Leading the Product Speaker Jason Shen talks about how to tackle hiring in Product Management For the blog post that goes with this presentation and more speaker talks go to: https://www.leadingtheproduct.com/behind-the-scenes/

1. Product Madness
Five Ways to Bring Sanity Back
Into the PM Hiring Process
Jason Shen
Co-founder & CEO | Headlight
Jason Shen
Co-founder & CEO | Headlight

3. Ridejoy

4. Percolate

7. Why is it so hard to hire
PM’s?

8. Product managers:
“Globally competitive,
unseen in Australia”

9. High
impact
Different
expectations
Imperfect metrics

10. So what?

11. “Learn recruiting. Once I became
a manager I learned that it was
now my job. I had imagined that
I would just let the recruiting org
know what my open headcount
was, and they’d handle the rest,
but nope.”
Jackie Bavaro
Head of Product at Asana
Author of Cracking the PM Interview

12. 1. Stop hunting
unicorns

14. Software Engineering UX Design
Marketing Data Analysis Project
Management Industry Expert
Sales Product Visionary
Customer Support

15. You can’t
have it all

16. You can’t
(afford to)
have it all

17. 2. Know what you
need

18. Product is about
trade-offs

19. 1. Hire for your must-haves
Train / coach for the rest

20. 3. Promote more
from within

22. Culture eats strategy
for breakfast

23. Training Rampup
Culture
Rampup

24. “Workers promoted into
jobs have significantly
better performance for
the first two years than
workers hired in.”

25. 4. Create opportunities to
learn product skills

27. “When people say they can
only hire experienced PMs, I
often read this as “I haven’t
figured out how to efficiently
grow new PMs yet.”
Ellen Chisa
CEO/Co-founder of Dark
Former VP of Product at Lola

28. 5. Hire with take-
home projects

31. Readium’s CEO wants to
launch a new 280 sec “micro-
podcasting” feature for their
iOS app.
Build an inital 3 month
product plan / roadmap

32. Clarity Vision Credibility Execution
Develop a Rubric

33. Bringing it home

34. 1. Hiring demands trade-offs

35. 1. Hiring demands trade-offs
Culture matters as much as skills

36. 1. Hiring demands trade-offs
Culture matters as much as skills
Take-home projects > good stories

37. jshen.me/ta
kehome
Answer 3 questions and get a bundle of B2B,
B2C & E-Commerce PM take-homes
Give me feedback!