MY PRODUCT leadership journey

The recruitment funnel is your most important tool in the whole hiring process. It is a simple tracking of a) the number of candidates from – Profiles considered → Profiles shortlisted → Initial screening/selling → Interview rounds → Offer discussion → Offer → Accepted → Joining over a period of time. b)Turn around time (TAT) […]

The human element of your hiring process is best captured by collecting feedback from the candidates about their experience. A candidate judges your company’s culture largely based on the professionalism of people involved in the whole process. So it is important to get candidate experiences right.  Once you get the candidate experiences right, you can […]

A few weeks after joining my team – one of the senior PMs casually told me “Venkat, before joining here, I spoke to your previous team members and got very positive feedback. Only after that, I decided to join your team”  Surprisingly, PM after PM who joined my team shared with me about having made […]

More often than not, hiring managers build job descriptions from templates or from similar postings from the web.  However, every PM role is unique. Even 2 jobs within the same team are different and can require a different set of skills to succeed.  Copy-paste approach to preparing JD can be misleading. It sets wrong expectations […]

Many years ago, I moved from a team-first culture to one that celebrated individual heroes.Same person. Same words.But suddenly, many things I said seemed to mean something different. It took a while to realise — communication doesn’t travel well across cultures. Here’s how the same words can mean very different things depending on where you […]

Similar to how a good product manager focuses on adding value to customers, a product leader needs to understand what candidates are looking for and provide (not just promise) them more and more value.  Beyond fair pay, candidates typically look for –  A good boss who can also be a mentor  Potential for growth within […]

Earlier, while working as an individual contributor, you helped product leaders to interview and it was largely a goodwill gesture from your side. (A notable exception is when your manager has added “number of interviews taken” in your goal sheet 🙂).  Now you are the hiring manager and your involvement needs to be way higher. […]

It is an understatement to say that good Product Managers are in very high demand. Thanks to the amazing growth of startups and corresponding funding. Every day, either a friend who is a product leader or a startup founder ask me if I have references for a good PM. I am mostly helpless.  In this […]

Hiring from your network / past workplace is one of the best methods to hire the most relevant folks.  You would be able to easily picture the fitment both ways – a) who from my past can fit the role really well and b) will this person really enjoy this role and the environment. Role […]

In this post, we will discuss hiring for a product role from other functions within your company – engineering/QA/design, business development, operations, customer care, etc.  I have hired half a dozen PMs internally from other functions and guess in what % of these hires turned out to be great PMs? It is 100%.  Here are […]