Hiring as an Individual Contributor — Part 4 of Becoming a Product Leader
The strength of any organization stems from its people. As a Product Leader, you are responsible for growing and strengthening the product team by hiring talented Product Managers. In this article, I discuss how individual contributors can become effective interviewers and demonstrate leadership skills in improving their hiring process.
This is Part 4 of the “Becoming a Product Leader” series. In this series, I’m tackling different outcomes and traits that individual contributor Product Managers can practice and cultivate to move towards becoming a Product Leader.
Hiring Matters
Who you hire matters. Especially Product Managers. More than most individual contributor roles, Product Managers can have massive impact on the success of a business. PMs are leaders of their teams. How they work with the dev team influences the speed and quality of execution. Their guidance and oversight impacts user experience and feature engagement. Their leadership in the vision, strategy, and roadmap drives customer and business outcomes.
Additionally, product managers can greatly impact the culture of the wider organization. Their attitude and mindset create an atmosphere for everyone around them. Strong positive personalities can help to forge bonds, build trust, and drive collaboration between Product Managers and other stakeholders. Strong negative personalities can raise walls, close communication, and even turn a great team toxic.
A great Product Manager on the right team can be a multiplying force for impact across the organization. A bad hire can be a dividing one.
Hiring as an Individual Contributor
As an individual contributor, you won’t be making the final call on whether a candidate is getting an offer. But you can greatly influence this decision when you’re part of the hiring process. A good hiring manager listens to all voices in the written feedback and in the debrief meeting. As a member of the interview panel, you should aim to provide a valuable perspective to the hiring decision. Ideally, you can build up enough experience as an IC so that by the time you’re hiring for your own team, you know exactly how to make a great hire.
Start Interviewing
Getting into the interview process is generally pretty easy. If you’re in a company with a structured training program — great! Just get in there. But most companies won’t have a structured program. So it may not be obvious how to get involved interviews, there may not be any actual training, and perhaps not even interview guides or evaluation criteria for any given interview. All of which can be opportunities to drive improvements for the product team.
If there isn’t an official process for getting involved in hiring, just ask. Talk to your manager and other hiring managers to let them know you’d like to get involved. Most folks are happy to bring in more interviewers. Hiring is a time consuming process, and being able to spread responsibility out across more individuals can limit the impact to productivity.
Become an Effective Interviewer
Good interviewing doesn’t happen by accident. Like any skill, it requires intention and practice. There are a lot of great books and articles for interviewing techniques, questions, and processes. But there are a few key concepts I wanted to call out:
- Know who you’re looking for. You should be very clear on what is needed in the role. What does this PM need to achieve in the next 6–12 months to be successful in this role? What skills, traits, and experience does this person need to achieve those goals? If the hiring manager hasn’t explicitly stated these things, talk to them to find out.
- Know the purpose of your interview. Each interview throughout the process serves a purpose. You should be clear in what aspects of the person you’re trying to tease out. It’s a waste of time for every interview to be trying to answer the same questions about the candidate.
- Your gut is unreliable, so be consistent. Asking the same questions ensures consistency in the process, which is critical to mitigating biases and effectively evaluating candidates.
- Have evaluation criteria. Know how you can grade answers to questions or how the candidate performed on a product skills assessment interview. This provides more structure to your interview, and has the added benefit of being more useful to the hiring manager. If an evaluation rubric doesn’t exist, consider making one.
- Talk to other hiring managers and interviewers on how they interview, what they look for, and how they guide candidates through the interview.
- Shadow on as many interviews as you can manage. Take the time to chat with your partner after each interview. Dig into how they managed the flow of the interview. What their thinking process was. What responses or statements were worth flagging or following up on.
- Once you learn how to run the interview, switch roles and reverse shadow, with the primary interviewer sitting back and observing. Again, take the time to debrief after interviews. Ask for feedback on your interview. What they thought you handled well. What they might have done differently.
Give Great Feedback
The hiring manager won’t be present in most of the interviews, so providing effective feedback is critical to aiding their decision. A lot of interviewers just rely on their gut to make decisions and give barebones feedback based on their feelings. Gut based hiring leads to biased outcomes, and feedback from the interviewers is generally useless to the hiring manager. Your feedback should be like any other analysis you perform in your job as a Product Manager: an outcome oriented opinion backed by evidence.
- Write down your feedback in detail. Don’t just rely on passing a general recommendation over to the hiring manager. A well written, comprehensive evaluation is invaluable for the hiring manager when making hard judgment calls. Take 15–20 minutes to summarize your thoughts. This can have the additional benefit of helping you identify any gaps in your evaluation.
- Give your overall recommendation, and ground it based on the overall needs for the position. If the position requires strong UX instincts, but they’re strong on data, be clear on why they’re a “no hire” for this role but could be a “strong hire” for another.
- Provide specific examples to justify your evaluations. What made them a great communicator? What details did they provide that suggested they’d be a great collaborator with their team? How did they demonstrate strong analytical thinking?
- Be clear about where you still have gaps in your understanding, especially if there is a good chance that these gaps should be covered in another interview.
Leverage the Debrief
In the debrief session, you’ll have the opportunity to reiterate your feedback and to hear other people’s feedback. This is an opportunity both to further hone your hiring skills, and also to meaningfully influence the decision whether to extend an offer to the candidate.
Pay attention to how others provide feedback and how they talk about their interview. This is a great opportunity to see who is particularly skilled at interviewing and who you could learn from. Try to discern what makes feedback helpful. As a hiring manager, you don’t want to make decisions based on whether a team member liked the candidate or not. You want to make decisions based on the specific evaluation criteria each interviewer was measuring.
Upon listening to all the feedback, you should be able to form your own opinion about whether this would be a good fit for the role. This is good practice for when you’ll be the one making the hiring decision, but also a good opportunity in practicing influencing another’s decision.
If you have a strong opinion about the candidate, you should consider how you can provide this opinion. It isn’t your decision, but a well formed opinion can be valuable input for the hiring manager. Rather than just baldly stating your opinion, call out the specific aspect about the role and the candidate that either raised concerns or suggested greatness.
Becoming a Leader in the Hiring Process
Many organizations do not have a particularly rigorous interview process. In these cases, there is an opportunity level up your product org. Establish a shadowing program if one didn’t exist. Create evaluation rubrics, especially for product skill interview sessions. Find or create a framework for documenting the expectations for each role.
I recognized the value of good hiring early on in my career, and I made it a goal to become an effective interviewer and hiring manager. In addition to reading books and articles on hiring and interviewing best practices, I always made an effort to get involved in the hiring process wherever I worked. At Autodesk, I requested to take on multiple interviews in our PM hiring process, particularly the product sense phone screen and the on-site case study.
We didn’t have a proper training program for our interview process, and our interview guides were pretty light. So I met with every PM who ran either of these interviews. I asked them how they ran the interviews, what they looked for in candidates, and how they measured success. I was provided the opportunity to participate in and then run the interviews fairly quickly.
After a few sessions with the product sense phone screen, I started coalescing on a few key criteria to evaluate each candidate. I created an evaluation rubric, getting feedback from other interviewers and testing it out in my evaluations. After a few iterations, I had a solid interview and evaluation guide that enabled other PMs to quickly ramp up and run them on their own.
Interviewing this many candidates enabled me to hone my own skills and identify best practices and opportunities for improvement in our process. So when I moved into a management position and started hiring for my team, I was able to immediately leverage all the knowledge I had gained. I set expectations for the role to ensure each member of the interview panel knew what to look for. I centralized interview guides and resources to ensure consistency in our process. And I set up a shadow program so more Senior PMs would have the opportunity to start interviewing.
Summary
Hiring PMs matters. Great Product Leaders take the time to ensure their organization will make great hires. As an aspiring people manager, you should prepare yourself for the next level. Invest the time to become a great interviewer and hiring manager. And find opportunities to level up and improve your hiring process.
Next in the series, I discuss another fundamental people manager responsibility: Coaching and Mentoring Product Managers.
Thanks again for reading this articles series. Please share your thoughts in the comments! And be sure to follow me to stay updated on future articles.
