Michael Margolis: preference

Transcript context

…Let's do it. What comes next? So once I have that set of criteria and the team is all aligned and agreed on what that is, they're like, "Yeah, yeah, those are our people," so then I start thinking about how I recruit them. So to do that, for most people, unless I'm looking for something that's very, very specialized or hard to find, what I do is I create a screener questionnaire. So I translate these criteria into, essentially, a set of questions that will help me filter out people, to know, if people respond to this questionnaire, who are the bullseyes in there? And so part of the trick there is to write a questionnaire in a way that I'm not telegraphing the right answers, and so that I kind of am in the control seat so I can pick out and identify the people. What I mean by that is if I were to say, "I will pay $125 to anybody who is a product manager who listens to Lenny's podcast," and all of a sudden, I'm going to get a bazillion people who are just like, "I will take that $125. " I'm like, "Well, I don't know, do you actually listen to the podcast? I don't know. Hopefully you do. Everybody does." But if I can ask the question in a different way in terms of, "What are some of the podcasts you listen to? What are the kinds of people you follow?" these kinds of things, and then see, where does that show up? Or even ask it as an open-ended question, like, "Where do you get your most trusted information as a product manager?" and start to see and then be able to pick those people out, because what I've wanted to do, one of the key things in those bullseye criteria are that they're very concrete and very measurable things. It's not just, "Oh, this person is an active shopper." That's not very helpful to me, because I need to translate it into this questionnaire. So I need to know, what is active shopper? That means somebody who is purchasing certain kind of item, whatever we define, three times a week. Yeah, that's active, right? So we have some very particular, very measurable, concrete things. So then I'm writing this questionnaire. And typically, what I do is I rely pretty heavily actually on User Interviews. Respondent is another one of these kinds of services. So I can post that questionnaire and get responses, depending on what I'm looking for, pretty fast. So I can recruit in a matter of three, four days, typically, depending on what I'm looking for. And I've been able to get surprisingly specific people that way. And so that is a huge shortcut for me to be able to recruit that way. This episode is brought to you by Enterpret. Enterpret unifies all your customer interactions, from Gong calls to Zendesk tickets to Twitter threads to App Store reviews, and makes it available for analysis. It's trusted by leading product orgs like Canva, Notion, Loom, Linear, Monday.com, and Strava to bring the voice of the customer into the product development process, helping you build best-in-class products faster. What makes Enterpret special is its ability to build and update customer-specific AI models that provide the most granular and accurate insights into your business, connect customer insights to revenue and operational data in your CRM or data warehouse to map the business impact of each customer need and prioritize confidently, and empower your entire team to easily take action on use cases like win-loss analysis, critical bug detection, and identifying drivers of churn with Enterpret's AI assistant wisdom. Looking to automate your feedback loops and prioritize your roadmap with confidence, like Notion, Canva, and Linear? Visit E-N-T-R-P-R-E-T .com/lenny to connect with the team and to get two free months when you sign up for an annual plan. This is a limited-time offer. That's enterpret.com/lenny. Where do you find these people? How do you contact them? Where are they?…

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