FUNDAMENTALS OF PRODUCT LEADERSHIP: STAFFING

A [product] leader’s guide: staffing competent characters

Building empowered product teams begins with hiring the right talent and retaining them. Furthermore, staffing the product team is the end-to-end and sole responsibility of the product leader and not the HR department. For a product leader to succeed with staffing, he/she needs to:
1. Find competent characters
2. Continuously be recruiting
3. Refrain from outsourcing
4. Learn to interview effectively
5. Hire efficiently and convincingly
6. Aim for collocation, and manage remote employees
7. Onboard new employees smoothly
8. Train new hires for maximum readiness
9. Excel in providing feedback and performance reviews
10. Terminate swiftly and with constructive convictions
11. Coach staff to promotion
12. Manage retention, but don’t take it personally

18 min readMar 29, 2023

Building empowered product teams that continuously deliver on desired business outcomes, requires hiring the right talent and retaining them. To achieve this, product leaders need to realize three fundamental principles of succeeding with employees:

You don’t need to hire exceptional talents like those of Google, Facebook, or Amazon. To succeed, you need 1) competent people who 2) feel aligned with your vision and principles (i.e., they feel they are on a mission with you), and then 3) you will need to coach and develop them into becoming better teams
Succeeding with talent in more than just hiring, but about staffing. Staffing refers to the end-to-end process of finding competent characters, correctly interviewing them, hiring them, onboarding and training them, keeping tabs on their performance, and helping them grow through coaching, and promoting them or terminating collaboration
Staffing is the sole responsibility of the staffing manager and not the HR department. Never should the staffing or hiring manager feel or think that they are a passenger on a staffing journey. While the HR team assists the staffing manager with the sourcing and hiring processes, actual staffing only happens when the hiring manager steps up and takes full responsibility for the endeavor

Never should the staffing or hiring manager feel or think that they are a passenger on a staffing journey

These 3 principles are essential if an organization desires to build product teams around solving complex problems and giving teams the space to find solutions that customers love. Because solving hard problems starts with your people.

Finding competent characters

Recruiting, hiring, and staffing the right candidate is the building block to having empowered product teams. To succeed in this fundamental step, product leaders need to scan for the required skills and competencies of a role and not obsess over their educational background or ambiguous concepts such as having a “cultural fit” or finding unicorns such as a “10X programmer” who may not repeat previous success in their new environment.

To staff the right person, product leaders need to trust a candidate's competence — which includes capabilities, skills, and track records — and character — which entails integrity, motivation, and intent.

Looking for competence

Having competence is table stakes and critical for any hiring inquiry towards building an empowered team. This means that the candidate must have the necessary skills to perform whether as a developer, designer, or product manager.

If an organization has hired an incompetent candidate, then this means that the hiring manager also lacks the competencies and experience required for the job as he/she was unable to correctly assess the candidate.

In certain cases, hiring managers may opt for less experienced but high-potential candidates (i.e., not competent yet, but could be in the future). However, this will require the hiring manager to sign up for coaching the candidate for growth, and if they fail to grow, the hiring manager needs to help the candidate find a different job, which is a massive commitment and needs to be considered carefully.

Finding the character

To build empowered teams, we need candidates who can perform independently and with durability. To have sustained endurance in performance, character matters. This means that it does not matter how talented or exceptional a candidate may be, they need to bond with the team and the organization.

To successfully identify such candidates, product leaders and hiring managers need to:

Have a large pool of people to choose from to ensure diversity of experience and perspective that will help better solve problems. This diversity could mean looking for different educational, professional, personal, and geographic backgrounds
Refrain from finding people who look and think similar to the current team, commonly coined as having a “cultural fit”
Ensure candidates are mentally healthy with low levels of dark triad characteristics, healthy attachment styles, and are not toxic to the psychological well-being of the team

This is easier said than done, but through experience, coaching reports, and attention to previous mistakes/failures, product leaders can build frameworks and checkpoints for what makes a great character and what does not.

Recruiting is an ongoing endeavor

Very similar to early startup founders, strong product leaders and hiring managers need to be actively recruiting. This means that rather than waiting for HR to source and provide resumes, hiring leaders need to have identified what they want and to proactively go out and recruit; very similar to how coaches in professional sports teams identify and recruit their players by visiting prospects, getting to know them personally, and persuading them to join their team.

A product leader that is continuously on the lookout for talent, treats recruiting as a process to craft productive and diverse teams. However, to get to that point, product leaders need to continuously and patiently build a network by:

Working towards establishing a personal brand
Attending industry conferences and professional meetups
Visiting partners and customers
Socializing at professional networking events
Scheduling coffee chats
Mentoring and coaching juniors and fresh graduates
Hosting talks at the company
Running a company blog
Building and maintaining an inspiring product vision and strategy

Photo by LumenSoft Technologies on Unsplash

Refrain from outsourcing

Product managers, product designers, developers, data analysts and scientists, user researchers, and their respective managers are the lifeblood of any company’s products. Outsourcing them would kill any chance of creating missionary and empowered teams.

Even in occasions such as the need for a specific niche skill, the best solution would be to train current staff and employees. The perceived short-term cost-saving advantages of outsourcing staff will come at a loss of capacity to compete and create value in the long run.

Understanding a Product Manager’s colleagues and their responsibilities

Product Managers need to collaborate with many people and therefore need to understand their responsibilities and align…

medium.com

While occasionally when a large burst of operational work such as test automation or a large migration can be outsourced, a small product team of missionaries will always outperform a large team of mercenaries across discovery and delivery.

Photo by Christina @ wocintechchat.com on Unsplash

Interviewing

To succeed with staffing, product leaders and hiring managers need to own and actively manage interview effectiveness and experience with the overarching goal of hiring for competence and character that elevates the team.

Some notes on interviewing:

Quality of interview assurance is more vital when staffing product managers and designers compared to engineers/developers because each team is staffed with only one PM and PD while with +10 developers in every team, risks of skill variation and competence can be managed for the engineering team
The interview team should be carefully selected and curated. Each person on the panel should be selected for their competence and character which creates a sense of pride in the candidate to join the team. Furthermore, each interviewer should be prepared and know specifically what they will be asking and searching for in the candidate. It’s important to have an interview guideline prepared and shared with the panel before the interview
Aim to answer any open questions before the interview ends. The panel should not walk out of the interview feeling uncertain about the data they gathered, which will be an injustice to the candidate. If any major concern or question remains after an interview, schedule a smaller touchpoint and deep dive into the area as soon as possible. Furthermore, allow the candidate to ask questions and follow up if any remain unanswered during the interview
Hire potential candidates, responsibly. At times, you might find candidates that don’t carry the competence you desire but have the character and competence and it might be worthwhile to bet on them such as with new graduates. If such situations arise, hiring managers must take full responsibility for training and coaching the new staff.
Look for diversity. New ways of thinking and experiences will help elevate the team and the interview panel should be on the lookout for such talent
Select skill over domain knowledge. To help increase chances of diversity and open the filter for team elevation, the panel should focus more on the candidates with the right skills than prior industry experience or domain knowledge as such intelligence can rapidly be picked up through onboarding and coaching

While there is a plethora of interview guides and books written on what to ask candidates, the high-level buckets that the panel should probe for a candidate’s level of self-awareness include:

Developing and structuring a strategy
Ability and impetus to translate and execute a strategy
Understanding and managing product innovation and creativity
Growth thinking across processes and the team

Hiring

When a strong candidate has been identified, it’s time to prepare and extend an offer and close the candidate. While most of this process will and should be handled by the HR compliance and compensation team, there are still some points for the hiring manager to work on after the interview and up to extending an offer:

Try to meet up in person with the candidate over food for example and have a more robust and personal interaction, especially for senior roles, so that you get a better feel for how he/she thinks and feels as a colleague
Take reference checks seriously, do them personally, and don’t delegate. These are great opportunities to understand the candidate’s character in the long run. Email reference checks are rarely useful and allow references to share whatever they are comfortable with and do not force them into revealing information they are not comfortable with
Check the candidates’ social media handles and how they interact and engage in the digital space
Move quickly on truly strong candidates, providing an offer within 24–48 hours after an interview as beyond that period you may lose the candidate
While the official offer could be given by the HR team, the hiring manager should reach out directly and explicitly provide the news and commit to investing in coaching and developing the candidate to reach his/her potential as hiring talent is a personal and professional commitment. This level of commitment will vary depending on the candidate’s number of direct reports, the experience level of the direct reports, the candidate’s experience level and operational responsibility, the role’s span of control, and the organizational and product strategy complexities
If the candidate has multiple offers, it can help when senior colleagues such as the CEO, CMO, or CPO reach out and convince him/her to join the team

Remote employees

Continuous innovation is the name of the game for any company that desires to stay relevant. To attain that, product teams at innovative organizations 1) have clear missions and goals, 2) are cross-functional, and dedicated, and 3) are collocated.

The need to be collocated is driven by the fact that people’s interactions bring creativity and inspiration to the organization, similar to a startup environment where teams huddle together to discuss, debate, experiment, iterate, and continuously try to move the needle.

While acknowledging that cloud-based video communication and collaboration tools have progressed immensely to allow remote and distributed work conditions, collocation is critical for product discovery.

Product delivery efforts can function well as remote teams with reduced levels of interruption that can be experienced when at the office. However, for the product discovery process that entails building prototypes and testing them out with users/customers, remote teams create several problems:

As soon as the product manager, designer, and tech leads are separated from each other, rather than focusing on the business problem to be solved, the team’s attention moves to a roadmap and delivering on features, which disempowers the entire team. The indications of this culture shift are noticed when the product manager continuously asks for time estimates from the developers, tech leads ask for wireframes to start planning, and designers ask for briefs or requirements writeups from product managers to deliver wireframes
With increased levels of physical separation and as people do not interact face-to-face, trust, and psychological safety tend to suffer. While product leaders need to coach team members on the importance of online interactions, interacting physically and away from MS Teams or Slack messaging can boost human trust among team members.
Employee focus tends to drop as teams go remote — while the general thinking is that not going to the office is more efficient as employees can save commute time and costs, this comes at a detriment to focus. Working from home or anywhere other than the premises that have large numbers of people working to serve customers, results in distractions from the problem team members are solving to family, entertainment devices, etc., especially when there is a feeling that Big Brother is not watching

While it’s highly unlikely that we will transition back to working fully from the office after COVID, product leaders need to continuously observe for signs of lost efficiencies when teams and members lose focus and trust or emphasize churning features over solving problems.

New Hire Orientations — aka “Onboarding”

When the hiring manager lands a competent talent of character who is ready to contribute to the team, it’s time to onboard them as the first three months are critical for any new employee and generally sets the tone of their tenure.

Every new employee, no matter how competent, will have a ramp-up period, and hiring managers should have specific mental checkpoints along an onboarding plan including:

Day 1: At the end of the hire’s first day, has he/she made friends with the immediate team? Was the lunch or intro session enough? How did the first impressions go and what can be done to improve the bond between people?
Day 5: At the end of the first week, has he/she managed to meet all members of the team personally? Has he/she started to understand expectations? How did the first impressions go and what can be done to improve the bond between people?
Day 10/20/30: After receiving the first paycheck, need a touchpoint to see how the hire is feeling about the role and the compensation and to reassure worries and concerns
Day 30: At the end of the first month, has he/she built a good idea of his/her longer-term future and potential at the organization?
Day 60: At the end of the second month, has he/she scored a public “win” that helps establish his/her value for the company and for himself/herself?

In addition to the above, the hiring manager needs to have a robust onboarding plan:

One of the first things that hiring managers need to observe from new hires is their openness to being coached. If the hire is defensive and insecure, it’s the responsibility of the product leader and hiring manager to establish trust and let the new hire understand that all efforts will be made to help him/her grow to their potential.
When the relationship is built on a solid foundation of trust, then it’s time to assess the hire and build a coaching plan to develop knowledge and skill gaps
It’s important to have customer or partner meetings and user deep dive programs for new product managers so they understand who they are creating solutions for
An integral part of the onboarding program needs to be meeting with the finance department and understanding the metrics and KPIs the new hire will be responsible for, what they mean for the business, and how they are tracked and measured
In due time and based on the new hire’s readiness, it’s time to personally introduce the new hire to senior executives and stakeholders and to help him/her build their relationship and network. It’s important to help the candidate paint a meaningful and value-creating image of him/herself at this time

Depending on the circumstances, product leaders need to check in with the new hires as needed so that all the above checkpoints and requirements are met and to gather feedback not just from the new hire but other stakeholders to help improve the process and fill in potential gaps that might have existed.

Readiness Bootcamps

Staffing product teams with exceptional product managers, designers, and technical leads is a hard task as they are already working at organizations that will do everything they can to retain and provide them with meaningful problems to solve.

Most employers want to recruit talent with previous track records of success, with the thinking that previous success at building amazing products and solutions will translate to repeat success in the future. However, if new talent is not provided with the support and tools needed to succeed at a new company, no matter how successful they’ve been in the past, they will most likely fail at creating meaningful value.

While new hire orientations can help employees feel welcomed and integrated into the organization, they fall short in preparing product team hires for the more important aspects of their roles such as making hard decisions or building trust in relationships. A week-long (or two depending on the complexity of the hire’s work) “Readiness Bootcamps” can generally help fill these gaps.

While the details of such boot camps can vary based on the business context and organizational culture that you are in, the following structure can apply to many product teams and organizations:

Develop a personal growth plan for the new hires that looks inward and prepares them for a career path at the new organization. This will require thinking about the candidate's communication styles, personality traits, and skills in collaboration with the HR department
New hires need to quickly and in detail grasp and understand the strategic context in which they are operating and how things get done. This will require 1) understanding the organization’s history and how it has evolved, 2) its customers of the past, present, and future, 3) its vision and strategic corporate, business, and product outlook, and 4) how the team operates across product discovery and delivery on a daily, weekly, quarterly, and annual basis across validation, building and prioritizing, learning and measuring, and going to market
The topics covered in the strategic context and how things get done phase should be accompanied by stories and Q&A sessions with current employees who provide their personal experiences and advice and can be a great networking, relationship, and trust-building opportunity for the new hires
With the context learning and relationship-building parts covered, a successful boot camp should have workshops where participants put what they have learned into practice by building deliverables and outputs in collaboration with their new colleagues and leadership which allows teams to bond quickly while learning in a psychologically safe environment.

Performance reviews

Annual performance reviews are legal, compensation, and compliance administration drills and are not to be treated as a feedback mechanism. If it is treated as such, then the product leader and organization have failed in managing and growing talent as annual reviews are too little and too far in between.

A successful product leader should never have any performance-related surprises to talk about in the annual review and they should be covered on weekly 1:1s

Strong and effective product leaders should not resist conflicts and provide constructive criticism and solutions to team members when needed. If not done as such, it’s unfair to the employee and a sign of weakness in leadership as the most basic skill required for a competent leader and manager is the willingness and ability to provide honest, timely, and constructive feedback to employees.

Terminating

The best way to avoid terminations is to improve the performance of the product team in effective recruiting, interviewing, hiring, onboarding, and ongoing coaching

However, there will be occasional situations where the partnership is just not working and termination of cooperation is needed.

When thinking of termination, it’s not just the problem employee that needs to be considered but the immediate team members who need to cope with the burdens of the situation and the message the circumstance is sending to the larger product team and the organization’s leaders and stakeholders.

Therefore difficult decisions need to be made, most often swiftly, for the well-being and balance of the ecosystem surrounding the product team

The circumstances whereby an employee needs to be let go include:

Despite training and coaching, he/she is not able to perform the tasks on the desired competency levels. This requires that the employee understands the situation, is provided a 3–6 months coaching and training roadmap, and is provided feedback in weekly 1:1. If improvement is not observed, then termination of cooperation will be needed. In such circumstances, the product leader should help the employee find opportunities as they are responsible for the hiring
The employee becomes a toxic character that impacts the mood and work appetite of others quickly erodes trust and leaves people feeling disrespected. While it’s important to find out whether such behaviors are circumstantial due to personal reasons, leaders need to provide a 3–6 months behavior normalization plan before moving to termination of the contract. Depending on the circumstances, the product leader may choose to help (or not) the employee find opportunities as they depart.

Dealing with bad hires is not a great feeling, but the mark of an effective and productive product leader

Promotions

The most visible and tangible sign of success in hiring, talent development, and coaching is when people are promoted

This employee growth will only happen when the manager has a clear understanding of the employee’s career aspirations.

In general, employees either a) want to move up the hierarchy into leadership roles or b) are unsure and desire more exposure to better understand their path forward. The role of the product leader here is to clearly understand the employee’s aspirations, help develop a career and growth roadmap, and expose them to opportunities along it.

The steps that a strong product leader needs to take to help promote his/her reports are:

Clearly and specifically understand the career goals and aspirations of the employee
Develop a career development roadmap that has identified the gaps needed to attain the employee’s roadmap
Keep track of the employee’s progress and provide coaching
When gaps are covered and necessary skills are gained, network and help the employee get the promotion. However, it needs to be communicated to the employee that he/she will also need to network and make an impression if they desire to get the promotion

Aspiring product managers and leaders need to understand that the skills needed for product management are different from that of product leadership — they are essentially different roles

While one requires focus and efficiency in product discovery, the other is mainly about people development and strategy. Hence, development roadmaps need to be carefully and accordingly curated which requires the product leader to clearly understand the requirements of each role if he/she is to become a strong coach, mentor, and development manager for his/her employees. This is not as easy as one would assume and requires experience, maturity, and continuous learning and research on behalf of the product leader.

Managing retention

While some amount of attrition is normal and healthy, such as when an employee finds an opportunity with double the pay you can afford or their spouse finds a job in another city that forces the family to move, high levels of employee churn are driven by a variety of factors including high turmoil in the business or market environment, lack of change management, cultural shifts, M&As, and lack of leadership and talent development.

I’m not a firm believer in the old saying that: “people join a company but leave their manager”

As I have seen on numerous occasions that managers can’t control and/or deliver all the career desires of their reports and team members. So don’t take employee attrition too personally — but do take it seriously and try to uncover its root causes via exit surveys (quantitative research) and coffee chats after the employee has left (qualitative research).

However, I do believe that as long as people managers/leaders are doing all they can within their power and capacity to help the employee develop their competencies and character, get coached, and grow their careers, then they have done their job efficiently and effectively

And most often, when that is the case, then we tend to witness high employee retention rates.

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