Hiring

Hiring Manager to take lead on recruiting for candidates by reaching out to networks or through LinkedIn.

Hiring Manager to take point on reviewing all applications, and then reach out to recruiter for support on contacting the individual and setting up the screening interview

Set the stage and set the candidate up to succeed and not just guess what is needed for the role.

Ice breaker

Looking to see how focused the candidate is on strategy vs execution

Looking to see how focused the candidate is on strategy vs execution

Looking for experience with product led organizations

Rather than awkwardly getting an answer as to how much the candidate is hoping to make, I prefer to instead set expectations as to what the price bands are for the role, and the constraints that I as the hiring manager has

Make sure that it is clear what is expected of the candidate, when they will hear from us on next steps, and executing based upon the expectations set.

Questions:

What is your team currently building?

How have you changed working personally with developers in your career?

How have you changed working personally with designers in your career?

Tell me about your technical developing skills

Notes:

Identifying how they work with team members

The more senior, the more confident of a “no” you will get on technical developing skills

Questions:

Tell me about one of the most successful product features that you've lead from start to finish?

Tell me about a time when you made the biggest impact on the company through the product?

Tell me about a time when you made the biggest impact to the end-user through the product?

Notes:

Does the candidate talk about how hard it was to get out, or what the feature actually did for the user/business?

Questions:

Tell me about your current team's goals.

Who did those goals come from?

Have you ever lead the goal setting process?

How do you choose one project over another?

Notes:

Seeing if there is a focus on outcome vs output.

Seeing if prioritization weighs impact and effort.

Questions:

What have you recently reported on?

What tools do you use to track your product?

What tools do you use to gather user insights?

What experience do you have with AB testing?

Which analytics tools do you have experience using?

Notes:

What is the first thing that comes to mind, the platform’s usage or the delivery pipeline?

What experience does the candidate have in qualitative research?

Eventually cutting to the chase and seeing how the candidate tracks performance of the product if needed.

1. Your team is responsible for the selling experience of a home. In an email with the operations group, you hear for the first time that the directors have started working on a new tiered pricing model that will require heavy lifts on the product and changes to the user’s experience. They are in deep conversations as to what new offerings to add based upon some year-old data. Some of the features are staging your home, getting in-person home value reports, cleaning services and moving services. In the same email they suggest that we try and move fast and get this released by the end of the month. What would you do next? What would you tell or talk about with the operations directors?
   
   Note: How effective is the candidate at working with stakeholders and tempering expectations tactfully?
   
   

2. Your team is responsible for the searching experience of the app. Thousands of people search homes and are filtering, favoriting, and saving searches along the way. Your team has an OKR to improve retention of the native apps. Explain how you would act on this goal from start to finish. What is the first thing that you would do to impact retention?
   
   Note: Does the candidate jump to solutions or go to the problem?

Hi ____,

Congratulations! We would like to move forward with you in the interview process for the Product Manager role at ____.

For your next interview we'd like to have you present to a group of 4-5 product peers where you will show one of the most impressive product initiatives that you've led on. Ideally, you can show an initiative that required heavy discovery, where you can explain how you found a problem, validated the problem, defined a hypothesis, and how your team came to a design of the solution. We are also hoping to hear about the release of the solution, what success metrics you had set in place to validate your hypothesis, and can speak to the impacts it made and how you measured those lifts. Expect to speak for 10-15 minutes and then 40-50 minutes of general questions. A deck is preferred, but by no means required.

Please let me know what times work best for you in this next interview

Talk soon!

All,

Thanks for agreeing to do the panel interview with ____ on ____.

I've met with ____ a couple of times and want to do a panel interview with him next. I won't be attending this interview because I've already drilled him enough. Your opinion on candidates in these interviews is critical to the decision of who we are going to move into the search squad. ____ is going to lead out on the interview, but please make sure you speak up and get the questions that matter to you out.

Here is ___’s linkedin profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/

For the panel interview, there is a case study that each candidate will report on. This is what we sent them a week ago:

For your next interview we'd like to have you present to a group of 4-5 product peers where you will show one of the most impressive product initiatives that you've led on. Ideally, you can show an initiative that required heavy discovery, where you can explain how you found a problem, validated the problem, defined a hypothesis, and how your team came to a design of the solution. We are also hoping to hear about the release of the solution, what success metrics you had set in place to validate your hypothesis, and can speak to the impacts it made and how you measured those lifts. Expect to speak for 10-15 minutes and then 40-50 minutes of general questions. A deck is preferred, but by no means required.

Here are some questions that I generally try to answer to see if the candidate is a good fit:

Does the candidate jump to solutions or work to define the problem first?

Does the candidate see success in business outcomes and not in the technical difficulty or the beauty in a user experience of their work?

Does the candidate have B2C experience? If not, do they understand the differences in product management between B2B and B2C environments?

Does the candidate have experience setting priority and driving priority?

Does the candidate just do what they are told or think for themselves and speak up when they disagree?

Does the candidate respect and spend time in both quantitative and qualitative data?

Does the candidate have a deep knowledge of their current domain?

Has the candidate proven that they work well with designers and engineers?

Does the candidate work well with stakeholders and able to manage expectations?

Is the candidate driven and ambitious?

Would you be willing to work directly with the candidate?

Each interviewer to reach back out to me individually with their thoughts and based upon the questions asked in the email.