YouSaid · the spoken record

Deep Nishad

lines on the record: 43
first: 2017-11-10
most recent: 2017-11-10
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“I'd say the flip side of that one is not correcting it fast enough if it's not a fit. The general rule in small groups you have to deal with problems fast. Like that's a simple rule. That role in particular metastasizes all sorts of bad antibodies form around that. So I think be sure you're ready and then evaluate hard on is this really working? And if not, have that hard discussion. I don't know. This doesn't seem to be working. And here's some of the reasons, but don't go through a second one and not make the fix. See, that's true for any role. It's true for any role, for sure. That please, guys, everybody give it up for our amazing panel.”
2017-11-10 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: How Founders Hire a VP of Product · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You can screw it up by not having a good relationship with your VP of product. Man, it's all about the partnership. Because you have to be able to work together and you have to have a good working relationship. If you can't spend a ton of time with that person, then it's not going to work. And in order to figure out if you can spend a bunch of time with the person, you got to spend a bunch of time with the person during the interview process.”
2017-11-10 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: How Founders Hire a VP of Product · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In my case, it's looking for commitment because if you think about it, a product lead is almost doing the job of most CEOs is handing that over. So a product lead needs to be maniacal about where this company is going, how they're going to build great products. And that takes a lot of work. Say, oh, I visit customers on second Fridays. It's probably not the right person. Almost the CEO level of commitment or the CTO level of commitment to make this company successful.”
2017-11-10 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: How Founders Hire a VP of Product · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The biggest one is not onboarding them properly, not coaching them how to be onboarded properly and not pushing them to make org changes sooner than later. When you bring on someone, you've got to tell them, hey, diagnose the org 60 days, don't over push them to deliver stuff earlier. Give them some love.”
2017-11-10 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: How Founders Hire a VP of Product · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“At some point, I realized that as CEO and founder, it is my job to scale myself. And by not scaling myself, I'm not doing my job. And I have to somehow separate that emotional piece. And I have to let go of some of these things. If you're a founder, you're in similar shoes. You want to do your job. Do you want to do it well? Well, heads up, your job is to scale yourself.”
2017-11-10 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: How Founders Hire a VP of Product · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Left out of every decision. So I think the commitment goes both ways. One commitment is look, I will bring you options. Like when we have hard decisions, I'll bring them to you. You can guarantee any hard decision I'm going to make. I'm going to bring you that list of options. I need a commitment from you that if you think the list isn't right, you tell me the list isn't right. Don't like just go add something. It's like just a way of talking to each other of like you trust that this person is sizing up the world for you and bringing you problems and solutions and that person has to trust that you will abstract out, give perspective that they may not have had and help them make decisions and help them evangelize decisions, but you have to form that trust.”
2017-11-10 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: How Founders Hire a VP of Product · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One layer, I think, is you have to find a way to have this proper casual relationship with the person that I think is, and it could be as simple as we're going to take a daily walk. It can be like we're going to have a regular dinner. It really matters whether you treat people the same way and whether you look at the world the same way, or you're going to be handed questions, you know, if your ethics are the same, turns out to be a really important one. Your ethics are going to be tested all the time. And if you don't think about it the same way, then you're going to find lots of conflicts. I think that level of trust and building that only happens with time. I don't think anybody would get married after an interview process for their spouse. You just have to spend time together for it. The other end of the spectrum, I think, is like figuring out how you make decisions together. And in a lot of cases, that can be collaborative and easy and so on. There is a hierarchy here. That had a product needs to empower their boss to help them in their process. And that person needs to trust that they're not going to be.”
2017-11-10 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: How Founders Hire a VP of Product · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That interview as just an interview. Spent essentially five hours before I even agreed to interview at Square with our CEO just getting to know him and understanding what his vision is for the company, what he cares about, what he doesn't, what his philosophies, how he works. Because you can interview all you want, but this is such an important critical role that you've got to spend time with them. To hear about the emotional aspects of letting go a little bit. What have you done to make it easier to let go of some of the things to this new person that doesn't even code? What advice do you give to the newbie that comes in to make it easier for you in both ways, for this emotional period to be smooth and lovely like a honeymoon?”
2017-11-10 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: How Founders Hire a VP of Product · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Product center company, the VP of product, and the CEO, no matter how they got formed, they're co founders. When you pick your co-founder for your company, my guess is that you didn't pick like, well, I can do this 20 tasks we need to get done, and I'm really good at these 10, I need to find somebody that's really good at these 10. Between the two of you, first off, there's some point of intersection, as all sorts of stuff that neither of you knew how to do, and we're gonna go figure it out together.”
2017-11-10 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: How Founders Hire a VP of Product · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“70% of learning you get is by doing the job. 10% of your learning comes from reading and seeing stuff. 20% comes from mentors who you watch in action and 70% comes from actually doing the job. We actually have a formal process now where we have people from other functions, adjacent functions wanting to transfer into product management. We essentially have a six month externship or internship where they slowly take on projects starting with smaller scope projects and ultimately you want them to actually take a problem formulation and figure out how to execute on something. And so you just give them projects of bigger and bigger scope and that's how you learn.”
2017-11-10 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: How Founders Hire a VP of Product · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Everyone has a superpower, but in startups, you usually need a unicorn, right? So they can do like four or five things. Like on the design side, you want someone who codes, you want someone who does visual, you want someone who does UI, maybe even product. You can't find everything in one person. What are you doing to train people to go beyond their superpower? If you have a designer engineer, be the product person, what do you do to give them the product strategy or customer centricity or data skills?”
2017-11-10 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: How Founders Hire a VP of Product · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then you want to take that your person who's doing your hiring for you, you hand them that rubric and say, I want them ranked on this. Like I want a UI-centered product person who's going to nitpick every pixel on the product. We need to know that and don't bring that later as opposed to the data center product person who's a total quant or you can pick each of the different types that you could find.”
2017-11-10 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: How Founders Hire a VP of Product · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I have two pieces of advice on that topic. The first one is the mock framework, and it stands for mission, objectives, and competencies. What it forces you to do is exactly what you're saying. Write it down on paper, what you're looking for. You can't re-calibrate during the middle of a search, but you also kind of asked during the period of hypergrowth, if you have a bunch of people reaching out, how do you kind of deal with that? Which is my Which is when you hire, when you raise a round, and what you're going to do with that round is grow your team, then the first thing you should do is hire somebody to hire people. Like literally, you raise a bunch of money in order to build your team, you have to hire somebody to hire people immediately. Because you cannot hire every individual person.”
2017-11-10 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: How Founders Hire a VP of Product · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's actually pretty wonderful when you hire a great product leader because when you are driving that product vision, you're so close to it and sometimes just the fact that you can step back and let this person quarterback sales, marketing, customers, customer success, engineering and handle all of those requirements, determine what's the right way, determine whether we need to build it, whether you can go get it. Once you as the CEO or the CTO get to take away all of that responsibility and have someone do it in an extremely methodical fashion, listen and then attack these problems. It's very liberating. You get to actually step back and you get to plan much longer time horizons. So when you're really early as a startup, you have very short time horizons when you need to plan, right? You can figure out something and then go get it done.”
2017-11-10 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: How Founders Hire a VP of Product · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Requirement documents. And sitting down with the engineers for hours a day. And so as soon as we had our guy join, I immediately, I stepped back from all the weeds, and now I get to partner with him on where to take this thing. And that's really what I want to do, not dish out every bug and make every product decision.”
2017-11-10 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: How Founders Hire a VP of Product · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It was really important to me to have the VP of product be my partner. At the time, we could have made the decision to get a really visionary product lead that has a great ideas about where to take the product, but maybe he can't execute on those things. And then on the other side, you can just have a pure executor and you tell him what to do and he does it better than anybody. But I wanted somebody in between, somebody that I could really partner with in order to decide where to take the product vision. I don't want to be the guy that it's on the receiving end of somebody that's just imagineering all this great stuff. Like it was really important for it to be a partnership. But you're absolutely right in that the role does change. It changed a lot for me, but it changed so much for the better because I'm now no longer so deep into the weeds of like literally assigning bugs to people and writing up products.”
2017-11-10 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: How Founders Hire a VP of Product · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Kind of couple of action items, and one of them was to engage with the people inside that community too so that he could learn how users actually interact with each other and how he can interact with users. It's not such a scary thing. He came back with these are all the things that are essentially turning our users off. And these are all the things that are keeping them coming back. And we got to fix the things that are turning them off. And then that was the first couple of things that he prioritized then in the next quarter.”
2017-11-10 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: How Founders Hire a VP of Product · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I had a lot of other stuff going on, and all three of these guys reported to me and which basically meant they had no manager. I'd just add one bit to the diagnosis, which is in the 30 days in order to actually diagnose. Your guy just totally needs to be an information sponge and learn everything about the product. He needs to be like out on the street talking with users. He needs to be looking at all the bugs that come in. The guy that we hired went through our internal wiki so deep that he read the profile of one of our office dogs. And so we also have this forum that a lot of our really heavy power users joins that it's kind of almost like a little mini community within the broader community and they talk a lot about product features and they talk a lot about user suggestions. They talk about bugs and so I actually wrote up his first”
2017-11-10 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: How Founders Hire a VP of Product · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so we operated, but when I brought our VP of product on, we had, I think it was at the time, 3 p.m. And I was the acting VP of product. And so there was... Little that the new guy could come in and do worse than what I was doing because I had”
2017-11-10 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: How Founders Hire a VP of Product · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I had to get rid of a guy that was a fantastic hire, and he got onboarded poorly, and he flushed out in six months because he just lost his report by not following that process. And so I think that I could not emphasize enough how important that is.”
2017-11-10 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: How Founders Hire a VP of Product · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One important thing to add to that, I can't tell you how many executives working for me, advising, so on. Nobody does it. When you show up in the organization, you have to tell your team that for eight weeks, I'm going to do what the old administration did. You have to do something meaningful. You threw 60 days, you haven't done something meaningful. I think it's really important actually that's a small thing. Don't take the biggest thing. Like, do something impactful, but it doesn't have to be the biggest problem. Don't show up and in week two say, oh my gosh, I've been all built up and I just have to do something. And so I publish this paper about how everything's screwed up and I haven't gone through the listening tour. But the CEOs give the person some space. And we hired this person because there was some problem. Like there's something going on. That person showed up. It's been three weeks and haven't solved the problem yet. Like, that's crazy. And you have to let that be. Because if that person's credibility gets ruined, not only is going to, you probably hired that person thinking there's a huge problem. Your organization, maybe they don't think there's such a problem. Maybe they've got something else to worry about. This person is going to assess that. They're going to come back and tell you what these problems are.”
2017-11-10 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: How Founders Hire a VP of Product · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Action. You need to show that you can deliver, you can actually drive something. They see your decision making style. They see your philosophy. They see all of that in action. So in 60 days, those are the two things you need to accomplish. You sculpt the arc, you make the arc changes, exit people, and then you need to drive one change that people remember. Your first 60 years is what people remember always. So make an impact, diagnose one state of the union, then arc change, and then one ideally significant product. If you do those things in your first 60 days, you have enough organization credibility at that point, you'll basically do well.”
2017-11-10 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: How Founders Hire a VP of Product · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, based on the insights, based on what you're hearing, based on people who are actually giving you the most insights, there are a lot of good people who are buried deep in the orga or are not in optimal roles. Again, people who are maybe in roles where they should not be. You need to identify, and that's part of your job in the first eight days, and you need to make those changes in the next 30 days. You have to. If you don't, you're toast. So that's first, change the orc. And the second one is do something impactful. Whether you're becoming as a senior most Level orc, or as someone who's just managing, you need to do something yourself, you need to drive something, a product on in this case, you need to drive a product change. Why? Because you need to have your team, the company.”
2017-11-10 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: How Founders Hire a VP of Product · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To the organization. I think that excess alone in the first eight years will get you so much credibility and will be so valuable. Because no one, I guarantee you, has ever sat. People and has asked them what's working well, what's not working well, what you do if you wear shoes, what should you do if you're not doing? Essentially, these four questions synthesize and then publish it back to the company. Here's what I'm hearing. Very simple. First 30 days. Next 30 days is where you actually take the things you're hearing and put them into action. Two things. One, most importantly, org changes. You have 60 days to make org changes. After 60 days, you become an insider. It's very hard to make org changes. So the first 30 days, you also diagnose not just the company, but the people.”
2017-11-10 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: How Founders Hire a VP of Product · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What do they expect? And so we essentially collect a huge set of questions and then literally you sit down with the team before you start at the company maybe and gather all of them in a roundtable setting and you just literally walk through and honestly just in a small setting just answer these questions, especially if you make it anonymous. A lot of the tension is out of the room. And then you also build personal connections with the people before you start. So I think pre-starting, it's really important to build that rappro with the team. Once you start, again, this is a classic 30, 60 day thing. The first 30 days are all about diagnosis. To diagnose the company, the organization, the strategy, the people. And so you essentially have a set of standard questions. You literally have four questions that you ask every single person, 30 minutes, you actually send the questions in advance, 30 minutes, don't interrupt, don't say anything. Just listen, take notes, and then synthesize at the end of 15 or 30 days. Synthesize, and then ideally present a state of the union back.”
2017-11-10 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: How Founders Hire a VP of Product · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So there are three phases to onboarding. When you onboard a product leader, actually any lead. First, before they join the company, it's really important that you give them time to meet with their team before they start the company. I onboarded this way at Square where you essentially send a survey or some way to collect questions from the team or at least the direct reports of the person before they start because everyone when they hear there's a new person starting that they might not have met during the process has a bunch of questions about what does this mean for me what is their style”
2017-11-10 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: How Founders Hire a VP of Product · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Product market fit is kind of everything. If you have it, and if you don't have it, it's kind of hard to make it work type thing. I mean, it really is. And the PM sits right in the central nervous system of product market fit. Everybody in the company, everybody has a vested interest in the product market fit, and everybody has an aesthetic around it, and everybody has a design around it. And so onboarding a PM the wrong way if it's coming externally is a very tricky thing to do and can be very disruptive. So, I mean, Gokul, I know you talked about bringing it internally, but you can't always bring it internally. Or maybe that's the reason you want to do it internally. But I'd love for you to talk about how do you actually introduce somebody into something that is so sensitive.”
2017-11-10 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: How Founders Hire a VP of Product · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Things, right? One is when they write something, there's amazing, you can see the clarity in thought. And then the second thing is when you tell them you want to see what's Horizon 1, Horizon 2, create product leads are phenomenal at prioritizing things, right? There was one product manager that I worked with, and he used to make lists of everything, and he would prioritize even his kids if his wife allowed him, right? And so, you know, it's one of those things where people who can put that down with that clarity of thought and give their first shot at a prioritization, it's a wonderful quality to have. And that's the way we hire.”
2017-11-10 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: How Founders Hire a VP of Product · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I actually find it really useful to ask the product person the home court question, but the way we kind of change it around is we actually do it more offline, right? We spend a lot of time with them in phone conversations, letting them do their research. And at some point through the process, we actually give it to them as a homework assignment. And the really good product leads actually, you know, we tell them, hey, if you thought of what PinDrop needs to do, you know, as Horizon 1, Horizon 2, Horizon 3, build out that product vision and tell me what it is. And we ask them to write it and send it to us. And it's a big advantage because two things happen. One, you start understanding the company space and you start fascinating about what it is to work there. So you really give it your best shot. And the best product leads we've had have built some of the best vision documents for the product. And it shows two.”
2017-11-10 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: How Founders Hire a VP of Product · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Questions, and I do this for every role. Come over with a bunch of synthetic questions. We're going to build a hypothetical product together, and they can be super broad. Like one of our favorite ones is you've been tasked to build a tool in the grocery space, and your job is to arm these small grocery outlets with ways to increase customer loyalty. Product can be anything. And we've had people build all sorts of different things. And I think you'll find When you get neutral ground, you can isolate what that person is uniquely good at, which I think is really important.”
2017-11-10 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: How Founders Hire a VP of Product · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And it's actually open to the company. And the rules of that presentation are pretty broad. Like we tell people you have 30 to 45 minutes. Make sure you cover your whole background so that it doesn't come up again in every interview. Tell us something interesting, like keep our attention, and give us the best of yourself. Any product person who can't figure out how to entertain you for 30 to 45 minutes is definitely not worthwhile as a product person. And the third part of that, and this is somewhat controversial, I think it's very easy in interviews to do either home court or way core questions. I'm trying to figure out how to bring this product to market. What do you think? Or you do a way core questions. You say, hey, I'm really interested in how you did, like, I see that YouTube did this thing. Why'd you guys do it this way? Why'd you do it that way? And my view is both are terrible. The homecore question is you're spending your whole time trying to figure out, well, what does he want to hear? You probably thought about this way more than I have. And so you're not really getting a great calibration. On the other side, you can't separate this person from the rest of the whole company that was around them doing this thing. So I think it's really important to ask neutral.”
2017-11-10 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: How Founders Hire a VP of Product · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Any good product person, if they can't wow you while they're sitting in front of you, then that's way below the min bar. When someone is at this level and I call someone on the team, look for the top level as an example, I call someone on that person's team, I don't tell them who I'm reference checking, and I say, tell me who owned the vision for this thing. Tell me when there was a real hard decision to make, where do you go, when you had to frame how the opportunity was created, where did you go? If you want to figure out the how piece, you say, you know, did things run smoothly or poorly, and who was it most due to? And so that process of finding information from the network of people is an art in itself. And I personally believe you have to do it yourself. So lesson number one, I think, is being very, very good at reference checking and having your framework in mind. The second thing I'd say is you have to find a way to simulate work with the person. And there's lots of different thinking on this. One thing we do actually, this is not just for product, we do it for every function at the beginning of every interview loop the person presents for about 30 to 45 minutes.”
2017-11-10 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: How Founders Hire a VP of Product · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And the fourth one is how to analyze data. So, one of the things again, as part of onboarding, I would recommend is really getting an account with basically your into your SQL database, essentially getting an analyst account, and starting to run your own queries. Because turns out at younger companies, there's no analyst role or there's an analyst, but they're overwhelmed with a lot of dashboardy stuff. So you need to, as a product leader, come with your own insights. So one of the best things as part of your State of the Union you present, hopefully at the end of 30 days, is also a completely new look at the data that the company has. Every single person in the company needs to be an analyst for a company to work effectively. This includes every senior leader of the company.”
2017-11-10 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: How Founders Hire a VP of Product · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think one of the most important things is that for any role you hire, companies make the mistake of not listing on paper the exact top four or five criteria they are looking for or skills and then looking both inside and outside the company to figure out who the best interviewer is. For example, people leadership and team leadership is a really important part of this role when you hire a people lead. And you might not have at a 30% startup. You might not have anyone who's essentially really good at judging whether someone is a good leader of people or not. So I would really encourage you to look at your board, many of your board members or investors or advisors. In this case, the first thing that matters is customer focus and empathy. And again, not just your own customer, but really trying to dive deep into how to think about customers, what kind of unique insights they've had in the past about customers. When you give them a product area, can they actually articulate a winning product strategy that is rooted in amazing customer insights? The third one is people and team.”
2017-11-10 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: How Founders Hire a VP of Product · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“For me, I found it very difficult to hire any position that I hadn't actually done the job. I just found really good at hiring things that I had done, and I found it very difficult hiring that I haven't. So especially for those that are not PMs or have not done PM that are thinking of hiring, what is your mental framework for hiring a...”
2017-11-10 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: How Founders Hire a VP of Product · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And it works. We had been chugging away on the product for like five years, and so we had a lot of built up assumptions. We were kind of a little bit dogmatic about certain topics that we didn't need to be that were probably holding us back. And so having a fresh set of eyes is somebody that actually does also know product management for the first time did really help. The downside, of course, is you have somebody that doesn't know your product as well as other people that have been there for a while sort of making the decisions on what to build.”
2017-11-10 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: How Founders Hire a VP of Product · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Outcome around product. So I think there is a very strong push again in having product unit leads because when you have a VP of product or head of product who has three product directors, a CEO quickly finds themselves going directly to the product directors. So I think that it's also important to note that there's no right way to do this stuff. And I can tell you that with confidence, especially considering that I did the opposite of your strong views”
2017-11-10 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: How Founders Hire a VP of Product · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“About 25 to 30 engineers is when you see the first evolution of leadership in the product function because A, there's enough engineers that there's many different things. You could organize them in many different ways. So there's need for more explicit strategy formulation. And finally, there's a team of people who needs a leader where the CEOs or one of the co-founders. Now one of the co-founders could become the head of product. But then I think the question is, are they the final head of product or lead of product? Many multi-product companies have gone to the product unit model where there are people leading product engineering and design, Facebook, Google, Square, a bunch of companies have gone to this model because in my opinion it doesn't make sense to have a person who's literally managing three different product units that don't really have cohesion. What are you holding them accountable for at that point? Being a good manager? Not really. You want your most senior executives to be held accountable for direct results driving a specific”
2017-11-10 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: How Founders Hire a VP of Product · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In general, you have two stages pre PMF or product market fit, at which point you don't hire any leaders, it's just you, your co-founder, and then a bunch of builders. And so you build for a while. And the next evolution is where the number of engineers grows big enough that it's hard enough to essentially be the product manager. So you hire, ideally get one of the designers or engineers to become a product manager. Again, I have some strong philosophies around whether you hire your first PM from the outside or whether you make one of your designers or engineers into a PM as your first product manager at a company.”
2017-11-10 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: How Founders Hire a VP of Product · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This is a technique I got taught by one of my favorite bosses over a decade ago, and then we kind of adopted it to Google. And basically the way this works is you say new PM comes into a company, comes into a group, and you hand them a problem, you hand them a solution, you go talk to this person, run this meeting, so on, and their job is to execute. And at some point, their job becomes to figure out the how, and they go figure out which meetings to set up and how to organize a team, what the cadence should be, all those sorts of things. And early on in people's careers, they tend to grow by growing scope. They get bigger and bigger features. You can manage a feature being built by one engineer and now five engineers, and you kind of grow that way. And the way you do the job changes. They actually have generally the same scope, but they just do the job differently. I call these declaration creators, like the number one job of that person is to take ambiguous spaces and turn them clear. And that could be organization, that could be product, that could be strategy. But the way they do the job impacts it a lot more than the scope.”
2017-11-10 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: How Founders Hire a VP of Product · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Product strategy for a company is driven by the product lead of the company. Turns out that many cases founders or CEOs, they've never actually articulated a clear product strategy. I think that's one of the most important things formally articulating the product strategy. And the second piece is shaping or sculpting the product organization. A lot of product development teams are organized organically based on engineers, based on skill sets, based on iOS versus Android versus whatever it is, skill sets and so on. The right product data comes in and takes a completely different product-centric view and organizes the team differently.”
2017-11-10 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: How Founders Hire a VP of Product · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The engineering team, and basically every team in the company is going to want to have a stake in what gets built. You also have to be really analytical because data is like another stakeholder. And you have to really look at the metrics to kind of turn sort of negative retention actions into positive ones.”
2017-11-10 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: How Founders Hire a VP of Product · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One of the people that I talked to when I was hiring my first VP of product was the VP of products at LinkedIn, Deep Nishad, and he said, a good VP of product is someone who has the brain of an engineer, the heart of a designer, and the tongue of a diplomat. And I think that's a pretty well-put thing. If you actually deconstruct it, it's actually very, very true, right? You have so many different stakeholders, you need to corral them all, but more importantly, you need to get shit done, right? I'll add to that great VPs of product also build great teams. So hiring is the other part of it. But ultimately, in terms of scope, I almost view product as a support role to all of these functions, right? Sales, marketing, customer success, your actual customers, engineering, and so it's a really, really important role. There's different types of users. There's the marketing team.”
2017-11-10 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: How Founders Hire a VP of Product · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source