Luc Levesque: evaluation

Transcript context

…And so that's a really interesting example of that in action. I was going to talk about this later, but maybe it's a good time to talk about it now, which is around hiring. So you talked about you have this playbook for how to hire. You mentioned to me that you kind of find that as you scale as a leader, hiring ends up being like the most important skill maybe, maybe one of the most important skills. I'd love to hear your take on just what you found about hiring as you've grown as a product leader. Well, I think you reach a point in your career where you realize that hiring is the skill you now need to become world-class at because you're not no longer doing the work yourself. You're still of course involved and doing some of the work and getting your hands dirty, but the bulk of your team's success now will be the quality of the hires you make and you truly need to be world-class at that. So yeah, I built this playbook out. I was in Canada in Ottawa when I sold that company, Tripadvisor, and really started growing my team and becoming more Leaning into leadership at the time through that experience. One of the benefits of being in Ottawa and kind of off the grid if you will, is it's a curse and a benefit as that you don't have a ton of people you can learn from. So it does mean you need to go to first principles and think things through from the ground up. It takes a little longer, but you come up with your own playbooks on how to do things. I think you've seen my blueprint, which is a good example of that where I have this blueprint I put together. When new people join the team, I show them my blueprint, which is basically a list of my quirks so we can really quickly align. That's something that just being in Ottawa and trying to figure out how to be a leader and avoid mistakes, I was like, "Wouldn't it be nice if you had a blueprint? When somebody joined, you can just tell them all of your quirks and you can just quickly calibrate on how it is to work together versus through awkward long discussions over the course of a year." My hiring playbook's a similar thing. I think of it in three different chapters, if you will. There's finding talent, assessing talent, and closing talent. In terms of finding talent, I do believe that the best predictor of future performance is past performance. So I'm looking for what I call signs of excellence. So I want to know the top people generally have done multiple amazing things in their life, repeated success, not just once. Maybe it was work related, maybe not work related. But generally speaking, if you think back to the stars you've worked with, they've done some amazing things. And that's why I always start when I interview or when I chat with people, I started talking about just trying to understand, "What has been your path? What have you done professionally and not professionally?" And generally, stars going to stand out. It's very rare that there's not something obvious that comes through. So for myself personally, I'm looking for kind of three different signs of excellence to tell me that it doesn't have to be three. The mental model I have is as you're talking to them, you're getting pluses and negatives. There's red flags you're hearing and there's really great things. And then at the end you can make an opinion of how good this person is. Another great sign of excellence, and this was just through reflecting on stars on the team and thinking what makes them unique, what about them. nd you can make an opinion of how good this person is. Another great sign of excellence, and this was just through reflecting on stars on the team and thinking what makes them unique, what about them. One of them is when somebody's boss leaves the company and then comes back to poach them, that is such a strong signal because if you think of what just happened, the leader who knows exactly how good this person you're talking to is, they have the most knowledge of the performance of this individual, they left the company. They've come back to poach them, putting their own reputation at risk by coming back depending on the situation. And they would never do that unless this person was really, really good. So you don't want to over pivot on one signal, you want to look at the full picture. But those are the types of things I look at to bring in top talent. And I've got this whole playbook, mistakes I've made that I've learned from, things to avoid. And over the years, yeah, I've put together this playbook that I try to follow and I'm always running little experiments to try to make it better.…

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