PITA 007

TOPIC 1:

As an interviewer, what are best questions (and (un)expected answers) for product management candidates?

• What do you do, how did you make those decisions?

• What can I (as a hiring manager) learn from you?

• If you can add one feature to our product portfolio, what would you? (See if it connects to the company’s mission)

• How do you know that you’re successful? (Outcomes and Impact on the team)

• What’s your ideal culture? What does a toxic one look like?

• Tell me about a typical day in your current role - activities, what teams, etc Looking for structure in thinking, x-functional

• Tell me about an assumption that was proved wrong

• Evaluate yourself - better on discovery or delivery?

• How do you define…. What makes a good pm and why?

• Ask for concrete examples

• Give them homework if they did good in the interview 

• What was the most formative experience you had as a PM? Tells you about them, what doesn’t matter

• Tell me something you hate about being a PM

TOPIC 2:

Teaching an organisation how Product adds value when they’ve never had Product before

• Throw away the word product. Figure out prioritisation and fix a problem. Install product thinking, get them on the right track.

• Get the backing of the leadership team

• Just do the thing needed to solve the problem. Use their language - if finance people, focus on value prop

• Communicate ROI and show improvements, blockers, problems

• John Cutler on Twitter - creating high value, high velocity decisions

• Support scale-up of the business

• Turning opinions into insights

• Try and understand ‘who’ is responsible for ‘what’ and re-distribute responsibilities where needed - although be careful that people don’t completely give up accountability!

TOPIC 3:

Recommendations for books to read while in lockdown that are relevant but don’t feel too much like work

• Algorithms to Live By

• Rising Strong

• Thinking Fast & Slow 

• Antifragile: Things that Gain from Disorder 

• This Human Moment - Six-part series of online gatherings. The next session is on Friday at 7pm BST. If you’re interested in joining, you’ll need to register here.

• The Mom Test, Rob Fitzpatrick

• Bones Brigade (Stacy Peralta) on Netflix (https://bonesbrigade.com, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s5kA57IyqAI)

• Chaos Monkeys 

• Phoenix Project 

• The Goal

• Radical Focus 

• Patrick Lencioni books

  • The Advantage

  • The Captain Class

• Republic by Plato

• The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers

• Business wars is an amazing podcast, very good storytelling and a lot of fun… Netflix VS blockbusters… Playstation vs Nintendo etc.

• What You Do Is Who You Are How to Create Your Business Culture - Ben Horowitz - very light and a lot of fun to read examples from Genghis Khan and a prison gang leader on how to create a culture...

TOPIC 4:

In B2B Product management, how do you manage customer and cross-functional expectations when sales sells more than what is available in the product? Measuring the team or measuring the outcomes?

• Follow Rich Mironov - and fix the sales team’s bonus structure

• What’s your sales cycle? Are they selling what you’ve told them should be delivered?

• Do sales actually understand the product? Or are they just throwing buzzwords at the customer to close a sale?

• Join the pre-sales calls

• Give Sales a configurator

• Get involved in the sales-closing process

• Build/repair the Sales relationship

• Sell services alongside the product?

• Tie Churn objectives into Sales

• Make sure you have a clearly-defined product vision that shows who your target customer is and how you’ll solve their problems; qualify sales into on-target and off