I would hold a pre-roll round table with the panel before we kicked off interviewing, and I'd use this document at that meeting. It helped make sure that the hiring group had seen the prompt and were aligned on the goals for the hire.

When you're running a product interview, you're often asking a question about a product that you know very deeply (example: come up with a new format). You have more information -- you've been there, you live it every day, you have all this knowledge.

When you're prepping your panel, it's really important to remind them that you're looking to see whether the candidate has good judgment and whether their thinking makes sense 

. Not based on what you know.

That's a really hard thing to prep for, to avoid that bias. You can do that by encouraging people to ask follow up questions instead of shooting down ideas based on their past experiences.

Some examples:

Why did you think these were good ideas? Walk us through your thought process?

For this role, we were looking for someone with a more creative mindset than we might normally look for in a PM or Growth PM. It was a relatively senior role, and we were looking for someone that could do bigger product thinking.

We didn't yet have a clear scorecard, so I wanted to make sure we at least had a rough one and that everyone knew what it was.

We did a lot of hiring before we had a product competency model at Slack. In a world where you’re hiring 2-3 PMs every half or quarter, it’s much simpler; you want every person to be a fit for that role and it’s okay if you have more of a bespoke experience. But when you’re hiring at scale (more like hundreds instead of dozens) you have to start thinking more generically. That’s when we pivoted towards a more consistent hiring approach across all of Product, where the process looked mostly the same except for one interview “slot” that was more specific to the role. We eventually evolved to the point where we had a couple of simulations written for different parts of the competency model. But, at this point, we were still focused on what we needed for this specific role.

We started putting more structure and consistency in place when we realized that every hiring manager in the Product org had a different process for how they were hiring PMs (and frankly, some of the processes weren’t great). For one, because they didn’t have a clear sense of what they were looking for in a candidate, they ended up applying whatever they thought was important to their role to the candidate. Also, we were finding more often that we’d be interviewing someone for one role and then would discover they might be a better fit for another; but then we’d have to start over with the whole rigamarole and maybe even a new simulation.

As we did more and more of these interviews, we started being able to pattern match and find some "red flags" and "green flags." Red flags were things that knocked the person's candidacy, whereas green flags were things that made me more excited about them.

A common mistake is thinking of activation/onboarding as a growth problem instead of thinking about it as a deep customer experience problem.

It's not just about saying "ugh, let's reduce friction and reduce the number of steps" or "let's just AB test our way to better onboarding."

The person solving this problem needs to understand -- Why is this user here? How did they get here? What are they looking for?

And then how can you connect the user to an aha moment / first value as soon as possible? And why should they be interested in this product in a world of 1 million other options?

So, sure, the person solving this problem needs to be competent at data and experimentation, but they need to be 

 at understanding users who aren't the power user, such as first time users, tire kickers, and adjacent users.

This makes it more of a customer empathy and experience problem (more like core product) than a growth growth problem.

Over time, we found that people who were successful in this role were not necessarily hard core data analytical people but rather were deeper product thinkers.

Only suggesting basic/generic ideas. There were about 7-10 generic ideas you’d see everywhere. I would be tempted to discard these simulations unless the generic ideas were coupled with something else.

Failing to provide reasoning (e.g., "here are my ideas without description or justification"). This was probably the most common. However, for us, the process the candidate went through to get to the answer was more important than the answer itself.

Suggesting things that are impossible to build. This is almost the flip side of the creativity piece. I didn't want to see some BS recommendation about putting in magic AI. This wouldn't necessarily disqualify someone before the interview, but I want to want to figure out during the interview whether they could back up the recommendation. (How did you decide to recommend this? How would you implement?)

Unique/interesting ideas, especially if it was something I hadn't thought of myself. This wasn't necessary but was definitely a big pro. I'd spent the last 2 years thinking about this problem, so if a candidate suggested something unique, I would get excited about them.

Demonstrating extra effort to get at a core problem (e.g., taking the initiative to talk to 12 people)

Spending presentation time on the core problem, even if the solution isn’t necessarily that good

This is less a set of things they need to do but more just to help us align on asking the right questions

At Slack, the ability to story tell / present ideas effectively was really important because of how we functioned as an org. If the candidate was a poor communicator in their deck/presentation, that ended up being a big knock against them.

On the flip side, when I hired the head of activation, she was able to come up with really strong product narrative about why this problem was important and what her approach was going to be. She really demonstrated her ability to think clearly and uniquely, be convincing, and bring others along. So I could really see her leading others through that vision.

Fareed Mosavat

When hiring a new Senior Product Manager for Onboarding at Slack, we used this document to ensure the hiring panel was prepared and aligned on what they were looking for in candidates.

We are looking for a PM to help make step change improvements in our onboarding experience. 

We have already tried many of the “low hanging fruit” / small experiments, so we’re looking for someone who can think in terms of larger bets.

In addition to general PM skills, we are looking for creative thinking and ability to push to deeper insight.

Customer-focused/UX lens, not just a growth-focused lens

Ability to think deeply about product experiences (and step function improvements therein)

Understanding of great onboarding and activation experience

Understanding of data / basic data literacy

Do they follow instructions by taking a big swing vs. proposing a series of smaller experiments?

Do they do some independent research? (Whether it’s around the product, customers or data?)

Hiring panel prep for a Senior Product Manager, Onboarding role at Slack

Interview Panel Prep Document

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