Building Your A-Team_ Creating a PM Hiring Process that Scales

Transcript

1. Building Your A-Team Creating a PM Hiring Process that Scales Product Leader Lily Okamoto
2. We are a manager without authority. Secret source to success is to “Influence.”
3. Lily Okamoto Status-quo is there to break | Vision Builder | Champion of Sustainable Business Strategy | Empowered Leader, Empowering Others Product Leader 5+ years of PMing at B2B SaaS startups. Lived and Worked in 4+ countries.
4. Building Your A-Team 0 1 0 3 0 2 0 4 Explain the Chaos Situation and Problems I observed. Vision Built a vision I got excited to work on Execution Executing, taking action, finding supporter Retrospective How I’d do it again. Learning from this process.
5. 0 1: Explain the Chaos
6. Business IT (Tech) Product Dev Consulting Sales Design Product Management Customer Success Implementation QA Customer Support Understand the Organization 0 1 Explain the Chaos
7. Product A Product B Product C Looking at the tip of iceberg with no focus 0 1 Explain the Chaos
8. Feature A Feature B Feature C Feature J Feature E Feature D Feature F Feature H Feature I Feature K Feature G Still Looking at the tip of iceberg with no focus, 0 1 Explain the Chaos
9. Biz IT Why are they keep building something not useful. No one is using what we were requested to build. 0 1 Explain the Chaos Who’s fault is this?
10. 0 2: Vision
11. 0 3: Execution Observation • Advocating • No more peanut butter • Empower
12. Team Structure unlocked depth, breadth and ownership 0 3 Execution
13. Situation Analysis 0 3 Execution Where are we as a business? Where are we as an organization? Where are we heading towards?
14. Are we mature as a team? 0 3 Execution
15. Relied on lots of reference and readings 0 3 Execution
16. Compare industry standard with our own band/grade 0 3 Execution Reference: https://medium.com/agileinsider/product-manager-skills-by-seniority-level-a-deep-breakdown-cd0690f76d10
17. Attracting talent by building a space where they can shine. 0 3 Execution
18. Example Hiring Flow 0 3 Execution 1 Screening Prepared sets of screening questions to identify if they meet minimum requirements Hiring Manager Meeting with hiring manager. Mostly allow them to ask questions about our company 2 Case Interview Conduct Product Strategy and Product Sense Case Interview 3 Team Interview Meeting with people who would be closely working with 4 C-Level Interview PM will be pitching a lot to CTO. If CTO doesn’t like this person, it will become a total failure from hiring perspective. 5 HR Interview Cultural Fit, logistics, etc. 6 First Round Second Round
19. Develop Evaluation Criteria 0 3 Execution Technical fluency Strongly preferred Product Sense / Problem Solving Deal breaker if not present Leader / collaborator Deal breaker if not present High agency Strongly preferred First principles thinking Deal breaker if not present Domain knowledge Strongly preferred Data fluency Strongly preferred Customer empathy Deal breaker if not present Communication Skill Deal breaker if not present
20. 0 4: Retrospective Observation • Did we forget our original objective? • Are they qualified for the position • What’s non-negotiable for us • What’s our reservation point? • Communicate with candidate better