S3 Ep.2: How Do You Hire the Right Product Managers?

Are you a product leader hiring new product managers for your team? Hiring the wrong person to your team can negatively impact you, the rest of your team and even the rest of the company.

Hope: Product leaders cannot create great products to delight customers and execute on a company strategy without a strong, capable team.  But many product leaders struggle to find the right people on their team and often forget everything they know about building great products and use traditional, mostly ineffective recruiting and hiring practices.  That’s why in this episode of Fearless Product Leadership, we’re answering the question “How do you hire the right product managers?”

 

As a product leader, building a highly effective team is key to your success.  Experienced product leaders who have extensively hired and unfortunately fired people who weren’t the right additions to their team know how critical product team hiring decisions are.  New product leaders too frequently find themselves with a team not well suited to the missions of the product team they’re on and worse, not working well with the other members in their cross-functional teams. Why? Because many new product leaders are simply inexperienced in hiring product managers and lack the understanding of what makes for highly effective product teams.  They often focus on particular technical or product management skills without understanding very real collaboration, influence and empathetic skills required to be successful in the role and as part of the cross-functional teams. In this episode of Fearless Product Leadership I speak with Kate Leto, a fellow product leadership coach, who shares the best practices from her new book: Hiring Product Managers as we answer the question “How do you hire the right product managers?” for your team.

 

Kate brings 25 years of product experience in organizations of all shapes and sizes seeking to create authentic, high-performing cultures, teams, and products.  Her experiences building her own teams as well as the work she does now coaching x-functional leadership teams with organizational design to affect product change make her the perfect person to speak to about these important decisions for product leaders.

 

So what are the practices that can increase the probability of success and help you get the right people on your team?  In this episode, you’ll learn:

  • How does making the “wrong” hire impact you as a product leader?

  • How do you identify what would be the “right” product manager hire for your team?

  • How do you convey the “right” attributes a candidate should bring to the table in a meaningful job description?

  • How do you assess whether the candidate is “right” during the interview process?

  • What are the parallels between effective product discovery methods and hiring methods?

  • How do you know if the product manager will be a culture-add for your team?  

 

Welcome Kate! I'm so happy to have you. And I know you've got a lot of experience hiring, right product managers, maybe a few wrong product managers along the way. And so want to make sure we can help all of those new product leaders who are in the throes of hiring. But it would be awesome to hear a little bit more about your journey into product.

Welcome Kate! I'm so happy to have you. I know you've got a lot of experience hiring, right product managers, maybe a few wrong product managers along the way. So, want to make sure we can help all of those new product leaders who are in the throes of hiring; but it would be awesome to hear a little bit more about your journey into product.

 

Kate Leto:  Yeah, absolutely. Well, thanks very much for having me Hope. It's great to be here. My journey, just like probably everybody, you've asked that question, to, has not been a straight path into product management, but very roundabout. So, just to age myself a bit back in the mid-90s. I started out in high tech PR, and the listeners can't see me make quotation marks around high tech, but that's what it was like, quote, unquote, high tech PR, so doing PR for companies like Hewlett Packard, right out of school; and that led to a few different marketing roles, which led me to my first startup in the late 90s, which was quite an experience. After the bubble burst very promptly, probably, you know, in the early 2000s-2001, I decided to do something a bit more stable. So, I started working at Yahoo, in Sunnyvale, as a product marketing person. That role, and that that kind of space brought me to London with Yahoo. In around 2006, I think it was, and doing Product Marketing around local search launches across Europe, which was really cool and very exciting. Once I made that move, I really kind of made the move from Product Marketing into product, and much more intent and entrenched, and kind of firmly placed in product.

 After Yahoo, I stayed in London, actually, I didn't go home back to the US. I started working for what was a startup at the time called Mu.com, which was many cards and is now business cards, much more business stationery focused. I was there, I was the unique special position of their very first head of product, while being their one and only product person at the same time. So, that was special, and something I'm sure a lot of people can relate to, getting pulled in all sorts of different directions. In that role, I worked with Mu for about three years, and we built out product teams, we built out different ways of working, and probably about 10 years ago, now I left Mu and that was really my last full time role.

Since then, I've been a product consultant, and coach and advisor. So, I work with organizations big and small, all shapes and sizes, on different areas of product management, product strategy, product organizational design and also, probably about seven, eight years ago, I started to do more transformation work. At the time, there are a lot of big companies that wanted to understand how smaller product-led companies were using our product methodologies and our tools and practices. They wanted to apply that to their larger ways of working organizationally. So, I've done a lot of that work. While I still focus on product, I also really focus on these adjacent spaces of change and transformation and organizational design. Through all of that, a few years ago, I started thinking about and writing about this concept called product EQ, which was putting more focused on what I call the human skills and product management. I felt like there is so much conversation in our community and our content around the tools we use, like building great roadmaps and developing and how to do like our testing and multivariate testing and AV testing and design sprints and agile and lean and all this really good stuff that's the foundation of what product people do; but no one was talking really about how you do it, the behaviors, and the emotional intelligence that's important and leadership skills, and resilience and empathy and all of that. So, I started writing about that under this concept of writing; and just recently, I published a book with sensory response, respond, press, about bringing EQ into how you hire and how you think of hiring, so kind of a different slant on it.

 

Hope:  Yeah, and it's such an important topic, and I'm so glad that you wrote about it; because at the end of the day, like it's all people making choices, doesn't matter, all the techniques at the end of the day, it comes down to the people and the choices that they're making. So, I think it's a very important topic and that's why we're so glad to be chatting with you about hiring product managers and just orient me,  how many hiring decisions do you think you've been involved in over your career?

 

Kate:  I have no idea, because my career has been, over the last 25 years now, so lots of hiring and it's hard to say, I would imagine, probably at least five to 10 hires a year, being involved with over 25 years. So, that's a couple 100 hires as a back of the envelope ballpark. Also, being on kind of the other side, the product person getting hired, has brought an interesting perspective into all of this as well; and different experiences that I'm sure a lot of people can relate to on the hiring, thinking and process that really made a lot of sense, and is really interesting and engaging, and others that just fall flat.

 

Hope: Let’s see if we can help people know more about the right ways. Also, be clear about what is ineffective in hiring practices. I know there's a lot of, there's so much growth, not only in the product function, but there's also so many people new to product, that there can be a lot of missteps in the hiring process. So, I'm excited to dive into it. Just to kick it off, can you talk a little bit about why this book was important for you to write?

 

Kate:  A couple of things: One is that I really wanted to find a way to really bring this concept of EQ and focusing on human skills and emotional intelligence into the way a product person works. So, I wanted to really focus on a space that product people and product leaders are really involved with, or they should be if they're not. Hiring is one of those pieces, because I think, you know, any product leader, they're going to have a couple of main aims and main focus, it's one building really good product teams.

The other is creating a good culture. And I think hiring is directly related to both of those, how you hire and how you think about hiring and the people that you bring in through your hiring process. So, that was one thing, I wanted to actually find a way where I could, in a way productize EQ and bring it into kind of something that product people do day in and day out, and more and more these days, there's less HR, and there's less recruitment, focus on hiring people, it's more and more coming down to the teams and the leaders to do that work.

So, that was kind of a main thing. Also, I think, just going through, going through and talking to folks about what practices they were using to hire, it's also kind of old school, there really hasn't been much change at all about how we think about job descriptions, or how we think about interviews, you know, or how we think about even like a hiring process. It just felt really old and tired and primed for disruption and thinking about in a different way.

 

Hope:  Great, yeah, I think you're right, like big responsibility, it really comes down to like the product leader more than anybody else in the organization to set the tone and set the practice, and if they're not using the techniques that are most effective to get the right people, then they're only going to be as good as the people that they've hired. So, I think it's awesome that you've sort of have taken a fresh look at what matters when you're hiring for one person or for an entire team. So, can you describe a little bit about like, why Yeah, wrong hire is so impactful as the leader for the team for the organization, like when does the wrong hire do?

 

Kate:  So, it's really interesting, I'm sure you've also experienced the outcome and the impact of a wrong hire. I've seen the wrong hire, which to be honest, I don't place blame on the person that was hired; if we're going to put any kind of responsibility, it's on the leader and the hiring process and the organization, I think, but when you bring in someone to the team, that's just not right for that role, right for that team, you see a lot of disruption, you know, on the team level in terms of communication, and how they communicate, conflict can come up, and it's not that conflict is bad, it's not that conflict is unusual. It's just that the team kind of starts to fall apart and break down and how they can handle conflict and resolve it. That at a baseline can just cause challenges and getting a product together and out the door, and that can have a direct impact on what the product that the customer is actually seeing and experiencing is.

From a leadership perspective, somebody that is not the right hire or the right person to bring on can pick up a lot of time from that leader, it can take a lot of time and energy to try to coach them to try to work with them to try to understand where the challenges might be, and it really takes away from other areas of the team, other areas of the responsibility. It can create a lot of challenges with stakeholders, in terms of communication with stakeholders, and keeping them building those relationships. Product is we've got all these, these tools and techniques we use, but it's really about people, as you were saying before, and building these relationships, and when there's a tension that's, that's created, or emerged, because of in kind of the wrong type of skills or the wrong type of role, then it just impacts those relationships and stakeholder management really suffers because of that. So all in all, it hits multiple levels, it's kind of, at an individual level, at a team level, at a leadership level, at an organization level, or organizational level, it can have a huge impact.

 

Hope:  I don't know if you if you have a story in mind, but as you're describing that I literally am having a visceral reaction, remembering one of, I would say, the poor hiring decisions that I made, that wasn't obvious to me, of course, during the hiring process; but over the following months, after I made this hiring decision, I could see in the the faces of the people that were working with this person that I hired, that it was not going well. Then I had no success metrics that weren’t being met, I personally apologized to the CEO, like, “I made the wrong call here.” and I was fortunate to have had, and it was a situation where I had a strong number two, but the one person just kind of tipped the scales being more polished and more persuasive and can talk a good talk in an interview, and it pushed me out in the end, thinking about the relationship building aspect, building aspect of the role, and it was not the right decision. So I know how challenging and it's not always easy, you don't always have a strong number two, and so get it right the first time, as best as you possibly can, is really the best that you can hope for as a product leader.

 

Kate:  Yeah, absolutely. I've had so many I've seen so often where you do, the hiring decision isn't right. I think you can notice pretty quickly when somebody comes in, within the first week, I remember this one client that I had, they had hired someone, I wasn't actually involved in the decision, but I knew what was happening. I was following up with a team leader, probably a week later, and one of our coaching sessions, and the look on her face was very much like, “Oh, I think I missed something, I think we, didn't consider something.” and the impact was already being felt just, you know, so shortly after the person joining. Sometimes that can be, solved: sometimes, finding this up front, I've definitely seen situations where things can improve, and I've also seen situations where Unfortunately, it doesn't.

So, that's what I talked about in the book quite a bit, as it's trying to figure out and align with your team and with your stakeholders, and with your recruiters even, like, how can you think more comprehensively about what you need in a role before you even like, go and write that job description and before you start interviewing? Then kind of make sure you're bringing all of that thinking all the way through your process, you know, so how can you reinforce that in interview questions you ask? And how can you make sure you as a hiring team are kind of making points for like retrospectives, and to loop back into what you're hearing and what you're thinking? So, to make it more of kind of a to just shift how we're thinking of the process overall.

 

Hope:  I love that. So, let's get into these tactics; because at the end of the day, we want to make sure that this is something easy to execute. I think what's fantastic about your book is, you really draw a lot of parallels to what you would do in good product discovery and good product planning. So, let's start with the job description, tell me more about when the product leader is creating that job description, what do they get wrong?

 

Kate:  A lot of times what I see, when I look at job descriptions, it's still it is the very traditional way of approaching and describing a job. You often see must haves and the nice to haves, that's kind of our tried and true approach to writing job descriptions. Those must haves, must have come first, and they're usually describing like what I call the technical skills. The lifecycle management or knowledge of a specific audience, like b2b or b2c, or a specific technology, something like that. What I find is product managers and product leaders really put a lot of focus on those things. The really tactical aspects of what this role will be doing. Then, often in the job description, you have the ‘nice to haves’ afterwards. The ‘nice to havess’ in my mind are really the human skills, which are just as important, but often not really given a lot of consideration. What I see in probably at least 70% of job descriptions for product managers, that first nice to have bullet point is:

·      Handles ambiguity well.

·      Deals well with ambiguity.

Which I think is an ambiguous kind of request right there. So I think within that section, ‘nice to haves’: human skills, I think it's important to notice that within our traditional job descriptions, they come second, they're not on equal playing as the ‘must haves’, that's something that would be great to have. Often what I see is, they are just kind of duplicates, and copies and paste from other job descriptions, and we're not alone in that a lot of people do that I used to do that; when I was like a young hustling product leader and trying to find time to put together a job description, I'd go look at competitors websites, or Amazon or Google's and look at their job descriptions. Then we kind of copy and paste, to put together those, those different kind of even ‘must haves’ and ‘nice to haves’; but what I've noticed that product leaders also do is that they build up wants in the job description and their requirements like so high, that it feels like it's almost impossible for anyone to actually be this person and come in for an interview.

So, one of the job descriptions that I talked about in my book, which was actually a real job description, I didn't name the company, but it was an e-commerce product manager role; and they wanted, you know, proven experience in b2b and b2c, they wanted proven Lifecycle Management, proven ability to manage and communicate with stakeholders and the executive level, all these are proven, proven, proven things, which I think sends a message to the person that might be considering applying like, “Ooh, is this an organization I really want to join? Because it sounds like, I got to know all of this stuff before I even get in there. Do I have an opportunity to grow? Do I have an opportunity to learn? Or do I have to be like the master of all in order to even go in for an interview?” That’s uncomfortable, and I think that says a lot.

 

Hope:  So, it seems like one of the downside risks and sort of taking this, like you said, very common approach, which is I'll just copy paste and merge together some job descriptions and hope that that gets me the right candidates, is really good to potentially like weed out some candidates that might have all the EQ skills that you're looking for, because you've stacked it so much with, these sort of technical skills that that might be a tall order. How else can job description impact the types of candidates that you end up having the opportunity to interview?

 

Kate:  It's interesting, because there's a lot of research we saw behind the words that are used. The words that are used can maybe appeal more to men or women. So, it can create a gender divide on the type of candidate that would even apply. So, for example, ‘competitive’ when there is a job description that has the word competitive or drive, that often is something that you'll find that more men will apply for that role, versus women. Women might respond more to words like ‘experienced’.

So, it's just it's actually kind of understanding the words that we're using and the impact it will have, not just on if anybody's going to apply and what kind of skills they're going to bring in, and also kind of the stories that they're going to try to tell you that they accomplished in order to meet this job description, but you could be having the impact on any sort of inclusivity or diversity efforts that you're trying to encourage as well. So, job descriptions, while they seem like they're these really annoying things that we have to do in order to hire somebody, there's so telling about the organization and the role and the type of person that would really fit into this organization. So, it's something to think about, is something to study and take seriously versus just trying to cut, paste and put it together and put it in your website.

 

Hope:  Right, and what I think is so interesting is even if you're hiring for a specific set of skills, and I think you get into this is product is a team sport, really understanding what type of team and the needs of that team and the dance of the partners to this product person coming in, is such a key thing that almost never gets talked about. So, can you talk about what you recommend people do differently to really understand what is uniquely expected from that person in that role?

 

Kate:  Yeah, so in the book, I talk about a tool called the product called The Role Canvas, and the role Canvas is based on four like, seemingly really simple questions. One is, what's the purpose of the role which kind of goes beyond job titles really like, What is the purpose of the role? Why does this role exist? The accountabilities associated with the role, what they're responsible for, maybe what are the outcomes they're working towards. Then, the human and technical skills that you feel are going to be essential to meeting those accountabilities. So, and what I've worked with organizations and doing is actually completing this role Canvas in a workshop setting, and it can be a virtual workshop just as easy as it was face to face; but having a workshop with members of your cross functional team, with your stakeholders, with your manager, with your recruiter, probably keeping it to no more than 10 people, but actually all come together and answer these questions. You'll find there's a lot of debates, and there's a lot of discussion that comes up, and how cool is it to have that debate and discussion before somebody just puts together a job description and starts like trying to bring people in for interviews? So, you create your dissent, you answer your question, you go through different iterations, but you have something to work from. It's very much like a community communication tool like many of the other campuses we use. I've seen doing that with teens, helps to get that conversation going and shift the behavior of instead of just jumping to the job description, let's actually talk about what we need.

 

Hope:  I love that because it to me, it's like the same, and again, just to help draw the parallels, so that hopefully it becomes even more familiar to product leaders, thinking about what's the best way to get the outcome that I want, which is the right thing for the team. Like, just as you would be really thoughtful about like, who is our target customer? How are we going to recruit for interviews, what would tell us the right person to learn from, you need that otherwise, it falls apart when you're actually debating candidates, because you realize you haven't actually surface the different opinions of what people expect from that person and what they feel like is missing on their team. So, I love that you're bringing that earlier much earlier in the process with the role canvas. Where do you find that people, when they're using the roll canvas, what are some of the things that you've seen, people get surprised by in terms of what the other members of the team are expecting that they may not have typically considered as they're thinking about the job description, or what they should screen for when they're interviewing?

 

Kate: Well, starting at the very beginning, really like the purpose of role, I often see people/team stumble over that, because it's a much bigger question than just what's the title? Are they an ecommerce product manager? Are they a senior manager? It's much more than that. It's like, what will this person actually be working towards day in, day out? So, that creates a lot of conversation and thinking, which is really cool to see. Then thinking the accountabilities, and it doesn't have to be like specific OKRs right off the bat and all of that, but just at a high level, if this is the role’s purpose, what are the types of things this role is going to be responsible for? Having that conversation as a group is really interesting, because often someone will create a job description or a role individually and maybe pass it around some stakeholders or something like that, maybe some members of the team, but there's not an opportunity to say like, “Oh, so this new role is going to be responsible for this kind of this space” I remember the team could be like, “but I thought that was my responsibility. So, if they're doing that, what am I doing?” So, it just opens conversation to really clarify what are the different roles on the team, and where maybe would there be overlap, and how can that get sorted? Then when it comes to the technical skills, these are usually pretty easy, people can pretty much jump through, like, “this person has to do roadmap, they've got to be able to run some design sprints” things like that, but the human skill side, this is an opportunity to learn about what human skills are. That's why I put it in there. Because in order to complete the canvas, we have to think about things like, “Okay, I'm going to say this person has to have conflict resolution skills, but what does that really mean?”

Hope: and how do we identify that, like, how are we going to determine, like that this person has that skill? Can you describe like, how that like the role Canvas ends up translating into the interview approach to assess, or the things that were identified on the Role Canvas?

 

Kate: Yeah, so with interviewing, so taking it to kind of the next level. So, let's say you've got your job, your Role Canvas together, and you've translated it into a job description, whatever format you use. Then you go through, you get some candidates, and then you start hiring. So, I think one of the best things that we can do is to take the focus off of really like diving into questions around those technical skills, like, “What was your last project? What were the metrics around it? How did you get there?” and much more into the human skills.

So, there's a technique called behavior behavior-based interview questions; and behavior based interview questions are really designed, they seem so simple, but they're designed to help you, the interviewer, understand how this candidate maybe has behaved in a work situation in the past, how that behavior, the how they intentions behind that behavior, and really, how that behavior may be impacted other people. So, for example, if it was conflict resolution, let's say your team has had had some conflict and some tension lately. So, in bringing this new role in you, like somebody that's going to be not just comfortable with it, but can maybe help you resolve the conflict proactively and positively. So, very simple questions around conflict resolution, like, “when was the last time someone disagreed with something you said?” that's a behavior-based interview question for conflict resolution. Seems really simple, but it's quite complex, and how you can unpack a response. So, the onus on that question is not on the candidates. It's not watching the candidates squirm and try to respond to that, it's listening to the story they're telling you, listening to the narrative, and trying to ask follow up questions and continue to probe and nudge until you can make something like conflict resolution that seems so intangible, tangible. So, finding out things what is an example of how they've handled conflict in the past? Do they engage? Or do they walk away? If they do engage, they try to set it up so that everybody feels like a winner coming out of the situation? Or do they like having a winner or loser? and then you can kind of come back to what you're looking for what you identified in your Role Canvas as a priority for human skill, and see if that aligns, right, and see if that works with your vision for this role.

 

Hope:  I love that and it's so parallel to, again, how we would do a customer interview, right? It's like, “Tell me about the time when….” and you're listening for the signals that you've previously agreed upon, would be strong indicators that the customer has your need, or has the skills or experience that tells you that this is the right person for our situation? So, a lot of parallels there.

 

Kate:  It's shifting the focus, away from - not that we don't want to ask about technical skills and experiences and projects and outcomes and all of that, but we want to be able to balance it by asking about behaviors and human skills as well. So, it's just broadening the focus, but using, like you said, a lot of the skills we have and that we're working on in interviews and talking to customers and probing and nudging until we get to that insight that we're really looking for.

 

Hope:  I love it. It seems to me that there are some times when teams are looking for people who have sort of been there, done that, for the situation that they themselves are encountering. Often product people are ready to take on new challenges, learn something new and so I don't know if it's in the role canvas or in interviewing, but like, how do you recommend people bridge that gap between like, “We want somebody who knows exactly the situation that we're dealing with, and is going to come in ready to tackle the challenges we're on?” and product person who wants a new challenge?

 

Kate: You’re looking for like a growth mindset, right? So, someone that can do the job, understand the job and has the human and technical skills for that, but also has this kind of this special component of this magic bit of growth mindset; and a lot of that, I think, is kind of listening to, can you understand their kind of level of curiosity? Do they ask a lot of questions? Do they have a lot of different interests and things that kind of piqued their attention? But also, do they have the proactiveness, to actually go do it, and to find out answers? So, I think that that's just kind of a different area of behavioral questioning that you can tackle for sure.

 

Hope:  I know that a lot of times people, when they're interviewing people; maybe it depends on the company, but there's often this, “Will they fit in here?” and this culture of that notion that to me seems like a very risky part of the process. Can you describe how you recommend people thinking about culture fit? Or whether that's even something that you should be striving for?

 

Kate:  Yeah, it's interesting, because I think my thinking on culture fit has changed over the last years and it's evolved, because I think, initially, I was really looking for that fit, right? Because when you, when you hire someone that fits into a team and fits into an organization, they have, there's a harmony there, right? Things get done easily. There's not a lot of tension. There's not a lot of conflict decisions are made easily. There's a lot of research that shows that when you have that kind of alignment and personality and attitudes and values and norms, that that performance goes up and redundancies, turnover goes down, right. So that's a that's a good thing. However, the more I've experienced culture fit and trying to really focus on culture fit, the more you realize that there's some downsides to that; and that is that is basically that we're hiring clones, we're hiring people just like us. We're hiring people with the same kind of background, the same kind of lifestyle, maybe the same schools that we all went to, or we all live in the same area, something like that. That's a different kind of danger that we all need to be aware of and that has a direct impact on the products we produce, right? Because we're not able to bring a diverse perspective into, into meeting our customers’ needs, right? We're not comfortable in expressing different opinions, because we're all getting along, and we all think the same thing. So, instead of looking for a culture fit, I encourage teams to do something called a cult look for a culture add or a culture compliment.

So, IDEO actually has this term as I think it IDEO is a culture add, I might get my kind of my descriptions mixed up there. But looking for something looking for somebody that doesn't exactly fit, if you think of it in terms of a puzzle, it's not every puzzle piece can kind of stack on top of each other nice and evenly, and it's all the same piece. You want different pieces in order to actually have a comprehensive picture of what the what a culture should really be like. You want to have a culture add, where you're adding to the culture, you're not just replicating it, we want to avoid just having a group of clones, we want diversity of opinion and inclusion, because that does have a magical impact as well on the products we produce.

 

Hope: Yeah, the more diversity on the team, the more diversity of ideas, the better opportunity for innovation and creating something that is different in the best ways for our customers. So I love that culture add, instead of culture fit and really being intentional about that; and the Role Canvas prompts for that as well where people are thinking about what are the things that we're lacking, or how do you help the team sort of identify what would be potential ads?

 

Kate:   It can start with the Role Canvas actually and especially once you have a few role canvases, because actually, it's interesting, the Role Canvas can be used for a new role; but it's also a tool that anyone can use to kind of to think about their own role, and where they are, right? What's the purpose of their role? How do they see that? What are the accountabilities? How do they see that and the human and technical skills? I often encourage product leaders and product managers to use that as kind of a tool for self-reflection, and it's interesting, then to bring that to the have that to share with your manager to share with other members of your team, because you can start to see, where there's a lot of similarities; and maybe where there is some gaps. So, the connection with culture ads is, what are we missing from that kind of exercise? Where do we want to focus? When we do have a new role, what's the piece that we're missing? Versus, let's just replicate the same thing again, and again?

Hope: That's a great tip for product leaders who may already have an existing team. Maybe they inherited it, maybe they hired it before they were aware of this process, but you're right, it helps them if you have that sense for like, what are all the individual roles and perspectives now, you know, the puzzle or maybe the missing pieces of the puzzle are easier to see if you've gone through that level of intention with understanding what's happening within each individual in the product teams.

Kate:   Yeah, it's a night it is a nice thing to do, when you're working with a new team, when a new team is coming together, it's kind of get to know each other as well.

Hope:  And how helpful to the new hire who's coming in to have a chance to learn that it's almost like the README file for the different people on the team.

 

Kate: Right. Exactly.

 

Hope:  So, let's assume that we've got product leaders who are using these practices? How do you help them? Or what do you recommend that they do to, you know, check in on opportunities to improve their hiring process and make it even more effective?

 

Kate:  Well, a lot of what I'm trying to bring across in the book and in with all these practices is finding a balance between technical looking for technical skills, and hiring for technical skills and hiring for human skills. So, I've developed some additional, some other tools that can be used for by any product leader, and it's just an addition to the role canvas to help them kind of understand, baseline, what are these human skills? You know, what are what really is empathy? What is self-awareness? What is resilience? Why does that matter to a product person? To help them do some self-reflection on kind of, what are their levels? You know, where are they with these different human skills and these different competencies? How can they continue? How can they focus on growing them, because that's the cool thing with human skills, with emotional intelligence is that just like our technical skills, and just like learning a new tool around strategy frameworks, or roadmaps, or whatever it is, you can improve your human skills, you can become a better leader, you can become more empathetic, you can build your resilience and your influencing skills. It's just having the commitment and the discipline to doing it, because it's going to take a little bit longer, the brain works in different ways when we're approaching these different types of skills, but it's, it's completely possible.

So I do have a number of different kind of practices that product leaders can try out on my website at Kateleto.com, to check that out, and start to kind of build their own product practice around human skills and technical skills, and then bringing that to your teams to really kind of boost that space and that focus.

 

Hope: That's great. I really appreciate all this awesome advice. And so how the book that you have is called hiring product managers. I'll make sure to have links in the transcript of this episode. But can you describe a little bit more about how you help product leaders and how they can find you?

 

Kate: Sure, so I offer one on one product coaching for product leaders. I also offer leadership team coaching within the product space and beyond. So, if a product leader is part of a broader leaders of cross functional leadership team, that's, that's a group of people that I'm, I really enjoy working with. I also do larger kind of organizational design and transformation programs. So, what I tried to do is have kind of a complete offering of individual team and organizational needs. So, pretty flexible there. There's lots of different ways we can work together. You can find out more on my website. Again, that's Kateleto.com, you can find me on LinkedIn, you can find me on Twitter @KateLeto. So, I'm kind of out there and look forward to hearing from you.

 

Hope:  You have amazing talks online too. So, there's a lot of ways for people to get to know you. This is really helpful advice that you've shared. Really, it's just amazing to think about how we, even as product leaders, even though we know all the tools to create great products, we haven't always applied them to what makes sense to build our own teams and thinking about how we, how we would creating a product. So, I love that you've crystallized it in your book and made that really actionable for people.

 

Kate: Thank you.  Just one other thing. One other thing to mention before I forget, I have a webinar, which is on February 3 with Jeff Gothelf and we're talking about the role of canvass and behavioral interviewing and continuous improvement in your hiring process. If you're not able to join that, then there's going to be a recording on YouTube, but if you'd like to sign up and join it, you can look on my LinkedIn profile or tweet me and I'll send you a link.

 

Hope:  Thanks so much, Kate. Really appreciate enjoyed the conversation. Thank you very much.

Kate:  I really enjoyed it.

 

Hope: Thanks to Kate Leto for sharing what’s she’s learned from being involved in hundreds of hiring decisions in her new book, Hiring Product Managers. The new book is available in paperback, eBook and audiobook.  It’s a short, actionable read that will benefit both new and experienced product leaders building out teams for the first time or evolving their teams with each new hire.  I’ve included links to for you to find both Kate and her book on the fearless product website in the transcript for this episode.  

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