Melissa Tan: recommendation

Transcript context

…Awesome. We're going to link to that book if folks don't know about it. I love it. You talked about hiring PMs and how that is important in building high performing teams. So let's spend a little time there, maybe just two questions all throughout and you can approach them however you want. One is just what do you look for when you're hiring product managers? You've hired a lot of PMs. You've managed a lot of PMs over the years. What do you look for, especially things that maybe other people don't focus on enough, and then just what is your interview process? What do you find is most helpful for interviewing process-wise? In terms of what I look for, I think there's this kind of known list of things that you probably want to look for, for a PM that I probably are not going to ... I'm say anything groundbreaking here, but obviously communication skills, the ability to manage stakeholders and work well cross-functionally. The things that I lean especially heavy on in my interview process is this concept of first principles thinking or strong critical thinking. So usually there's some live problem solving component to my interview process where I really lean more heavily into how would you approach X problem? And then I dig into the Y and try to understand why would they approach it this way, see what questions they're asking and just see how they approach problem solving. And then the other thing that I look for that I mentioned is that growth mindset. So really seeing how does this person take feedback. And so I'll actually sometimes give feedback to candidates through the process. Something that I do that I learned a few years ago that was super helpful, so I always have a presentation component to the interview process that checks for prepared thinking communication. And I recommend a prep call between the two of us before that presentation. And I actually will give feedback on the presentation. And what this gives me signal is what is it actually going to be like to work together? And then I see how they incorporate it into the final product and that is always really interesting and sometimes it's the biggest signal to what it's going to be like to work with this person. Okay, this is great. I want to spend a little time here. So what is the actual sequence that you recommend or you use for interviewing? There's a presentation, there's a rep call but also is kind of involved in that.…

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