this is actually probably a good point to talk about is the CS degree required is a technical background required to be a product manager I don't think it's strictly required but it really really helps and if you don't have it you better spike on some of those other attributes so that's sort of where I stand on that ok so now we have found these great PMS how do we interview them how do we evaluate them three stages of the typical PM interview the phone screen or coffee the one on one loop and then the panel presentation and I'm going to skip the phone screen and coffee that that's mostly about you know finding mutual fit if you're a start-up half the time it's convincing this person to actually come and talk to the rest of your team you're mostly in cell mode so I'll leave the phone screen or coffee up to everyone here but I want to focus on the one on one loop and the panel presentation so first of all one on one loop who should interview this person who should talk to them I think this is a pretty good sample of people to talk to them if you're a small company five to seven people your founders any other PM's you have and then leaders from engineering design and the business side of the house that's a pretty good set of people to talk to them and then as your company gets bigger let's say 500 people at that point you probably have a VP of Product you probably have several product product managers and then again somebody from ng design and biz thats a good panel for for this interview so what are some good questions what should we ask them I'm going to go through for example questions ones that I've found to be pretty good and again these questions are going to try to hit up these attributes that we found earlier these the the ones from the must-haves and the should have columns okay so first example question this one's a product question and it measures those three that are bolded on the Left named an app you really like tell me all the features the team had to build to create the app and then tell me how you didn't prove it so the bad answer here is just going to be pretty like superficial like they're not going to get into a lot of product details they'll say something fluffy like I like Instagram it's fun and simple it grew something sort of superficial maybe not that's official but something sort of on that order a good answer the candidate is going to get excited about the product details they're going to tell you Instagram is simple and fun because they got so many details right the editing and filter UI is so easy to use but so powerful the original design that they had with square photos made the feed you I and all the grid you eyes super orderly super simple there's a lot of functionality on the profile when you think about it there's things like follow request to follow and block likes super easy to give you can double tap but also fun to get that get pushed to you in real time simple small things like there's no cat there's no concept of a caption a caption is just equal to the first comment that makes that's a simplifying assumption and then videos that autoplay on mute Instagram was one of the first apps to do that so as you talk to this person you're going to find them getting all excited about these little product details that's how you know the difference between a passionate product person and kind of a superficial thinker okay second question technical question so in as much detail as possible tell me what happens when I type yahoo.com into my browser and hit enter what happens the bad answer here is gonna be like a little clueless I see the Yahoo homepage right isn't that what happens the better answer here is gonna know the basics of the HTTP request and response loop and be able to sort of walk you through it so your browser generates an HTTP request a DNS lookup gets the host gets the IP address from the host we open a socket to that IP address and send the request the server receives the HTTP request along with all the cookies will do things like check to see if the users logged in from the cookies it'll then hit a chain of internal Yahoo front-end and back-end services generate the HTTP response which is just this long string of HTML send it down to the browser which the browser will render and parse construct the dom and then things like CSS images and JavaScript are loaded and then modify the dom and they'll talk about this for about five minutes in detail and I think this is a good like level setting technical question for product managers they don't have to get every single aspect of this but they should if they've done any kind of programming in the last five years they'll know how to answer this question and if they say they've done programming in the last five years and they're clueless on this question that's a really really big red flag so I like this as a level setting question for product managers okay next one leadership tell me a concrete example where you disagreed with the engineers and designers on your team what did you do so this happens every single day and so a good product manager should be able to talk about this right a bad answer here is gonna have a bunch of yellow flags you're gonna spot there's gonna be some finger-pointing there's gonna be an overall negative tone there might not be very much self-awareness on the side of the candidate and a good answer is gonna show leadership so they will have diagnosed root causes they'll have communicated openly they'll show humility they'll have had concrete ideas to avoid gridlock so a great example I heard from a candidate was you know I just couldn't I couldn't agree with my engineering and design team on this one feature they wanted to build I wanted to do something different but they all wanted to do it that way so I said okay let's time-bound it we'll do this idea but if it doesn't pay off in three weeks or four weeks we're gonna change it to this other idea I thought that was a great solution to avoid gridlock a really really proactive solution knows when to push back versus disagree in commit which is important for teams knows when to escalate and when not to escalate and overall a positive sort of mature leadership tone to this conversation that's that's a good answer okay fourth question last one strategy question vision question what are all the implications of self-driving cars so this one is kind of open-ended but it's fun to kind of think through this with the candidate the bad answer here is either just gonna bore you or it's going to be superficial or it's gonna be just completely disorganized the good answer is gonna talk it shows vision and imagination about what's going to happen with the space you know maybe car interior design will totally change rather than sitting face forward and these car seats will be sitting around it seated around a coffee table as the car drives 500 miles an hour car ownership will go to 0.so garages and driveways won't need to exist anymore those will be anachronistic ride-sharing will be more efficient much less traffic la can stop widening its freeways this is an amazing answer that I heard recently which is Google will open source all the saw Google will crack the code on self-driving software and then open source it so that any car manufacturer can build self-driving cars much like they did with Android and that so everyone will produce these self-driving cars and ubers valuation will plan to zero plunge to zero I have no idea whether that's true or not but I thought that response was pretty creative and I offered that guy a job things like competition between the major players Google Tesla uber an Apple and then overall you know some kind of organizational framework around their answer which I didn't really do but someone who could say you know from a user perspective it'll do this from a societal perspective it'll do this from a business perspective he'll do this some framing around their answer that would be a good answer for that question okay so those are the four questions that I wanted to go through the last step that I'd like to talk about in the interview process is what we call the panel presentation so the idea of the panel presentation is that after they've gone through all the one-on-ones maybe like a few days after if there's good fit on both sides like if you're excited about the candidate and the candidates excited about you we like to ask them to come and actually give a presentation at in the office like around a conference room table to eight to ten people and this is sort of to see how they do in a group dynamic how they present their ideas how clear they are and so this is the prompt that we would give them it's pretty pretty intricate what product or service has launched in the past two years that you believe is particularly revolutionary what specifically does the product improve for its customers which aspects are especially well designed how will this product impact market conditions and the competitive climate in the space and then part two identifies three areas of the product that could be improved explain how you would change the product to address these issues and how you would test whether these changes had a positive impact so this goes pretty deep and you're asking the candidate to prepare a three or four hour you know fifteen twenty slides of worth of PowerPoint to come in and show you and so I've heard I've heard great answers on this I a really memorable one about the tesla powerwall another one about classdojo where they which is education software where the the candidate would actually set up the environment like a class dojo classroom so all of the all of the people in the panel got gold stars when we ask good questions it was really entertaining and interactive so you get to see you know how deep does this person go how do they communicate and most importantly how do they do with tough QA on the spot because you want product managers who are spokespeople you want product managers who are going to be able to do this every day at work we're going to be able to go to board meetings and do this in front of a board and who can really be spokespeople for your product so that was the last step that we finished up with with the panel okay so now we've found these great PMS we've evaluated them we know we want them how do we close them you got to do all the usual stuff that you do for every single candidate so you got to maintain frequent contact you have to be hands-on you can't delegate it to recruiters and you have to taut you have them talk to all your fancy investors all the stuff that you normally do but then there's a few things that I think are particularly PMS to point out so the way that I think about this is by thinking about what are the reward centers in the p.m. brain I've identified these six so having big impact delighting users having autonomy getting recognition getting some kind of financial outcome and learning and growth and I think that if you think about all the different job functions and you think about specifically PMS after talking to hundreds of them these three stand out as the ones that really really motivate PMS impact delighting users and autonomy I think about engineers engineers are oftentimes motivated by really interesting technical challenges designers are often motivated by craftsmanship and acceptance in the design community recognition from the design community but PM's I find really spike on impact autonomy and user delight so then the framework is pretty simple find out which rewards center they course they respond to and then prove to them they will have impact at your company prove to them they will have autonomy at your company and really ask yourself are you willing to give this person autonomy at your company but if you are and if you can prove to them that they'll have it you will close some great PMS thank you