How to Hire Great Product Managers
I joined Aircall in March 2020 as Head of Product. Soon after, despite the outbreak of the Covid 19 pandemic, Aircall raised $65M in Series C funding. The growth and product ambitions were huge and my role as a Head of Product was to help make this happen. My first focus was building the team and the first step was to get the right people onboard.
You think getting a PM job is difficult? Try hiring one!… and remotely
Here are a few questions to answer before launching the recruitment process:
- What seniority? We had agreed with the Leadership team that we wanted to hire a senior team. We are scaling at a very fast pace, our product initiatives are numerous and complex and we need seasoned practitioners with both a good product mindset and experience.
- What profiles? This is the classical question of specific domain and market expertise vs product management expertise. The decision was to go for the latter because an experienced PM will be able to tackle new topics and learn fast about new markets and users. Another decision was to hire for culture and mindset fit and not for an exact perimeter. This helped focus on the right people and skills but also helped us manage a common scaling challenge: making sure we can play with start dates and topics in a context where the engineering team was scaling very fast as well.
- What product mindset? I was looking for a mix of strategic and operational skills. Some key aspects were being user centred, using data for decision making, focusing on what makes the business successful and understanding just enough tech to drive the product forward. I was looking for PMs that focus on de-risking their product hypothesis and testing them in a lean way in order to bring value to production early and often. When thinking about the mindset of the team, it was really about knowing our topics well but also not being afraid of trying new things, testing, learning and pushing good collaboration and communication a step further every day.
- What process? We decided to have a mix of ‘classical’ interview and a use case. We wanted to be mindful of the candidates time so we went for 4 steps: HR interview, interview with a Lead PM, ‘live exercise’ (nothing to prepare beforehand) and a last interview with the Head of Product. I wanted to be the last one seeing the candidate in a 1:1 because I consider it is important as a manager to make sure we keep the integrity of the team and choose someone who matches the culture and the mindset.
In terms of making sure someone is a good fit, remote interviews are trickier that in person ones. Can you get the ‘feeling’ you would like to work with someone in only one hour over Zoom? Well, from my experience I can say Yes! Feeling and intuition work well remotely as well, and even though you can never know 100% if someone is a good fit in my case it worked wonders because we’ve hired amazing PMs and designers.
Another great strategy is to hire people you already know. This will insure you have great professionals on board but also people that you enjoy working with and you already have a good relationship built on trust. In my case, 3 of the new joiners were in this situation. But the process of having them join the team was not a piece of cake. Here are a few things to keep in mind when you want to hire people you already know:
- Adapt your recruitment process. Do not make the people you refer for your own team go through the whole standard process; this is inappropriate and a waste of time on both sides. Adapt your hiring process and take into account the fact that the person to hire has been approached by their future manager to join their team (so they might not even be actively looking for a job) and most of their skills have already been validated in previous experiences.
- Do not underestimate the time element. Even though you adapt and shorten the hiring process, getting someone you already know on board will take quite some time from you as a manager. From my experience, this meant multiple ‘unofficial’ conversations about how I see the future of the company, the product and the team and what their role will be.
- Make sure you offer a smart career move. Even though you and the person you contacted would love to work together again, there is much more to a career move. Sometimes the incentive is a promotion towards a management position, a salary raise, a new intellectual challenge or all this together. The move needs to be interesting altogether and you being the manager should only be a plus.
Hiring is a critical part of building a great team and for me it was also an intense one as as I hired 8 people in my first 3 months as Head of Product at Aircall. I could not be more happy with the team today, and the key to getting here was to make sure that they have the right experience, mindset and motivations in order to be successful at Aircall in 2020 and beyond.
