Category: Interviewing

Perhaps your job is great! Things are swell and you have the perfect mix of performance and growth opportunities. That’s why today is the right time to interview with another organization. A piece of career advice I once received, and which has stood the test of time for myself and others, is to “interview once a year whether you need to or not.” Why’s that? Doesn’t interviewing mean you hate your job and need to quit? Not necessarily – here’s 6 reasons why:

1. You never know when you’ll need your interview skills, and it’s important to keep them sharp. You may unexpectedly find yourself in need of a job, or with a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, where your interview performance will be key. By interviewing once a year, you’ll ensure those skills are ready.
2. Interviewing helps us process our story. Our careers tell a tale, and in an interview we often have to repeat our story of challenges and successes to others. Interviewing puts us in a position to hone this story and actively reflect to confirm it’s the journey we want to be leading.
3. Our resumes and social presence stays fresh. The interview process is the perfect time to tweak your resume, update LinkedIn, and post to other social sites. It’s far easier to incrementally maintain these important documents than to have to do major updates later.
4. We learn a lot during an interview. Approach an interview as much with your ears as your mouth. How does the organization operate? How do they approach the role you have, or the one you want? What can you take back to your current role and organization to make it the best yet.
5. You’ll find new reasons to love your current role. Over the years at an organization, you lose the passion from the ‘honeymoon’ phase when you were first hired. You now know all the warts and downsides to your role. However, an interview will show you that other companies have the same, or worse, faults. This can be a healthy reality check and reinvigorate your love for your job.
6. Career pathing should consider opportunities elsewhere. You’ll learn during the interview more about your strengths, and your growth opportunities, for your role at any organizations. Or reach higher and see how you compare to the next position you want. You’ll better know what you should be learning and developing to be relevant and exceptional in the industry. Be sure to ask for feedback after the interview to get all the info you can.

With these great reasons to interview, not even listing the fact that you might find and get your dream job, it’s time to take action. Over several years of interviewing, I’ve found the best approach is to be honest and transparent with your boss. Using the reasons above, explain why you find it important to interview at least once a year. There’s a lot in it for your boss! You are making the offer to go out, become re-energized, bring home new ideas, and help craft your development plan. Plus it’s a great conversation starter with your boss about what’s motivating and demotivating for you right now. I’ve had all my bosses be on board with the plan and it’s only made our relationships stronger. It may get you on a list with HR that you’re looking around, so be sure to also formally close the process with your boss by having a debrief when you’re done.

Go out, interview, and best of luck!

Further Reading

• Frame your career, and your next job, with the Personal Business Model
• Practice for your PM interview with these sample questions

You’ve done your user research, understand their problems, and now it’s time to communicate your insights to your team and stakeholders. You may be tempted to create a persona document, but there are major flaws! The persona you create may be a Frankenstein of your actual customers. You may take a little of this and a little of that from each user interview and the end result is a user that doesn’t exist, leading to incorrect product decisions and wasted time. Instead, try out lightweight empathy maps for each interview to help others connect with each of your users, showing the rainbow of possible customers as well as the commonalities.

I tried this new approach to empathy maps last week and it was a huge hit. I was inspired by this Practical Guide to Empathy Maps, made some tweaks, and ran it with five interviews. This format took well less than 10 minutes to complete for each call, led to visually engaging notes that my team actually read, and made user research fun. It’s the best experience I’ve had with documenting user research, and I hope you have great results too. Here’s my how-to guide to making one.

1. Customize your maps
   1. I’ve created a template map that you can use along with a script for calls. Create a copy of each to get started!
   2. Choose a set of default faces for folks who don’t have a photo on LinkedIn (more on that below). I took pictures from a set of vector avatars.
   3. Pick the demographic data you wish to track. This will populate the bottom of your map, and it helps if it’s visually engaging. I put:
      1. User’s country’s flag
      2. User’s company’s logo
      3. User’s role at their company
      4. Familiarity with our product (from 1-5 with stars)
      5. Familiarity with our problem space (from 1-5 with stars)
      6. Whether they’d buy our product as a big green check or red x
2. Research your user
   1. 1. There’s a lot about your user you can learn ahead of time! Look them up on LinkedIn to hopefully get their company, role, etc.
      2. Add the user’s name and other demographic info to the map.
      3. Grab the photo for the middle of the map. Here’s a clip of how to insert the image into the map:
   1.  Interview
      1. Run your call, follow your script, and you’ll get all the info you need to fill out your map. Especially look for soundbytes to add as quotes to the map.
3. Fill out your map
   1. Add it all in! If others joined you on your customer call, collaborate on the notes.
   2. Save your map to an image, share it with your team, and print it out as a visual radiator on your team’s walls.

That’s it, and hopefully your foray into empathy mapping is a great success. If you’re working with a new Product Manager, this is also a great lightweight way to both think holistically about a customer interview and to enable quick note-taking and communication. And while you’re at it, you should acquaint them with the classic empathy map, which just got an update from XPLANE, as there may be something you want to borrow from that too.

If you are hiring a new Product Manager, you may be tempted to skip what once was a venerable part of the interview process – the reference check. The popular rationale is that candidates will “stack the deck” by only giving references for people that will put them in a positive light, and thus it’s not worth the time to make the calls. However, there are several excellent reasons to do the reference checks. I’ve taken some of these from TopGrading and some from my own experience. They all come down to setting the goal for reference checks differently. Reference checks aren’t just about validating your assessment of a candidate’s interview. Reference checks also help:

Weed out C-Players: When choosing a candidate, it’s all about hiring A-Players. The common rationale for avoiding reference checks is based on a fact: hiring takes a lot of time. To get to one A-Player, the top 10% of candidates, there are at least 9 candidates that must be screened out. This takes time with no positive outcome. By being clear that there are reference checks as part of the interview process, you can help weed out C-Players with no work. State that you will be contacting former managers, not just the references that the candidate chooses, and C-Players will likely not apply or choose to not continue the process. An A-Player, however, will not see this as a obstacle and be happy to arrange these references if they are truly excited in your position.

Begin the mentoring process: A reference check isn’t just about making the hiring decision. References are also an invaluable jump start to mentoring your (hopefully) new Product Manager. By talking to former managers about a candidates strengths and weaknesses, you can learn where they need coaching and how you can leverage their strengths. You can even do these reference checks after the offer has been accepted. This can help you set the tone with the reference more clearly as one manager talking to another about how to best ensure their former A-Player is a star at your company.

Show the candidate you care: A-Players enjoy a challenge, and will rise to exceed your expectations. By doing reference checks, you are showing the candidate that you value getting the best talent, and spend the effort to ensure only top players work for you. They will thus have better impressions of their co-workers knowing that they all went through the same challenge and hiring rigor.Reference checks aren’t just the last gate in your interview process. They can set the tone for all the interviews and be the bridge between a great interview process and a great onboarding process.

No one gets a degree in Product Management. Everyone comes from a different career, and needs to learn to leverage their strengths as they come to Product Management.

I’m fortunate at work to have the opportunity to start working with an Associate Product Manager. It’s a new role for my company, and we found a perfect internal hire, Jenni, to take the position. My first formal role in product management was as an Associate Product Manager, so it will be fun to tread old ground and have a great excuse to strengthen my skills. To teach is to learn, and I look forward to sharing that learning in this blog.

Jenni is coming from a role in Customer Research, and thus has many great skills for Product Management, as well as some risks in the difference in careers. As an interviewing exercise, I had her complete the Personal Business Model Canvas as found in Business Model You. I think this is a great exercise for several reasons:

• This exercise is very similar to the Business Model Canvas which is a great tool for a new Product Manager to understand. Thus she learned some Product Management right away in the interview.
• The book is a great stimulation for thinking about an important career change. Product Management is a rewarding but demanding career, and thus a candidate should think critically about how it matches their strengths.
• The canvas gives a conversation piece in the interview for discussing soft skills. For an Associate Product Manager hire, soft skills such as organization, communication, and critical thinking are crucial, as there are no yet hard skills to assess. My previous experience with soft skill interviewing has used TopGrading, and I think the Personal Business Model Canvas achieves many of the same goals in much less time.

So, for the assignment before the interview, I asked her to read the first section of the book (lending her my copy) and create her Personal Business Model Canvas for her current role. On the last page of the first section (page 77), there’s an example of how a canvas changes with a new career. I asked her to do the same and either mark-up her first canvas or make a second for how she sees her Canvas changing with a move to Product Management.

She was very excited to check out the book and explore the framework for helping her think about a career change. She came to the interview ready to share her canvases, and I found the conversation around the canvas very insightful. Highlights of the conversation focused on the Resources, Activities, and Customers panels of the canvas. We came away from the interview feeling confident that Jenni understood how she’d be able to leverage her existing strengths and where she’d need to grow to become a great Product Manager.