How I Hire Badass (Growth) PMs? 30 Learnings
How I Hire Badass (Growth) PMs? 30 Learnings
After hiring 4 top performers at Miro |
🤗 Who is this guide for?
Founders / CEOs
Product Leaders
Growth Product Leaders
Hiring Managers
❤️ Why should you care?
Hiring is expensive!
It's your time, company’s time, and a bunch of $$$.
Learn from my successes and failures at Miro to set yourself and your company up for A+ Game.
✅ What do you get?
The guide has four sections:
The Unspoken Truth (10 learnings)
The Ideal Candidate (8 learnings)
The Interview (5 learnings)
🎁 Bonus Tips (7 learnings)
😑 Before we start!
Hiring is a team effort! It's a puzzle you piece together.
Now, we are ready.
🏁 Let's start!
The Unspoken Truth
Hiring takes time; it's not a magic pill to solve your immediate headaches!
It takes at least 9 to 14 months from the moment you start hiring until the talent reaches their full performance potential. 3 to 6 months to hire a rockstar and 6 to 8 months to properly onboard.
Hiring mistakes are crazy expensive!
It's not only the 'Cost To Hire' that can reach $20k (many people putting in many hours making the magic happen). The real cost of a mistake is the missed opportunity $ and the blow to teams' productivity and morale.
Hiring mistakes are inevitable!
So you made a hiring mistake... The best you can do is to acknowledge it and act. Time matters and PIP is not always the solution. Share your learnings and incorporate the insights into the company's hiring process. Your learnings are gold!
Create a hiring business case as early as you can!
To get a headcount (=terrible term!), you need to do some groundwork with the leadership. Saying that you need to hire X to leadership without having a hiring business case ready is an amateur move.
But what should be in the hiring business case doc?
The doc MVP should explain alignment with company strategy and growth strategy. Articulate the ‘Why now?’ and map the ICP (Ideal Candidate Profile). If a candidate can be sourced internally, you should mention it!
You get what you pay for!
Be honest with yourself about which talent you are competing for. Global (US + EU + APAC) or Local. To get Global top talent, your Brand + Comp package must be Globally competitive. Otherwise, you are wasting your and the candidates' time.
Hiring senior talent is GREAT!
Getting senior bar raisers does miracles for the existing team ( + yourself!). Shorter onboarding to impact time, and high-quality outcomes. It's just awesome! Or is it?
Hiring senior talent is NOT GREAT!
It's expensive (plus you will need to refresh their comp package in 6 to 12 months) and usually creates a promotion traffic jam.
Hiring Growth PMs is different from Non-Growth PMs!
Growth PM aims to build a Repeatable, Sustainable, and Defensible growth system across Acquisition, Retention, and Monetization (Reforge). The mindset is driven by fast hypothesis-experimentation-learning cycles.
Long-term (12 months) hiring plans do not work for Growth!
Same as with growth roadmaps, you can only plan so far. Growth DNA requires more flexible resourcing than the one you can get away with when running a non-growth product org.
🟢 Work with me!
There are three ways we can work together. Check those out. 😉
The Unspoken Truth
Align your ICP1 to your company’s profile!
Aim for candidates that come from companies with similar (1.) growth stage, (2.) growth rate, (3.) company size, (4.) growth team maturity, (5.) business model, (6.) industry.
Align your ICP to your company’s growth strategy!
I found the best fit with candidates that have experience with the relevant (1.) growth motions (PLG2, MLG3, SLG4, CLG5) and (2.) growth levers (Acquisition, Retention, and Monetization).
Align your ICP to the expected growth work!
Let's go one level deeper. I observed great fit with candidates that have relevant experience with particular (1.) growth lever inputs (in Retention case, Activation, Engagement) and (2.) loop types (Viral, UGC6, etc.).Earth down your ICP expectations!
If you apply all those criteria together with your budget constraints, you will get a two-and-a-half candidates pool... Figure out which criteria are a Must and which are Nice To Have.
Your talent partner is your partner in crime!
The best ROI investment is teaching your talent partner all they need to know to ask the right questions, identify strong-fit candidates, and screen the rest. A growth expert in the making!Empower your talent partner with real-world examples!
Do the work and craft a list of 10 ideal candidates' LinkedIn profiles and 20 ideal companies to hire from. The list will help your talent partner to understand your growth talk better.
Growth Culture Matters!
Be aware of growth hackers, funnel gurus, and feature factory workers! Your candidate should think and talk in growth systems, models, loops, metrics, hypotheses, experiments, and learnings. Reforge should be the baseline thinking!
Focus on Linkedin sourcing!
LinkedIn proactive sourcing gets the best results. Reach out directly to candidates. Looking for strong candidates within those who applied through the company career page is like looking for a needle in a haystack without a
The InterviewYour panel should make sense!
Those should consist of AMPED (Analytics, Marketing, Product, Engineering, and Design) leaders who will work with the candidate. It's not a HiPPO contest!
Get your panel ready!
You will get extra points for creating a pool of questions to evaluate each competency. You will get a standing ovation if you define how to assess whether candidates' answers are missing / meeting / exceeding the expectations for every question.
Stop exhausting the candidates!
Cap the # of interviews (less than 5), limit the # of participants, and schedule all the interviews within a few days' time window. The time to offer should be less than 3 weeks. If your process takes longer than that, you will lose top-class candidates!
The case study is where the magic happens! (Or not...)
Make it a real business case and suggest collaborating with the candidate. It's an opportunity to evaluate candidates' thinking, communication, and quality of delivery. It's where I choose my favorites.
Go off script!
To assess a candidate's real experience, go beyond candidates' rehearsed answers. Ask for three failed experiments, three learnings, etc. Go deep! In addition, I look for clear signs of resilience, self-awareness, and empathy.
🎁 Bonus Tips
Never hire a bully!
It doesn't matter how brilliant this person is and whether they come from FAANG. Never do it! You won't change their behavior with coaching, and the negative impact they will have on your team is 10X.
Avoid base pay gaps between your team members!
For example, all Level 7 (Lead PMs) within the same hub should have the same base +/- 5%. Your team always knows! Use equity as a lever to close strong talent.
Intuition has its place!
Don't ignore your gut feelings. Of course, it shouldn't be the only factor, BUT it has its place in your hiring decision. Bill Gates on decision making: “Often, you just have to rely on your intuition.”
Onboard PM with Designer!
If you kickstart a new Growth team (that requires design), onboarding both the PM and the Designer together will make them a super-hero duo. The bond will be unbreakable.
Groom meaningful relationships with potential future hires!
This one is important! Play the long game with world-class candidates. Nurture a genuine relationship with them. You will be their first call when they are ready for new opportunities.
The first growth hire must be a leadership-level hire!
Setting up the growth org requires working continuously with the company leadership, influencing company-level decisions, and jumping between growth levers. A leadership job requires a leadership hire.
A growth team mission should never be tied around a feature!
The growth team mission should revolve around a metric rather than a feature. The growth team should be empowered to experiment across the product and beyond to move their metric. That's the Growth team DNA!
ICP - Ideal Candidate Profile
PLG - Product Led Growth
MLG - Marketing Led Growth
SLG - Sales Led Growth
CLG - Community Led Growth
UGC - User Generated Content