Chris Miller: evaluation

Transcript context

…Are there any other traits on that list of traits you look for that you think are really important that maybe other people don't focus on? Yeah, relentless curiosity is probably my number one. My number two would probably be resilience, specifically if you're working in growth. I think if you're doing growth, right, if you're doing product-led growth the right way, then you're trying to balance the science and sort of taking a somewhat hygienic approach to validating assumptions and hypotheses with being really ambitious and really pushing for the things that are going to have massive impact for your customers at the end of the day. And when you're doing that, you're going to fail more than you're going to be successful along the way. And if you're not resilient, that can be really demotivating. I think there's a stat that some growth person put out there years ago, which is that on average only 20 to 30% of experiments of growth team runs might be successful. So, that means 70 to 80% of the time you're, you're not putting numbers on the board and you're extracting learnings hopefully that you can apply to the future. But I think if you're not resilient, what I've seen happen is you end up sort of grasping for a win, which can sometimes look like making bets that are too small and too insignificant to matter. If your sort of primary modality of product-led growth work is experiment-driven product development and you're hitting more than like 30, 40% of the time, you're thinking too small. And so, that resiliency piece is certainly important in my mind. I think coachability is another one in the sense that I still think that the sort of subcategory of growth product management is still fledgling compared to PMs working on platform features. And so, even when I'm interviewing folks, I'm not necessarily looking for 10 years of experience doing PLG. I think that's mostly an unreasonable ask, but it can certainly be taught and even if you do have some experience doing PLG work, it's important to know that what that work is going to look like is going to potentially vary in a meaningful way from shop to shop. And so, being coachable and adaptable to whatever the context is of the business or problem space that you're working on I think is an important trait that I look for in PMs, and then creativity is so important too. Valuing simple solutions to really hard problems, I think if building the next super sophisticated widget is the thing that gets you out of bed in the morning, growth might not be for you, I think the best growth product leaders and growth minds that I've worked with over the years or have had the privilege of learning from over the years, I think the thing that I noticed about them is they're almost ambivalent to the solution and certainly ambivalent to how complex a solution may or may not be. And taking little to no pleasure or pride in the complexity of a solution so long that it delivers the outcome that the business and your customers need, I think is a really cool trait, and I kind categorize that under creativity. You mentioned this phrase, relentless curiosity, and it made me think about a story I read about you where the way you got into product management was you were at some startup and the founder was just like, "I've read that the cure to all our problems is going to be hiring product manager," and you heard that and you googled, what is product management, and then you asked them, "Can I do that?" And that's how you got into the role. So first of all, is that true? And second of all, what's your advice to people trying to get into product management and any lessons from that experience?…

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