How to Hire a Good PM
An over-arching view of how to set up and improve the interview processes!
At first, I wanted to keep the title of this post as ‘How to Hire a Great PM’. But I quickly realised that ‘Great’ is too high a bar in most people’s mind. So I changed it to how to hire a good PM. If you hire good ones, some of them will turn out to be great ones!
Unlike my other posts which focus on a singular idea and get into the depth of it, this one is written as an overarching view. The reason for it is simple — I wanted to start with covering the broader spectrum using which companies can fill in the blanks in their process. Focussing on a singular aspect can come later.
The first question on one’s mind could be — every company has a process to hire PMs. So why do we need a separate post around it? The main reason for writing this post is because I get this question quite a lot of times, both from founders and product leaders. While there is a set process that every company follows, many people have burnt their hands in making few bad hires even after following that process. In this post, I aim to talk about how to make the process more foolproof while ensure you don’t propose too many changes to your current org. The post is quite useful for companies in Growth stage where processes are still being formed (say 5-200 PMs). It’s also useful for early stage startup founders (0-4 PMs), but their problems are more acute around sourcing, shortlisting, and hiring the right candidate for the stage the company is in! We will cover it in a future post, but not her
So how does the usual hiring process usually look like? Let’s start with that.
The Usual Hiring Process
Hiring a PM is a pretty diverse process across orgs, but follows this structure broadly:
Identify the set of skills you want your PM to have. This can vary across the type of company. For example, Stripe and OpenAI would want PMs with strong technical skills, while marketplaces such as Amazon and Airbnb want PMs with strong business/ product marketing skills. This is also why Meta, Google, Microsoft all have different rounds for PM interviews, and so should your company.
Evaluate PMs by creating interview rounds around skills. This one is straightforward. You get mid-to-senior folks to evaluate PMs on the skills you listed in step 1.
Regroup and discuss to make a decision on hire or no-hire. The discussion includes everyone who has interviewed the candidate, including the hiring manager and HR. They make this call of hire/maybe/no-hire in this meeting.
When you follow the usual process, you would be able to hire some good PMs, and some bad ones. The key reason you get mixed bag of PMs is Step 2 — evaluation on different skills. It’s easy to improve step 2, no matter whether you are a startup or a large company. So how do we do it?
A Better Hiring Process
There are three tactics to make the usual hiring process better, both focussed on Step 2 - evaluation.
Tactic 1: Interviewer <> Skill Mapping
Every product has few strong skills. The first tactic is to figure out which interviewers are best suited to evaluate what skill. Assign a specific set of skills that every interviewer has to evaluate for all candidates. For example, interviewer A would evaluate product sense and strategy, whereas interviewer B would evaluate analytical thinking.
One caution you should exercise while implementing this is you shouldn’t treat the mapping as sacrosanct, and keep assigning interviewers to gauge skills they aren’t mapped to 20-30% of times. Such flexibility ensure you don’t create bottlenecks by relying on only few interviewers for a skill and there are always backfills available.
Tactic 2: Interview notes while taking the interview
While most of the companies have the policy for interviewers to take notes, it doesn’t get followed. Many leaders create notes post interviews and share them. This creates two problems:
They rely on their own memory, which can be deceiving at times
They can slow down the process by not sharing the notes quickly, thereby making the HR/ other interviewers wait
Given the advances in GenAI, I do believe that taking notes has been much easier than earlier. So if you request people to use an AI generated meeting summary to create their notes (even post the interview), can be pretty reliable in recent times.
Tactic 3: Using the same questions
Daniel Kanhemann, Nobel Prize winner for his work in behavioural economics, created the recruitment process for Israeli Defence Force in 1955, which is still followed today. Here is what he writes about recruitment in his book ‘Thinking Fast and Slow’
If you are serious about hiring the best possible person for the job, this is what you should do. First, select a few traits that are prerequisites for success in (the) position. Don’t overdo it – six dimensions is a good number. The traits you choose should be as independent from each other as possible from each other, and you should feel that you can assess them reliably by asking a few factual questions.
Next, make a list of those questions for each trait and think about how you will score it, say on a 1 to 5 scale. You should have an idea of what you will call ‘very weak’ or ‘very strong’.
These preparations should take you half an hour or so – a small investment that can make a significant difference in the quality of the people you hire.
To avoid halo effects, you must collect the information on one trait at a time, scoring each before you move on to the next one. Do not skip around.
To evaluate each candidate, add up the six scores. Firmly resolve that you will hire the best candidate whose final score is the highest, even if there is another one whom you like better – try to resist the urge to change the rankings.
A vast amount of research offers a promise: you are much more likely to find the best candidate if you use this procedure than if you do what people normally do in such situations, which is to go into the interview unprepared and make choices by an overall intuitive judgment such as ‘I looked into his eyes and liked what I saw’.
In 1955, Kahneman instructed his Army colleagues to concentrate on scoring each trait as accurately as possible.
The new interview procedure proved to be a substantial improvement over the old one: the sum of the individual trait ratings predicted a soldier’s performance far more accurately than the interviewer’s overall judgement.
After Kahneman won his Nobel prize he returned to Israel and paid a visit to his former army base. He discovered they were still using the same interview process he had designed forty-seven years earlier, now with decades worth of data proving its effectiveness in predicting the combat performance of soldiers.
So how is it useful for PM hiring process? Ask the interviewers to ask the same set of questions to all candidates. While these questions can be periodically refreshed because candidates may share this info in the broader market, they can be same in a short period of 4-8 weeks. If possible, you should also create a product problem yourself that’s not popular in product circles.
When you ask the same/similar questions to multiple candidates, it helps you rank them well. But when you vary the question for every candidate, it’s quite difficult to assess them relatively.
If you follow the three tactics — skill<> interviewer mapping, asking interviewers to take notes while interviewing, and having standard question for every candidate for the role — you would have a better filtering process than most.
The last thing to improve continuously in the hard part of interviewing process.
New Product Sense Live Cohort is here (and 60% full)
The 3rd cohort of Product Sense and Strategy program is around the corner. The program is exclusively for experienced PMs and founders. Loved by 150+ alumni from startups and FAANG alike, this program is going to start by 18th January’2025. The program covers everything that’s need to master product sense and strategy.
You can check more about the program and apply from here
Hard Parts of Hiring PMs
The hard parts are the one which are difficult to master and need continuous improvement. And two category of people face this challenge most — first time hiring managers, new interviewers, and founders!
Here are the 7 hard parts of PM hiring and what to do about them
Assignments
I have never been a great fan of assignments because most of them feel like a screening criteria. Good candidates already in great jobs might not even have time to do assignments. So you need to make a conscious call of whether to include assignments or not.
Assignment can be great if you use them an opportunity to see how the candidate displays the skills needed to succeed in your environment. For example, Uber wants to see how the candidate presents and defends a product strategy. I have been through the process, and loved every bit of it. Good assignments also challenge the candidate in ways that they feel good after completing the assignment.
Bias
Companies have done all sorts of experiments to remove bias in the interview process. The best one to follow is Google. Google doesn’t allow interviewers to peak into each other notes to avoid bias transfer. This is something every good process should do. Google also does other things to remove bias. For example, it has a hiring and compensation committee different than the interview panel, but that’s something that only larger companies can do imo.
Making of a good interviewer
How will a new interviewer know whether they are good or need improvement in their interview style? They won’t if there is no shadowing. Shadowing is where the trainee interviewer wishing to improve their interviewing skills observes another talented/respected interviewer conducting an interview. But just shadowing isn’t enough. So there comes reverse shadowing where a senior/talented interviewer joins the interview to assess how the interview is being conducted and share notes around improvement areas for the interviewer.
The Bar Raiser
Bezos and Jobs both agree on getting the first set of hires right in order to build a world class team.
Bezos said about bar raisers in the 1998 Amazon Shareholder Letter:
It would be impossible to produce results in an environment as dynamic as the Internet without extraordinary people. Working to create a little bit of history isn't supposed to be easy, and, well, we're finding that things are as they're supposed to be! We now have a team of 2,100 smart, hard-working, passionate folks who put customers first.
Setting the bar high in our approach to hiring has been, and will continue to be, the single most important element of Amazon.com's success. During our hiring meetings, we ask people to consider three questions before making a decision:
Will you admire this person? If you think about the people you've admired in your life, they are probably people you've been able to learn from or take an example from. For myself, I've always tried hard to work only with people I admire, and I encourage folks here to be just as demanding. Life is definitely too short to do otherwise.
Will this person raise the average level of effectiveness of the group they're entering? We want to fight entropy. The bar has to continuously go up. I ask people to visualize the company 5 years from now. At that point, each of us should look around and say, The standards are so high now -- boy, I'm glad I got in when I did!
Along what dimension might this person be a superstar? Many people have unique skills, interests, and perspectives that enrich the work environment for all of us. It's often something that’s not even related to their jobs.
So as a founder or hiring manager, if you made the first hiring decision in product sub-optimal, you can mathematically induct that the team is going to be sub-optimal.
Self-awareness
The last point is more relevant for founders. Most founders are great at 1-2 things, but not all. So unless you are a key product founder, you are likely not great at it. And your judgement when it comes to first product hire will be sub-optimal.
So how do you solve it? Find people who have great reputation as PM and let them hire for you. Or even better is finding product founders who have been through your journey of building product teams, and seeking their help.
Projects
Elon musk is proponent of drilling a candidate in one of the projects they did. His typical question is “Tell me about some of the most difficult problems you worked on and how you solved them.” He believes that the people who really solved the problem know exactly how they solved it. They know and can describe the little details. Usually, someone who really had to struggle with a problem, they really understand the details, and they don’t forget.
Focussing on one or two projects can particularly useful in PM interviews. Though it is usually hard to get into details of projects for most interviewers. A hack that works there is to focus on projects where you have some domain knowledge. For example, if you have worked on a platform product, you can drill the candidate on a platform product they built. This creates a better conversation with the candidate because you are highly engaged in the discussion. Add to that, your knowledge makes you assess the details better.
Reference Check
Checking reference of a candidate when the references were provided by the candidate is a wrong strategy. Such reference checks alone would almost always be good since candidate has already asked for their permission to share their details.
So what do you do to perform a good reference check?
One, reference checks should be relied only if the candidate has worked in a similar work setup. For example, a startup hiring a PM shouldn’t take a reference check from a manager in large company. It’s known that a startup PM needs different set of skills and mindset than a large company. So such reference check can be misleading because it doesn’t tell you how the candidate is going to perform in your setup, i.e. a startup.
Two, reference checks should be done across multiple companies the candidate has worked on. A strong PM may have one bad experience. Similarly, a not-so-strong PM may have one very strong reference.
Past is the biggest predictor of future for most people, and so reference checks are valuable if done well.
That would be all for this post. Happy hiring, and see you next week,
Deepak
PS: Thanks to Debanjoli Sinha, Piyush Mayank, Sorabh Vij, Ankit Kulshreshtha, Uday Vansh Malik for reading drafts of this and providing inputs!