Hiring for ‘cultural fit’ in a product manager
This year I spent a fair amount of time hiring product managers. The time yielded lots of mini-‘aha’ moments that taught me about what I was really looking for in a candidate. But since I started building teams a few years ago, I’ve noticed that one of the hardest aspects of measuring a strong candidate was to evaluate the cultural fit. Arguably, cultural fit can be the biggest differentiator when you are dealing with many high quality people (reference to 50–60% cost resulting from poor cultural fit). So after I finished this most recent round of hiring for product managers on my team, I reflected on what were the real themes that stood out to me as true indicators of an awesome cultural fit, for the compnay and for the product manager position. I wanted to make sure culture isn’t an off-the-cuff, fuzzy evaluation, and instead follows clear criteria to an unbiased assessment. Here are my cultural criteria and a little bit on how to test for them.
A commitment (to):
- Outcomes
- The cause/product
- Debate and comfort with disagreements
A continuous learner who:
- Acknowledges growth areas
- Has a penchant for curiosity
A collaborator who:
- Communicates clearly
- Works well with colleagues
- Shares information openly and can scale their knowledge
A creative mind who:
- Is able to think outside the box
A proactive personality who:
- Doesn’t procrastinate
- Stays focused on solving problems not complaining about them
How to test for commitment
Outcome oriented. Outcomes can be tested by their demonstration and ability to articulate clear metrics and KPIs that they use for their current product. When you follow up with probing questions as to why these data points were chosen, they should be able to explain the reason. Internalization is such a key attribute as a product manager, and someone who doesn’t know why they’ve been doing the work they are doing is a big red flag.
Doing it for the cause. Measuring a candidate’s commitment to the cause can be shown through a few methods. One is to ask them about a time they had to break their normal work schedule to make something happen. This doesn’t mean you want someone who doesn’t hold strong boundaries between life and work, because that is critical. But a good product manager should have plenty of stories about late nights, early mornings, and 6 hour debugging sessions. If they can’t show this, it’s hard to believe they will put in the fight when it really counts. The other method is to see how much homework they’ve done on your product ahead of time. Do they talk about why they feel connected to the company? Do they ask a ton of questions about how you operate and what the product really does to impact its users? These tell you the person cares about the output.
Civil Debator. Disagreements and debates is such an important attribute that I look for in a candidate. I love constructive debate, I love real-time reflection. Product managers will never be the most knowledgeable about the users, or the most knowledgeable about the code. They may know a lot, but they won’t know it all. And a product manager must be ready to yield to logical arguments, or engage in strong debate. This can be tested really well during one of the case studies you run through with the candidate. If you’re asking them to solve a problem and they are running with an idea, introduce a counter point. Do they hold on to their idea without pausing, reflecting and asking more questions? Equally, do they just fully change course and forget to constructively engage to understand the counter point? Making sure they use logic frameworks and they demonstrate the ability to understand different paths, and if presented with strong evidence, can disagree and commit, will tell you a lot about how they will handle work-like situations.
How to test for a continuous learner
Shows vulnerability. It is a simple question to ask, what are your biggest growth areas as a product manager? Product involves balancing a ton of different responsibilities, and every single one of us has a few weaknesses. When someone doesn’t have these ready to share it means they either haven’t done end-to-end product management, or they don’t want to grow. Asking about weaknesses should never be a trick question either. It is expected, and is immensely useful for the hiring manager to see how people internally can help that potential candidate to close those gaps or to be covered by other PMs in the team.
Life-long learner. A desire to grow and learn usually leads to an employee who will be a dynamic contributor. We like to ask a question along the lines of ‘teach us something in just a few minutes about something we likely won’t know much about’, or one I like even better ‘tell us about something you’ve taught yourself or about a hobby you have outside of work.’ People provide such genuinely fascinating answers to these questions. You want to see that people have a natural inclination to learn and to build new areas of knowledge.
How to test for collaboration
Clear communicator. A key to strong collaboration is being a strong communicator. I can keep this one straightforward to assess. And there are two specific places where you can give a candidate a chance to shine (as you’ll also assess this throughout the interview process). We expect that when we ask someone to introduce themselves in 2–3 minutes, that the candidate can do so in roughly that amount of time. We always approach casually, and to impress upon them that it doesn’t need to be a list of accomplishments because we have their resume, but just a summary of how they would describe their background. I’ve had people go for 10 minutes without pause, so it is either poor communication skills or poor listening, both not great. However, who isn’t nervous in the beginning of an interview! So this would be more of a yellow flag. Then when you ask them to explain the value their product brings, or how their product works, you really want to be able to understand the explanation. If they can’t do so, it’s a big cause for concern as they will need to be the absolute best demonstrator of how the product works and what value it brings for the product you want them to grow/build.
Relationship builder. When you have a top technical candidate who also knows how to yield positive relationships, you have a winner. One way to look for this would be to ask them what the dynamic is with their current team. Often if they tend to be difficult to work with, they will expose that in a 1–2 minute explanation of how their team currently works (do they emphasize how some people are tough to work with but don’t talk about how they work through those problems?). The other is to bring an engineer or two from the team they will work closest with. When the technical assessments are air-tight and they can ensure competency, the next thing is how well they can get along with the people they will talk to day-in day-out.
Makes others better. A smart person who doesn’t share information will not help a team grow and won’t be as effective as they could be. It also means they will not be able to inform the people around them and they won’t be able to effectively teach others. Two key questions to ask here. One is ‘how, and to whom, do you communicate when releasing new enhancements?’ You should expect a clear process around what documentation they update, and what key stakeholders or marketing channels they use to inform the right people and also have a paper trail. The second question is ‘Tell me about a time when you had a really effective way of doing things and you needed to help scale that mode of operation to other teams’. You’ll immediately see if they know how to make people around them as productive.
How to test for creativity
Out-of-the-box thinker. This one is simple, but it is an especially key culture quality for someone who is taking on a more nascent, less-defined product. The question I often go with is to ask them to design a new residential cooling fan in a market where they have dissatisfied customers and test your assumption at virtually no cost. Or to redesign a fire hydrant (and test your assumption at virtually no cost). This will test for a lot of things, such as problem identification, sourcing of information, creative ideation, prototyping, etc… But I love to see how out-of-the-box a candidate can get when thinking about lightweight ways to test a hypothesis.
How to test for proactivity
Always ready for what’s ahead. I find that procrastination can be a big problem as a product manager. I don’t consider myself someone who is a great project planner, but I do make sure to stay ahead of problems and stay abundantly aware of timelines. As a PM, you must be a champion of context and delivery and this means trying to look for problems before they come. This is pretty tough to test for, but I believe it’s a subtle thing to keep an eye on through the interview process to see how well prepared they come for each interview round.
Shows initiative. The last one here is to see how they do at changing the status quo. How well can they handle when things aren’t going the way they want. Building products means setting a clear vision, and being resourceful on how to handle problems that crop up and how to solve for them rather than accepting that something isn’t the way you want it to be done. Two questions that peel back the layers are ‘When have you picked up a new skill or tool in order to get something across the finish line’ and ‘Tell me a time you felt the company you worked in was not approaching a problem the right way and you did something to bring about change.’ Admittedly this may be hard to think of on the spot, as are many of these questions. At my current company, we have a pre-interview round, where candidates answer a set of technical and/or cultural questions, that allows us to assess candidates unbiased without seeing their resumes. This could be a good example of one that can help you start to chip away at your cultural assessment at the earliest opportunity.
I was not able to execute all of these assessments well nor did I manage to include all of them in the process. These, however, are my reflections on what to be looking for when you need to balance strong technicals with strong culture. It’s so important to avoid cultural assessments that are purely based on a ‘chat’, where we unfortunately bring in a bit too much personal biases even if we don’t intend for it to happen. How to formulate this into a rubric is numerous.
One tip is to identify how many of these cultural attributes are must-haves for the PM role currently open, put them into a rubric with the questions you choose to represent those attributes, decide which stages you want to cover these questions, and then stay committed to the process. If certain attributes are must-haves, then you will need to explicitly acknowledge that strength in your rubric and similarly, explicitly acknowledge when one of those criteria show a red flag. The less mitigations you put in place, the less time you waste on candidates who truly are missing a key competency for the role you want to fill. These criteria help build a more quantitative approach to finding someone who will be an all-star contributor and whom you know will match your cultural values.
Interested to hear what ways you measure, and how you measure, culture when hiring product managers!
