Shishir Mehrotra: uncertainty

Transcript context

…Wow. There's so much there. A couple quick questions. Is this basically your calibration ladder framework for PMs at this point? And then is this also just like your interview guide, just interview at each of these pieces to level the person? Yeah. So it's definitely how we do. Our version of leveling is PSHE, and we use a set of Radford levels. Radford has this really interesting way of describing that as you grow in a profession... He uses the analogy of someone, of a sailor and that a junior sailor is learning to tie knots and then you gradually can tie all the standard knots and then you can tie the advanced knots and so on, and so you work your way up and at some point the way you're judged is you invented nylon and there's list between there. It's like a way to evaluate every role. It's very similar to PSHE. And so we look at a similar list. But yeah, basically all of our roles are evaluated on something that corresponds with PSHE. And in terms of interviews, yeah, you look for the same thing. And by the way, I should say interviewing is one part of this. And you talk about interviewing. You talk about calibration. There's one other really important one which is reference checking. And I think the best way to assess PSHE is actually through references. And so the most important guide we write isn't the interview guide. When we call this person's references, what do you ask to actually get at these questions? Because people can often confuse them. Just to pick product managers as an example. We all know some really amazing H level product managers. And one of the reasons, one of the hallmarks, of an H level product manager is that their counterparts usually love them and they'll say things like, "Oh, my gosh. The person runs such efficient meetings and all the communication is always clear. [inaudible 01:16:07] always buttoned up. Execs know what we're doing. The market knows what we're doing. Sales team know what we're doing." That's great H. And then you'll ask them a question about, "Okay. So when you're deciding which problem to solve, who is the leader of that? And are they picking the right problems? Or when there's a hard problem, who is regularly coming up with the best solutions for them? Who do you turn to? Who is the most obvious person to turn to say, 'This is really hard problem. What's the right solution?'?" An amazing number of people will tell you, "No, they run a great meeting but actually solving the problem, designer does that," or, "What are the problems? No. The CEO tells us what to do. That's not what this person's really good at. Yeah. I'm not sure we're solving the right problem, but boy, we run a great meeting. " And it's not meant to diminish any of that. I mean, we spent a while talking about rituals, which mostly happen at that H level, so I don't think it's unimportant, but it's actually quite hard to assess in an interview but incredibly easy to assess in a reference check. And I think getting good at that is really important. You may have mentioned this, but what's the question there? Is there a question that you could recommend?…

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