YouSaid · the spoken record

Scott Williamson

lines on the record: 62
first: 2024-02-21
most recent: 2024-02-21
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Very charismatic dude. And they have a browser called Arc, which is a crowded space, a tough, you know, playing with giants there. But I've heard a ton of buzz about them. And I use it myself on an Arc browser right now. Lots of thoughtful UX touches. And they made it a little more fun to go browse the web. And I think they have an ambitious vision of how one might access the internet down the line. For example, using AI in a clever way and making it very easy to interact with Chat GPT through their browser. So they've done a really nice job of trying to create some differentiation through a great product and user experience.”
2024-02-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: The Five Step Process to Hiring the Best Product People, The Four Core Skills the Best PMs Need to Have, The Two Product Documents that Drive World Class Product Teams & Why the Best PMs are Writers with Scott Williamson, Former CPO @ Gitlab · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“All had big scale Amazon's amazing. I've learned a ton from the way they do things. And if you haven't read working backwards, I recommend it. For Laura Risa, smaller company example, there's a company called the browser company. Yeah, Jordan.”
2024-02-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: The Five Step Process to Hiring the Best Product People, The Four Core Skills the Best PMs Need to Have, The Two Product Documents that Drive World Class Product Teams & Why the Best PMs are Writers with Scott Williamson, Former CPO @ Gitlab · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, it's well warned advice at this time, but it's the same advice I would have given myself way back when. Talk to customers more. You know, I feel like even though that's look the most obvious thing in product, I'm guessing 90% of PMs don't do enough of it. And it shows up in a number of failed products and failed projects. And so I wish PMs would just start there and then fill in the rest of it.”
2024-02-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: The Five Step Process to Hiring the Best Product People, The Four Core Skills the Best PMs Need to Have, The Two Product Documents that Drive World Class Product Teams & Why the Best PMs are Writers with Scott Williamson, Former CPO @ Gitlab · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Division between what PMs do, what designers do, what engineering. PMs have said what to do. Designers decide how it's going to, like what the user experience is in design and engineer builds it, codes it. I can imagine those lines blurring if you get into a world where code assistance can do some prototyping or code assistance can generate 80% of the code. And then it becomes more about how do you prompt the thing to come up with the rug user experience? How do you, again, I think PM still has a role because you're still going to need to decide who we're going after, what problems we're going to solve, all of that. But the lines may then blur. I can imagine we'll triple roll down the line where they're doing PM design and engineering with the help of AI.”
2024-02-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: The Five Step Process to Hiring the Best Product People, The Four Core Skills the Best PMs Need to Have, The Two Product Documents that Drive World Class Product Teams & Why the Best PMs are Writers with Scott Williamson, Former CPO @ Gitlab · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It will. It probably has to some degree, if nothing else in terms of the projects that are being asked to work on. So A, they're going to have to understand its domain. They're going to have to get familiar with LLMs. They're going to have to learn how to prompt. They're going to have to learn how to create maybe more of a chat experience versus a typical UI experience. So the product, the end result for customers is going to change. Two, you'll start to be able to use tools from AI to automate some of this stuff. You know, I mentioned product usage data and customer insights. I could imagine AI will do a nice job of summarizing that for you so you don't have to incur as much brain damage with the input and synthesis and get some help on that. So PMs will have more help synthesis in terms of inputs. And then ultimately I think it might change the role. Like right now, this is pretty clear.”
2024-02-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: The Five Step Process to Hiring the Best Product People, The Four Core Skills the Best PMs Need to Have, The Two Product Documents that Drive World Class Product Teams & Why the Best PMs are Writers with Scott Williamson, Former CPO @ Gitlab · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's a tie between engineering and sales, depending on the orientation of a company. Some companies are very engineering lead, some are very sales led. When those are scales really tipped one way or the other, they end up tending to want to do the priority work. They tend to want PMs to just be order tickers and do what they think. If you're a good PM and you want to run the process the right way, that can create a ton of friction if they don't really understand why your direction is better than theirs.”
2024-02-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: The Five Step Process to Hiring the Best Product People, The Four Core Skills the Best PMs Need to Have, The Two Product Documents that Drive World Class Product Teams & Why the Best PMs are Writers with Scott Williamson, Former CPO @ Gitlab · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Relying on logo versus the actual accomplishments. And I also think there's in a related fashion, hire people who don't actually want to be at the stage you are. If early stage founders try to hire maybe an early product leader and they hire somebody from maybe a company that's doing a hundred million or a billion, make sure they want to get back into that hands-on hustle wear a lot of hats mode because I see a lot of failed entry because it sounds glamorous to be the first head of, but these people actually own and work that way. We're early stage. There's a lot of discovery. There's a lot of creativity. You're more on the art mode versus society. You have to want to be there. That early discovery or taking product from zero or a small number to a bigger number is a much different thought exercise.”
2024-02-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: The Five Step Process to Hiring the Best Product People, The Four Core Skills the Best PMs Need to Have, The Two Product Documents that Drive World Class Product Teams & Why the Best PMs are Writers with Scott Williamson, Former CPO @ Gitlab · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Broadly speaking, listen to customers about their problems and generally ignore their recommendations around solution because they may not billing exactly what they want may not be the most elegant way to solve the problem. That's generally a form of form.”
2024-02-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: The Five Step Process to Hiring the Best Product People, The Four Core Skills the Best PMs Need to Have, The Two Product Documents that Drive World Class Product Teams & Why the Best PMs are Writers with Scott Williamson, Former CPO @ Gitlab · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think that's a reasonable hypothesis. There are fewer engineers, fewer PMs, fewer designers, people are being asked to do more with less. I would guess the average PM probably has less time to get out of the building. And there's more focus on revenue. And if you're a product manager and you're trying to drive a longer-term vision that might have payoff in a year or two or three versus the sales team coming in and saying, hey, we got to make the number this quarter. I need this for company X pretty hard to push back on that so I can imagine that a lot of PMs are facing that and might be shifting more towards doing really tactical short-term stuff.”
2024-02-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: The Five Step Process to Hiring the Best Product People, The Four Core Skills the Best PMs Need to Have, The Two Product Documents that Drive World Class Product Teams & Why the Best PMs are Writers with Scott Williamson, Former CPO @ Gitlab · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think it would be really start with the problem and start with the customer and do a ton of customer discovery. My first PN role was in a place that was kind of one of these enterprise factories that tended to do what large companies asked them to do. And I get it. That was where the incentives were aligned that ultimately, I don't think that product was everything it could have been if I had been more focused on starting with the problem, starting with the customer. So I wish I had that epiphany earlier.”
2024-02-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: The Five Step Process to Hiring the Best Product People, The Four Core Skills the Best PMs Need to Have, The Two Product Documents that Drive World Class Product Teams & Why the Best PMs are Writers with Scott Williamson, Former CPO @ Gitlab · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think this depends on stage, broadly speaking. If you're very early, you're probably heavy in new feature buildout. If you're more mature, you probably got a lot of surface area that already exists. You might want to have a heavier percentage to iterative improvements of things that have already shifted and tech debt. At SENGRID, we had a recommended split. And granted, this is when we were sort of 100 million-ish of 60, 30, 10, 60 on net new, 30 on 80 troops, 10 on tech debt. It was totally fungible. Teams could recommend a different split. But in the absence of a better idea, that was our recommendation on how to allocate efforts. If you short internet improvements or you short tech debt, it will bite you. And so I think having a healthy amount of ongoing improvement to the current experience and a healthy amount of ability for engineers.”
2024-02-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: The Five Step Process to Hiring the Best Product People, The Four Core Skills the Best PMs Need to Have, The Two Product Documents that Drive World Class Product Teams & Why the Best PMs are Writers with Scott Williamson, Former CPO @ Gitlab · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think that's where these monthly reviews came in. So let's just say we agreed that they should move on with a project and we like the concept and we like kind of the design prototype. Then it gets fed into the development cycle. And then as they're talking about their KPI review, they can reflect on what we did last month, what we're going to do next month. And then you start to see how this thing's getting iterated on as it projects off towards the ultimate customer value. That's why separating them out a little bit because the first two or more about making sure this is something we want to take on is a good investment and the other was more like managing the ongoing priorities as a ways to building.”
2024-02-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: The Five Step Process to Hiring the Best Product People, The Four Core Skills the Best PMs Need to Have, The Two Product Documents that Drive World Class Product Teams & Why the Best PMs are Writers with Scott Williamson, Former CPO @ Gitlab · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think you can open it up to more. I was always of the mind the more the merrier. But I wanted to be careful about how many voices were in the room because these are usually fairly quick meetings. Maybe 30 minutes to an hour max. You got to be quick in getting to the point and getting to the conclusions. At GitLab, we recorded all of them and we posted them. And anybody who wanted to watch them could. So we were very transparent about all these meetings. You could see them all as an internal employee.”
2024-02-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: The Five Step Process to Hiring the Best Product People, The Four Core Skills the Best PMs Need to Have, The Two Product Documents that Drive World Class Product Teams & Why the Best PMs are Writers with Scott Williamson, Former CPO @ Gitlab · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think for the opportunity canvas and the solution, let's call it the prototype review, the PM little designer who we are doing the work, the product leader or leaders. For me, it was me, the design leader. We have a VP of design at both Cinder and GitLab. The two of us were in there, plus the PN and the designer and anybody else they wanted to invite and that sometimes met the engineering manager. Usually around four or five and that's sort of on this conceptual pre-engineer phase.”
2024-02-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: The Five Step Process to Hiring the Best Product People, The Four Core Skills the Best PMs Need to Have, The Two Product Documents that Drive World Class Product Teams & Why the Best PMs are Writers with Scott Williamson, Former CPO @ Gitlab · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Was kind of high level. How's this whole thing doing? Then you also have work in progress. So you have the ops PM and you have this idea that we need a much better incident management feature set. That's where I would get into reviews on this in progress work. And that's where that opportunity came to STEM comes in. Okay, OpsPM. Show me the canvas with a problem we're solving with incident management. And if the concept looks great, then you show green like that. Well, then they move to the next phase, which is building a prototype usually with design. And then when we go back and review the prototype as a solution, okay, PN, you had these 10 customers. They wanted this. Does this design really solve that for them?”
2024-02-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: The Five Step Process to Hiring the Best Product People, The Four Core Skills the Best PMs Need to Have, The Two Product Documents that Drive World Class Product Teams & Why the Best PMs are Writers with Scott Williamson, Former CPO @ Gitlab · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If you're early, you may be able to combine all of those, but I tend to separate reviews that are about work in progress from reviews about the product or product area as a whole. As an example, this opportunity, let's say you're a product manager in the ops area of GitLab, I used to have a monthly KPI review with each area. So we had a dev monthly KPI review, a sick monthly KPI review, an ops monthly KPI review. This was more about the area as a whole. Each area had a target KPI or numerous KPIs that they were managing to. And the rhythm of that was, I would ask them, okay, what happened in the numbers with bonon? What did you do last month to drive your target metric? And what are you going to do next month? There's sort of this constant check-in to make sure that their priorities and actions at least past the test that they are reasonably aligned with the target metric they were trying to measure.”
2024-02-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: The Five Step Process to Hiring the Best Product People, The Four Core Skills the Best PMs Need to Have, The Two Product Documents that Drive World Class Product Teams & Why the Best PMs are Writers with Scott Williamson, Former CPO @ Gitlab · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If you really understand them, then you're going to tee up the right work, which is going to drive results. Ultimately, you want to drive results. How do you get there? I think the building block is having a ton of perspective on the target user and what they need to level the right stuff for them. And if you demonstrate that you know the target user, sales get interest you. marketing is going to come for you to you to make sure that your thing is marketed the right way engineering is going to believe you and trust you and not fight you on every decision you make it just everything flows from that so that's the very first thing i would do and then from there you're trying to prove business impact so make sure you have a kpi that leadership cares about that maps to the work that you report on regularly and openly honestly”
2024-02-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: The Five Step Process to Hiring the Best Product People, The Four Core Skills the Best PMs Need to Have, The Two Product Documents that Drive World Class Product Teams & Why the Best PMs are Writers with Scott Williamson, Former CPO @ Gitlab · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You should have the strongest point of view anybody in a company about the ideal customer for your area. Like if you're an ops TM at GitLab, you should know what those platform engineers want, how they work, what makes them tick, what the problems are.”
2024-02-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: The Five Step Process to Hiring the Best Product People, The Four Core Skills the Best PMs Need to Have, The Two Product Documents that Drive World Class Product Teams & Why the Best PMs are Writers with Scott Williamson, Former CPO @ Gitlab · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And if you check in on this stuff every couple months, they get nuggets and really actionable feedback. They know where they stand with you. They have something or some things to work on over the next two to three months to get better. And then when the review cycle comes up at the end of the year, well, no surprise where they stand promotion, fire, and conversations are all much easier because they know where they stand with you. And it takes some work. I would set prep calls in my calendar. Okay, a week before my interview with X, I would have a little half hour prep meeting where I would fill this thing out, gather my thoughts, takes a little bit of energy to provide good feedback. And then I would have an extra half an hour on top of our normal one-on-one where we would just talk about career shit. We wouldn't talk about day-to-day. And I found that worked really well if you were consistent.”
2024-02-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: The Five Step Process to Hiring the Best Product People, The Four Core Skills the Best PMs Need to Have, The Two Product Documents that Drive World Class Product Teams & Why the Best PMs are Writers with Scott Williamson, Former CPO @ Gitlab · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I have this thing called a career development framework. I mentioned those four buckets. So validation, bill, business and communication. And then there was a breakdown for PM, senior PM, principal PM. And it tried to outline with as much specificity as possible what behavior and outcome expectations are at each level for each bucket. And I would have conversations with my directs and I would ask any other people leaders to do the same to have a check-in every two to three months on that. What I would do is very simple. I create a new line below their level and I would write down what did I see that was either really good or constructive feedback on each of these four buckets. And then I would also tell them where I think they stood at large against that skill set. Do they need development? Do they meet my expectations? Or do they exceed my expectations?”
2024-02-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: The Five Step Process to Hiring the Best Product People, The Four Core Skills the Best PMs Need to Have, The Two Product Documents that Drive World Class Product Teams & Why the Best PMs are Writers with Scott Williamson, Former CPO @ Gitlab · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Later on, when I got better at hiring, there were relatively few of these where it was just, you know, they're bailing on week one. It's just a total disaster because we got better for screening, but we did have a phone number that just didn't make a cut at month three. I think what you find is, A, they don't take ownership. Either they don't want to or can't. By Month three, you should really see them start leaning in and have a strong point of view, take ownership, have some conviction and priority, and they're just not there for whatever reason. Maybe they didn't have the base skills to form a point of view. Maybe they're a little timid about communicating a point of view. Maybe they don't collaborate well. These things can be a little harder to test for and show up within the first few months.”
2024-02-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: The Five Step Process to Hiring the Best Product People, The Four Core Skills the Best PMs Need to Have, The Two Product Documents that Drive World Class Product Teams & Why the Best PMs are Writers with Scott Williamson, Former CPO @ Gitlab · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think if they're really bad, you know, within the first week, if they're maybe good but not good enough, you're going to know within the first quarter.”
2024-02-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: The Five Step Process to Hiring the Best Product People, The Four Core Skills the Best PMs Need to Have, The Two Product Documents that Drive World Class Product Teams & Why the Best PMs are Writers with Scott Williamson, Former CPO @ Gitlab · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like roll out the red carcint. Here's who they made. Here's what to read. Here's all the contacts you need. In weeks three and four, talk to customers. You know, I want to see 10 customer interviews or whatever. By the end of month one, you should be able to give a general. What these deliverables are is company specific, but help them get context, tell them your expectations on what they should underwind. Another example is maybe you're the founder and you still own all the squim proceedings. When do I want you to start leading these things after month one, month two, like set their expectations and then along the way you engage whether they're going to be ready on 10?”
2024-02-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: The Five Step Process to Hiring the Best Product People, The Four Core Skills the Best PMs Need to Have, The Two Product Documents that Drive World Class Product Teams & Why the Best PMs are Writers with Scott Williamson, Former CPO @ Gitlab · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“First, especially in early stage scenarios, the founder has to be crystal clear with the incoming product person about what they want to own as the founder and what they want this product person to own. Oftentimes this is murky and the PM comes in when the product leader comes in and the founder decides Pom. I actually still want to own prioritization. But the product person came in thinking they would own law. So do you want to own vision? Yes or no? Do you want to own strategy? Yes or no? Do you want to own prioritization? Yes or no? Do you want to own hiring? Yes or no? Be crystal clear about those and communicate that in the hiring process and document it when someone comes in so that that's clear. They know what their field they're supposed to play on. And then two, I like to be very prescriptive about what I expect. Okay, in week one, you should meet these people. Here's a link to all the docs you should read. Like in the first two weeks, you should be helping them gain contact very fast.”
2024-02-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: The Five Step Process to Hiring the Best Product People, The Four Core Skills the Best PMs Need to Have, The Two Product Documents that Drive World Class Product Teams & Why the Best PMs are Writers with Scott Williamson, Former CPO @ Gitlab · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, they don't know most of them been a product manager. They have no idea what this role is about. So they don't know what to look for. They don't know how to grade it. And so they go off of category or Google or B. They know the lingo. You know, they talked about validation. So must be good at it. Because, you know, it's like it's logical. I get it. I stuck at interviewing for this at first too. So the more that you can do as a fonder to clear on what skills you need out of PM and be really attention about testing for it, even if you don't know function well, you're going to be better off.”
2024-02-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: The Five Step Process to Hiring the Best Product People, The Four Core Skills the Best PMs Need to Have, The Two Product Documents that Drive World Class Product Teams & Why the Best PMs are Writers with Scott Williamson, Former CPO @ Gitlab · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think way back, I didn't have nearly as much conviction on what a good PN looked like. I didn't have a rubric in my head like I do now. And I hadn't made the connection on systems thinking and that being super important for PM. So I just wasn't interviewing for the right stuff is where the early stage came from.”
2024-02-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: The Five Step Process to Hiring the Best Product People, The Four Core Skills the Best PMs Need to Have, The Two Product Documents that Drive World Class Product Teams & Why the Best PMs are Writers with Scott Williamson, Former CPO @ Gitlab · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think someone who can clearly connect the work they're doing to the outcome they were trying to drive and can describe, okay, what did I learn from customers that led me to believe that they take this action if X were there? How did I instrument the product to know whether the intended effect was there or not? And then how do I manage to that and iterate from there? Like tell me a story about how you went from early stage to later stage, what moves did you make along the way? Because it's never about shipping one thing. It's about shipping and learning and shipping and learning. And it's a constant journey and you have to have good habits all along the way.”
2024-02-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: The Five Step Process to Hiring the Best Product People, The Four Core Skills the Best PMs Need to Have, The Two Product Documents that Drive World Class Product Teams & Why the Best PMs are Writers with Scott Williamson, Former CPO @ Gitlab · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If they haven't, and they're just making happen that kind of thing turns up. So that's one way they fail to depth their examples doesn't demonstrate they actually worked in the way we wanted to work to this think big think small. Maybe they can't communicate clearly in writing or verbally or have trouble iterating to a good answer. And then three, the case study. A lot of people think very haphazardly about problem because they just have a great framework for it.”
2024-02-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: The Five Step Process to Hiring the Best Product People, The Four Core Skills the Best PMs Need to Have, The Two Product Documents that Drive World Class Product Teams & Why the Best PMs are Writers with Scott Williamson, Former CPO @ Gitlab · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Good insights, and so I'll ask questions like tell me about a time where you're doing discovery with customers and learn something that's surprising but caused you to change course. Or tell me about a time where you're looking at product usage data and found something that was counter to what you believed and what'd you do about it? If somebody spent enough time interviewing enough time sifting through product usage data, they should have.”
2024-02-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: The Five Step Process to Hiring the Best Product People, The Four Core Skills the Best PMs Need to Have, The Two Product Documents that Drive World Class Product Teams & Why the Best PMs are Writers with Scott Williamson, Former CPO @ Gitlab · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Not really. Look at can matter. There are certain roles where you need a certain level of technical expertise. That's a fact. There are certain roles like let's say I'm hiring for a billing product manager. I probably want someone who's been around billing before. So you need to make sure that they've had enough domain experience to survive. But mostly what I'm testing for is how you do product and how you think. And that's relatively domain agnostic. I tend not to hire for domain if I don't have to. And you can test those things from a SNAPN just fine. So how do they fail? The examples that they give don't indicate to me that they took orders. They didn't use their own judgment from inputs that they got. So either they didn't go out and get good inputs or B, they didn't or weren't able to turn those into insights. Well, good PMs can do is take inputs and derive what”
2024-02-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: The Five Step Process to Hiring the Best Product People, The Four Core Skills the Best PMs Need to Have, The Two Product Documents that Drive World Class Product Teams & Why the Best PMs are Writers with Scott Williamson, Former CPO @ Gitlab · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it's when I interview a candidate, I set it up, say, tell me about the product that was the most relevant to what we do here. And I'm going to ask you a bunch of questions about it. And so I tried to go a few levels deep on what they've done.”
2024-02-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: The Five Step Process to Hiring the Best Product People, The Four Core Skills the Best PMs Need to Have, The Two Product Documents that Drive World Class Product Teams & Why the Best PMs are Writers with Scott Williamson, Former CPO @ Gitlab · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm always sort of borderline embarrassed about this example, but I've used it a ton of time because if you ask product managers or GetLab, they probably chuckle about having to. I've gone through this. I ask them to pretend they are a product manager at a foods company and they own the milk product line, always been a problem with the production line. And they're losing X per day. And it sort of set up the scenario. And the general managers asked you to dig in and figure out what to do. What do you do? Bizarre problem statement. But he learned a lot from how to handle it. Like, do they start for first principles? Do they have sort of methodical way of working through a fresh problem? Do they start with the customer or do they just start making shit up? Do they ask good questions to unpack the scenario? These are all signs of someone who thinks systematically. Ultimately, that's what that case is for, is to test systems.”
2024-02-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: The Five Step Process to Hiring the Best Product People, The Four Core Skills the Best PMs Need to Have, The Two Product Documents that Drive World Class Product Teams & Why the Best PMs are Writers with Scott Williamson, Former CPO @ Gitlab · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I like to ask a non technical. I like to pose a non-technical scenario that they haven't worked in before and actually isn't what we do either because I don't want. Then A, rely on the jargon that they learned in their last job. And I don't want to also sort of penalize them for asking them about an area that I know really well. And boy, I should have seen this. So ask sort of a non-technical, semi-unrelated case to ask them how they would solve a problem.”
2024-02-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: The Five Step Process to Hiring the Best Product People, The Four Core Skills the Best PMs Need to Have, The Two Product Documents that Drive World Class Product Teams & Why the Best PMs are Writers with Scott Williamson, Former CPO @ Gitlab · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Tons of back and forth, engineers that don't get it. They're like, why are we doing this? I don't understand why this thing is more important than that thing. When you're switching a lot, oh, well, we're weak into the spread, we redirected to this thing. It's totally different. And now I got to switch. So if there's a lot of content switching, there's a lot of confusion about why there's a lot of back and forth between the engineers and whoever asked them to do this thing. Probably isn't a well-conceived backlog in the first place.”
2024-02-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: The Five Step Process to Hiring the Best Product People, The Four Core Skills the Best PMs Need to Have, The Two Product Documents that Drive World Class Product Teams & Why the Best PMs are Writers with Scott Williamson, Former CPO @ Gitlab · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Who cares about what if that shit's unclear, the product development process can get really chaotic. So in my experience, it's fed up engineering.”
2024-02-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: The Five Step Process to Hiring the Best Product People, The Four Core Skills the Best PMs Need to Have, The Two Product Documents that Drive World Class Product Teams & Why the Best PMs are Writers with Scott Williamson, Former CPO @ Gitlab · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's a tricky balance because this sounds a little heavy, but let me also explain. PMs always have two tracks going. There's a validation track where you're doing your homework on the things you want to pump into edgy airing. And then you have a build track. The build track's always moving. You going sprint to sprint to sprint. Every place I've ever been has been an enormous backlog for engineering. So it's, in my opinion, if it's well run, doing a proper validation shouldn't slow down engineering. We have more than a wolf to do. This is about making sure that the next thing you tee up for them is well conceived. But to my far earlier point, PMs need half their time available to be doing this kind of validation work. So it shouldn't slow down the engineer. It should speed them up because there's less back and forth between PMs and designers and the engineers if the project is well conceived, where you get a lot of back and forth and slowdown is when you're like, are we building for that or that? Who is this for?”
2024-02-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: The Five Step Process to Hiring the Best Product People, The Four Core Skills the Best PMs Need to Have, The Two Product Documents that Drive World Class Product Teams & Why the Best PMs are Writers with Scott Williamson, Former CPO @ Gitlab · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Goes on idea. The problem with ideas is they can sound very good from one perspective. Like customer X asked for it or wow, this sounds cool. Or, oh, if we did that, we could tear them into the next tier. There's always some reason why an idea sounds good on a surface. But sometimes when you line these things up, it's like, oh shit. Our target user that really wants this, we don't actually talk to. We don't market to. There's only three customers that want this and yes, it's acute for them, it's not broad enough. Forces that conversation. And it's a good time to either redirect or kill or pause because you haven't coded anything yet. You haven't wasted the team's time yet. So I spent a lot of time kind of at this opportunity canvas problem validations phase to make sure that the thing you're going to push down the cycle were well conceived.”
2024-02-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: The Five Step Process to Hiring the Best Product People, The Four Core Skills the Best PMs Need to Have, The Two Product Documents that Drive World Class Product Teams & Why the Best PMs are Writers with Scott Williamson, Former CPO @ Gitlab · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The point of it was to help them think holistically about something they wanted to take on. You don't do this for all projects. You don't do it for improvements. You don't do it for tech debt. But for something that's big, that's going to take weeks or months of engineering time. I think it's very smart to do something like this and asks them to go out and talk to five to ten ideal people in a target user profile and interview them about the problem that they have and then come back and show me an opportunity canvas and it tells me here's the target user what pain point do they experience what are their workarounds what would the upside be telling us to do this what would the first thing you would do to build against this be what are your alternatives what are your risks and what's your kpi there are a couple other things but it could all fit in one page and if you've done your homework you can fill it out 15 minutes what that does is it forces the pm to think about a bunch of different angles”
2024-02-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: The Five Step Process to Hiring the Best Product People, The Four Core Skills the Best PMs Need to Have, The Two Product Documents that Drive World Class Product Teams & Why the Best PMs are Writers with Scott Williamson, Former CPO @ Gitlab · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I think a good strap can be as short as two pages. So there's no need to fill up the six. I think the reason why Amazon set the six pages limit is because in one meeting on one topic, any more than six pages is just too much. But make it as short as you can. When I did at GitLab for the whole product, it's probably a couple pages, two, maybe three. It wasn't that long. It can be quite concise. That's how the strategy. When I mentioned the one pager earlier, that was on a particular product concept. I called it an opportunity canvas. And this was used.”
2024-02-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: The Five Step Process to Hiring the Best Product People, The Four Core Skills the Best PMs Need to Have, The Two Product Documents that Drive World Class Product Teams & Why the Best PMs are Writers with Scott Williamson, Former CPO @ Gitlab · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Even if you're more than ten people, this can be helpful. Maybe when you're not all in the same run, when you start adding new people at song clip, because new people just don't have that context, they don't have the tribal knowledge. And when you add more nodes on, the quicker you can get them wrapped around who we're going after, what we're going to do, we're not going to do what matters most, what business outcomes are we trying to drive. You eliminate a lot of extraneous conversations that can otherwise slow the whole place down. So I think it can be useful very early.”
2024-02-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: The Five Step Process to Hiring the Best Product People, The Four Core Skills the Best PMs Need to Have, The Two Product Documents that Drive World Class Product Teams & Why the Best PMs are Writers with Scott Williamson, Former CPO @ Gitlab · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exec team. In my own experience, the exec team is where it gets more difficult because that's where you really need to make cross-company trade-offs. A good example at SenGrid, we stayed pretty true to the mid-market as our target ideal customer profile. We resisted going up to enterprise. That was controversial. There were almost every sales leader at the company wanted us to invest in more to go up, to do the tippy toll complex shit that, you know, the bigger brands wanted, but we more or less resisted that over the years. And I think that was to our benefit. We kept the product experience really clean, very self-serve first. I think that was the hard why that company ended up doing well. But, you know, you had a strategy review and they don't see that you're doing the stuff that the top 10 want and it's complicated.”
2024-02-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: The Five Step Process to Hiring the Best Product People, The Four Core Skills the Best PMs Need to Have, The Two Product Documents that Drive World Class Product Teams & Why the Best PMs are Writers with Scott Williamson, Former CPO @ Gitlab · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'll use GitLab as an example. It was a fairly async process given the all remote nature. I did it at my level in sequential kind of concentric circles that got bigger. I reviewed it with the CEO first. I reviewed it with my product leadership team, second, the executive team third, broader product team, fourth whole company fifth. Each time I took comments essentially. And each time I would refine it until that group understood it, and then I would move out from there. If this is an individual PM, maybe you start with your design and engineering manager or your boss. Your boss probably, then your immediate peers, then the broader team, then the company.”
2024-02-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: The Five Step Process to Hiring the Best Product People, The Four Core Skills the Best PMs Need to Have, The Two Product Documents that Drive World Class Product Teams & Why the Best PMs are Writers with Scott Williamson, Former CPO @ Gitlab · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because words matter. And if you're projecting your strategy verbally or in bullet points, people can hear what they want to hear. They can read. They can interpret what they want to interpret. What is written down, and you actually read it, and it's off 10 degrees with what you think. I think it's easier to map too. Hey, here's what I really think we should do. And here's what this person's saying we should do. And just that fidelity alignment is so much higher in a long form doc on something like a strategy.”
2024-02-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: The Five Step Process to Hiring the Best Product People, The Four Core Skills the Best PMs Need to Have, The Two Product Documents that Drive World Class Product Teams & Why the Best PMs are Writers with Scott Williamson, Former CPO @ Gitlab · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Make sure it's two or three iterations larger than a planning cycle. So if you plan every quarter, make sure it's at least a year. If you plan every year, make sure it's two so that you can kind of get out and over the planning cycle into like where are we going over a longer r. And it should make trades. It should say, hey, we're going after this segment and not this segment. We're going to focus on these use cases and not these use cases. It should narrow your focus rather than having it overly broad. And that kind of dock and that kind of alignment is tough to get to. And I think the only way you get to it effectively is through long form writing.”
2024-02-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: The Five Step Process to Hiring the Best Product People, The Four Core Skills the Best PMs Need to Have, The Two Product Documents that Drive World Class Product Teams & Why the Best PMs are Writers with Scott Williamson, Former CPO @ Gitlab · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, start with the six pager because that's sort of the longer arc one that should help you drive more focus at GitLab. We had these things at my level for the whole product line. The directors had them for product areas. So if you think about GitLab, there's DevSync and Ops. So we had a Dev Strategy sex strategy and ops strategy. And then HPM underneath those directors had their own strategy for their area. Maybe it was Agile Planning or Roadmapping or continuous integration or whatever. And when you have these laddered strategies, it helps each level make sure that the things they're working on are connected to other levels. I don't want to overcomplicate you mostly dealing with startups here. So you probably just need one of these. But the point is you want a little bit of a longer arc than your typical planning cycle. So GitLab, we had a one-year planning cycle. Plenty of companies have quarterly planning cycles.”
2024-02-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: The Five Step Process to Hiring the Best Product People, The Four Core Skills the Best PMs Need to Have, The Two Product Documents that Drive World Class Product Teams & Why the Best PMs are Writers with Scott Williamson, Former CPO @ Gitlab · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I tend to agree, especially at a place like GitLab where it was all remote. PMs did very little synchronous work. If you can't rely on sort of verbal agility to get things done, you better be a good writer. And I think relying on verbal is fine. It's helpful. Like I said before, you have to communicate clearly to different levels and different audiences. But that written artifact is just essential to driver alignment. There are two that we use at SengGrid and GitLab that I think were essential. One was a one pager called an opportunity canvas, which asked PM to outline certain concept they wanted to build. The other one, it's like a two to six pager, I think Kevin might have mentioned this. It sort of borrowing from Amazon this concept of a six-pager, sort of a longer arc strategy doc. Those are two that I feel like you have to write down.”
2024-02-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: The Five Step Process to Hiring the Best Product People, The Four Core Skills the Best PMs Need to Have, The Two Product Documents that Drive World Class Product Teams & Why the Best PMs are Writers with Scott Williamson, Former CPO @ Gitlab · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Gilab's all remote. You're dead in the water if you can't write clearly at GitLab. So it's testing all those things at once.”
2024-02-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: The Five Step Process to Hiring the Best Product People, The Four Core Skills the Best PMs Need to Have, The Two Product Documents that Drive World Class Product Teams & Why the Best PMs are Writers with Scott Williamson, Former CPO @ Gitlab · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think GitLab did this well. We had what was called Think Big Think Small was the exercise and the PM would partner with the interview candidate and ahead of time they would ask them to come prepared with a topic that was so pertinent to the area they were interviewing for and we would ask them to write down what sort of the vision for this thing and then how would you iterate your way to iteration was a company value at GitLab. I think it's a very underrated aspect of great PM and great product development is this act of breaking things down into small chunks so that you don't overcomplicate what you ship. So this exercise tested a few things. It tested their ability to think about something on a fairly large scale tested their ability to break it down into like actionable steps that the engineering could absorb and it tested their verbal skill and their written skill because they had to write it down.”
2024-02-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: The Five Step Process to Hiring the Best Product People, The Four Core Skills the Best PMs Need to Have, The Two Product Documents that Drive World Class Product Teams & Why the Best PMs are Writers with Scott Williamson, Former CPO @ Gitlab · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's four buckets for an individual p.m. One is around valid. I call it validation, customer interviewing, product usage data, kind of like gathering insights. Two is build, which is how well do you work with engineering. Can you make trade-offs? Can you tee it up form in a language they understand? Can you iterate? Can you work with them to break stuff down? Can you ship? Three, the business. Do you know which KP ad is set? Do you know what the thing you're working on is going to drive, so linking the activity to the potential outcome? Can you think about the business of your product and what you're trying to do? And third is communication skills. You need to manage up to execs. You need to talk to customers in their language. You need to speak to engineering in their language. Every one of them involves different vocabulary, different altitude. And you need to be clear to each one of those constituents. That's how I break it all down.”
2024-02-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: The Five Step Process to Hiring the Best Product People, The Four Core Skills the Best PMs Need to Have, The Two Product Documents that Drive World Class Product Teams & Why the Best PMs are Writers with Scott Williamson, Former CPO @ Gitlab · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Five areas total first one's 30 minute recruiter screen or hiring manager straight if you don't have a recruiter just check her to the basics then the hiring manager should spend an hour with them checking on clear the bar for the core competencies of pm and i can get into what i think those are an engineering manager interview for an hour or so where you're testing for clearing the bar on the domain and the minimum level of technical knowledge they're going to need and their ability to work with engineering one peer interview if you have other pms they should be doing this i could get into tap tips and techniques for that but i typically like to see that be a little more hands on where they work on something together and then one more sort of finalist interview either with the higher integer again or a barraiser interview if you have someone else in the org just variegated interviewing where you get into more like a case question”
2024-02-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: The Five Step Process to Hiring the Best Product People, The Four Core Skills the Best PMs Need to Have, The Two Product Documents that Drive World Class Product Teams & Why the Best PMs are Writers with Scott Williamson, Former CPO @ Gitlab · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source