Kate Leto joins Melissa Perri to talk about some of the challenges in filling product management roles that companies run into all the time, and how to overcome them.
Show Notes
Kate Leto is an organisational design consultant, coach and product advisor with a 25 year track record helping to build product teams that thrive. She joins Melissa Perri today to talk about some of the challenges in filling product management roles that companies run into all the time – and how to overcome them. Ultimately, Kate believes that growth mindset – both of leadership teams and product managers themselves is what makes the difference between success and failure. is a career coach who specializes in hiring product managers and organizational design. Here are some key points from Melissa and Kate’s conversation:
There are two high level motivations for hiring a product manager. This first is because it ticks a box, the second because you need to make meaningful change. [Listen at 04:45]
How Kate has learned to hire great product managers, and strategies for doing so that she helps her clients implement. [Listen at 07:30]
The role of emotional intelligence in product management and organizational design, and the key trait that indicates someone will be successful. (Listen from 12:00]
The Story of Pete – the team member we’ve all worked with who is technically excellent – but not so strong on the human skills. [Listen at 14:45]
How to identify and call out the specific issues when you get the feeling that something is off during the interview process. [Listen from 22:30]
What is the mindset you need for success, and what happens when someone doesn’t have it. [Listen from 28:00]
The diversity problem plaguing many organizations in tech and other industries; Kate and Melissa talk about how to get out of the trap of hiring the same person over and over again. [Listen from 29:40]
Hiring for senior and director level positions, and making sure you’re attracting a diverse array of applicants. [Listen from 43:45]
Resources Kate Leto KateLeto.com | Twitter | LinkedIn
Episode Transcript
Melissa Perri: Creating great products isn't just about product managers and their day-to-day interactions with developers. It's about how an organization supports products as a whole. The systems, the processes, and cultures in place that help companies deliver value to their customers. With the help of some boundary-pushing guests and inspiration from your most pressing product questions, we'll dive into this system from every angle and help you think like a great product leader. This is the Product Thinking Podcast. Here's your host, Melissa Perry.
Melissa Perri: Hello, everybody, and welcome to another week of the Product Thinking Podcast. Today, I am joined by Kate Leto, who is an organizational design coach specializing in product management, and especially product management careers. And I'm very excited about the topic we're going to be talking about today, which is how do you hire product managers?
In fact, Kate just wrote a book called Hiring Product Managers, pretty straightforward right there. But this is a question that I get a lot from organizations that I go into help or product leaders who are trying to build up their teams. What do you look for in hiring great product managers? And we're diving into the topic, really, of they call it soft skills, right?
Like, what are your leadership skills and how do you influence people? How do you bring everybody together to agree on things? And Kate's got lots of really great ideas around that. So I'm excited to dive in because we're all about hiring product managers. Hey, Kate, welcome to the podcast. It's exciting to have you here.
Kate Leto: Thanks, Melissa. I'm so happy to be here.
Melissa Perri: Yeah, and you're right now based in the UK, right?
Kate Leto: Yes. Yeah, just outside London.
Melissa Perri: That's very exciting.
Kate Leto: Yeah, freezing cold London right now, which is a little rare.
Melissa Perri: Yeah, we've got rainy weather down here, too. I just moved to the south and they told me that it would be warm and it's not. The lies. Yeah, it was all lies. But I'm excited that it will get warmer soon. I'm excited to have you on the podcast today. So you're a product management and design consultant and coach. What types of companies do you work with? What is that role? Can you tell us more about what you do and how you do it?
Kate Leto: Sure. So I work with companies really of all shapes and sizes. And I have been for the last 10 years as a consultant and coach. So the one thing that they all seem to have in common, though, is they want to change how they're thinking of or building and supporting products. So sometimes that means creating a brand new product management practice where there just wasn't one before, starting from scratch.
Other times it's kind of like a more medium or smaller level shift and change and helping teams work in a different way or helping their leaders work differently. But change somehow is always the goal. And that gives me really a pretty wide spectrum of companies to work with. So, for example, right now I'm working with a fintech startup out of South Africa that's looking to become more adaptive.
And I'm working with their leadership team on that. I'm also at the same time working with a global logistics corporation who are going through a massive product transformation. And I'm working with different leaders within that organization as well. So the kinds of companies I work with really varies.
It's just they're always trying to make some sort of healthy, progressive, good change in the ways that they're working.
Melissa Perri: And is there any type of company that you specifically work with, like different stages or different domains?
Kate Leto: No, there's really not. It does really go from a startup level, small to medium size organization. It could be from like 100 people up to global corporates with tens of thousands of people worldwide. And it's a variety of industries. So I love the variety actually. I think that is kind of one of the reasons why I have stayed being a consultant for so long and want to continue to do it. It's because I get to work with different levels, different phases, different industries. Yeah.
Melissa Perri: It's pretty cool. Yeah. But do you have a specific type of company you really like working with or is it just, no, I like them all?
Kate Leto: What I really look for is not kind of like industry or size or anything like that or a stage or phase of development. It's more of kind of the mindset of the people within the organization. So people with more of a growth mindset, they're looking to kind of learn and grow and change. I know it sounds kind of vague and broad but really it's those kinds of people and you can find them in different, so many different types of organizations and so many different sizes of organizations. But that's what I look for. It's kind of looking for the DNA behind the organization versus kind of their sector or size or stage.
Melissa Perri: Yeah, I think that makes sense. I see that too. There are certain people out there who want to do product transformations or hire product managers because it checks a box, right? It's just like, okay, that's the thing. And what you're talking about is more like who are the people actually want to change for the benefit of actually changing?
Kate Leto: Yeah, a lot of times they are just different leaders, different sizes of organizations, different types of organizations. They're basically told they're going through a product transformation, right? Or some kind of change initiative. And the response often is we've done this a million times before and what's different about this one?
And so there is a bit of like a kind of a jagged edge to a lot of the folks that are going through transformation programs. So I look for the people that are ready and willing and eager to go through the change and can see that it's an opportunity for them to grow themselves and also to help the people around them and build a better organization. It's a special mindset that I try to find when I'm looking for new clients.
Melissa Perri: How do you tell if somebody has that mindset or if they're just trying to check a box?
Kate Leto: Yeah, it's having a good conversation in that kind of situation. It's not really an interview type of setup, but it's getting to know really what is the change they're looking for and understanding why. What's their why? What's the why behind the change? And how have they tried to really kind of make that change happen already?
So right from there, you can get a good understanding if somebody's really bought into the idea of change, of doing things in a different way, or if they're just trying to tick the box. And talking to different people around the organization, as you probably know when you're working in a larger organization and let's say you're working with a kind of a big group of people, if you ask that question of what change you're trying to make and why, you'll probably get 10 different answers. So from that, you can pick up on kind of patterns on whether or not this organization is one that's really ready to do the change and create change and build products in a different way.
Think of organizing in a different way, whatever it might be, or if they're really just ticking the box.
Melissa Perri: Yeah, and I think figuring that out is so important for what you do because you really help people get the right product managers in there, and that seems like something that you're really focused on. You just wrote a book called Hiring Product Managers. This is a topic that I feel like I get questions on every single day from my product leaders or product managers.
Like what do I do in these interviews? So finding a place where product managers will thrive seems like the first thing to do to make sure that you're not just hiring in a bunch of people who can't succeed. So I love that. But let's talk a little bit about the book, Hiring Product Managers. Hard topic.
I find that everybody's got a different process for it. It feels like there's some standard metric on what does a product manager do. Everybody's got a different like a different way to judge them. So tell us about the book. Like how did you learn how to hire great product managers and what do you look for in hiring a great product manager?
Kate Leto: Yeah, so I've learned probably have a few different perspectives. One is I was a product manager for quite some time and I was a head of product. So I probably have about 15 or so years of hands-on product experience before I became a consultant. And as a consultant and working with companies that are going through change and maybe creating new product organizations or changing the way their teams are set up or something like that.
One of the first things that I find clients want to do is they want to hire, right? It's like a knee-jerk reaction. Oh, we're going to create change. We're going to do things differently. Let's find somebody with a different perspective or a fresh perspective or a different set of expertise. And that'll help us create a different kind of structure and all of this good stuff.
So it is like this knee-jerk reaction. Let's go hire some people. So needless to say, I've been involved in a lot of hiring conversations over the years. And that's the fact that I've not, I haven't been serving or acting as the hiring manager has kind of given me a different perspective of what hiring, when it works well, when it doesn't work well, and what kind of impact it really can have on an organization and how it can help an organization change.
But not simply by hiring more people, it's by thinking about the process behind it and how you get teens involved and how you think about things like even a job description, you know, how these different aspects of hiring kind of say a lot about your organization and how using hiring as an agent of change can really kind of alter, provide like a new perspective to your organization. So that's really what I've been focused on over the last few years. That's an interesting
Melissa Perri: One, too, where you're talking about, like, usually we just go out and hire a bunch of people. Oh, we're going to change. We're just going to hire a bunch of people. And today, actually, during our CPL Accelerator class, we were talking about work design and change. And somebody brought up a good point that said, well, sometimes, you know, organizations say that we need to go hire a product manager and we don't need a product manager. It might be something else. So I guess that's like, even where do we start? How does an organization know that they need a product manager specifically to hire?
Kate Leto: Yeah, that's a really good question. What I talk about in the book is when you're starting to think about hiring, I recommend this, a new tool called the role canvas. And it's something where, instead of, like, just jumping to a job description, you know, a lot of people will think, like, well, you've got approval for a new headcount.
Let's just go hire a new product manager. And what I try to encourage individuals and teams to do is to actually sit down and answer four really simple questions, well, seemingly simple questions on this role canvas. And the first is, like, what's the purpose of the role? So that's not just the job title, right?
That's not just product manager or a senior product manager or a junior product manager. It's really why does this role exist? What are they going to be working towards day in and day out? And then it asks you to kind of think about the accountabilities. What are the goals or the outcomes the role is going to be working towards?
And then it asks you to think about what are the human skills and what are the technical skills that will be essential to actually achieving the accountabilities and the purpose. And human skills are things like leadership, resilience, adaptability, emotional intelligence, self-awareness, things that we don't often think about when it comes to identifying a new role and the type of skills that are really necessary and essential. And then there's also the technical skills, which are things our product people know and love and talk about all the time, like our roadmaps and how to create MVPs and OKRs and all that.
Cool. Yeah, exactly. All the blogs, all the talks, everything. So by focusing on this kind of a role canvas and doing that with your team even in a workshop kind of setting, you can get a better understanding of not what the title is, but really what's the need that you have and how can you address that.
So it kind of changes the conversation from we need a product manager, here's a job description that I've copied and pasted together, and let's go do that, to let's really understand what the need is, what's the gap, and what's the purpose for the role. Yeah, I love
Melissa Perri: That. And I love how you did in the role canvas. You like separate out these traits besides just the purpose of why do you actually need a product manager. You're going into your technical and your human skills. And that to me has been the defining factor of so many product managers and so many leaders being successful as those human factors because we're in this profession where you have to communicate and work with all these people and deal with conflict, tell people you say like no you can't have that and it's like some finesse, right?
That's like a huge part of our job. So I want to talk more about this emotional intelligence aspect and these human skills that you're talking about. What do you look for in a product manager there that's really going to show that they're going to thrive?
Kate Leto: It may sound kind of hokey and a bit out of nowhere but I look for self-awareness in a product manager. Self-awareness is basically the ability to kind of know yourself and how your actions are impacting other people. Know your place in kind of your world, your community, your environment. And in a lot of ways it's kind of your moral compass, right?
Those types of skills are so essential to what we do as product people these days. And being able to work with those like really challenging stakeholders and being able to make some big decisions around what's really a priority for a product. What do we really need in there? Is that something that maybe I as a product manager am pushing for because I think it's a good idea or is it something the product actually needs or the organization actually needs?
So I look for somebody who knows themselves, knows themselves well enough to be able to say like maybe I'm doing this wrong. Maybe there's a different way of doing it. Maybe my opinion's not the right way to go and I should change my mind, change my opinion. Show some flexibility. So self-awareness is something I definitely look for in product people.
I also look for empathy because we need to be able to build these relationships with all sorts of stakeholders and all sorts of people. And the best way to do that is putting ourselves in their shoes and having that ability. So that's kind of another key skill. And then there's everything from like leadership skills to resilience skills.
There's all these things that are so, just really make up the core of being a really good product person.
Melissa Perri: Yeah, I like the resilience skill too. I see a lot of product managers get in their industry organizations, especially I'm sure the ones you deal with and I deal with, they're going through these transformations. Everything's not working wonderfully. People are going to say no to their ideas. Things are going to get shot down. I think it's hard sometimes to deal with coming against that wall all the time. But the best product managers that I see are the ones who can bounce back from that and be like, it's not me personally. It's my idea. It didn't work this time. Let's move on.
Kate Leto: Yeah, yeah. And learn from it. That's the makings of a great product person, I think.
Melissa Perri: Yeah, definitely. So in the book, you talk about this guy named Pete. And when I read about Pete's profile, I was like, oh my god, I know so many Peets. It's so funny. I'm going to now label everybody Pete when I start to know them. But I thought it was such a good representation. Like I'm reading about Pete and I'm going, oh yeah, I've seen that before.
And he's lacking the human skills, right? And you're talking about how do we find that in our product managers? How do we bring that back together? Because they just tested Pete on technical skills, which I see happen all the time. What are the things that you observe in an organization where you can tell you have a Pete?
Like, can you tell us about a time where you ran into a Pete and how did you realize that was the problem and not necessarily the technical skills?
Kate Leto: Yeah, for sure. So just for a little context for those who haven't read the book yet, but hopefully will soon, I tell a story of a fictional bank called New Star Bank. And Pete, New Star is going through like a massive product transformation. They're actually trying to create a product practice and a product function where there just wasn't one before.
And Pete is their first leadership hire and he's the new director of product at New Star Bank. And of course, well, this is all fictitious. This is based on so many real clients I've had over the years. And Pete reminded me, actually, especially a client that I had about a year and a half ago at another financial services organization where he really, really was very passionate about learning all of the latest tips and tricks in product management that are in our toolbox, right?
The latest things about MVPs and OKRs and how to do great A-B testing and multivariate testing or getting the most out of a customer interview and the methods behind that, how to do discovery and design. He was on it all. He was a great guy, a very likable guy. He had really kind of a great reputation around the organization as somebody who just always delivered, right?
Everything was done on time, on scope, on budget. And that is really kind of, that was the impetus for my thinking about Pete. But what this guy, my client from about a year and a half ago, what he didn't have was the ability to kind of grow into more of a leadership role. And when he was promoted to become a director, he really did kind of fall flat on his face because he had to lead a group of a couple of different teams of product people and getting some new things developed, prototype tested and things like that.
And it just didn't work because he was trying to really kind of bring along, upskill everybody on these technical skills without really keeping in mind that he had to influence them. He had to be a leader to the group. He had to form relationships with them and show empathy and not just micromanage.
So a lot of that went into Pete. And when I started working with this client of mine about a year and a half ago, he was, the cool thing about him was he was very open to trying to understand where things weren't working, which human skills. Maybe did he need to do a little bit of development on, a little bit of focus and work on.
And we worked together really well for about a year and things changed for him. He grew a lot. He learned a lot. He learned how to build relationships and show empathy and all of these great things. So that was the impetus of Pete. Little bits of Pete I think live in all of us in many ways because we all tend to fall back on our technical skills and the things we know and things we're comfortable with.
But we all do have the opportunity to really kind of grow the human skill sides as well.
Melissa Perri: How much of that do you think is learnable too? I personally was not very emotionally intelligent when I was younger. I know that for a fact. I will admit that. I used to bust in the room and be like, it's my way or the highway and just think everybody was dumb or at least act that way. It took me a while and I feel like consulting was the thing that got me into being more emotionally intelligent because I see people's reactions be like, oh, that's not working. My whole job is to influence. So I felt like I'm like, okay, that's how I grew the muscle. But how do people grow that muscle inside a company or wherever their job is?
Kate Leto: It is possible to do because I've done it as well and continue to work on it all the time. So it's learning a new habit in many ways. So it's akin to kind of identifying something or a habit that you're not happy with and unlearning it and replacing it with this new habit, this new behavior, kind of this new skill and repeating it again and again and again until kind of the emotional centers of your brain pick up this new behavior, this new practice behavior that you're repeating over and over and over again.
So it's totally feasible. It's totally possible to grow these types of skills. It's just it takes a lot of dedication and commitment. And, you know, it's great if you have a coach that you can work with. Of course, that helps a lot because they can help you become more aware of the areas that you might want to grow in.
They can help you put together kind of an action plan, help you identify these habits, all of that cool stuff. But that's not available to everyone. So what I often recommend as well is peer coaching. So kind of buddying up with somebody that maybe you don't work right next to but somebody that knows you and you know them and you're comfortable sharing, you know, things around human skills that you'd like to improve on and how you're going to try to do that to help each other out.
So I've seen a lot of really cool things happening with peer coaching. Also, you can start to do this and practice it on your own. I have on my website a number of different tools that I've developed to help product people or anybody really get a better understanding of how balanced their human skills and technical skills are now and what changes might they want to make and kind of what's that first small step you can take to make that change.
And also, you know, another tool to kind of help you understand which in terms of things like self-awareness and resilience and empathy and all these things that are really important to product people. How are you doing on those? Where are you on kind of a scale of one to ten? And how again can you start to implement some small steps to change those behaviors?
So it's totally feasible to do on your own. It's totally great to do it with a buddy, a peer in peer coaching. And if you have access to a coach, then that's great as well. But it's completely feasible. It just takes time. It's a different part of your brain to retrain than learning the technical skills.
So it's just going to take a bit more dedication. Yeah,
Melissa Perri: That sounds good. I think I started to get better at it when I started to make it a goal of mine. Like I was mad that nobody was listening to me and nobody was using my stuff. And I was like, well, brute force is not going to work. So now what do I do to start to change it? But everybody was mad at me and being like, you've got a team player and stuff.
And I was like, well, that's not going to get my goal, which was to get people to work better together. I kind of looked at it as little experiments. I was like, well, if I start listening more, right? Like what you're saying with the small steps, it sounds to me like kata experiments almost. And that's how
Kate Leto: My brain works. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it really is. A lot of kind of changing these behaviors and building your human skills is kind of the same methodology in some ways as we build our products, right? Break things down into small digestible pieces. What's the first thing you can do to actually create like an experiment and to see what the outcome is. And from that, how can you iterate? How can you continue to grow? So it's a lot of same same in methodology. It's just applying it to a different space. Yeah, I really like that.
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Melissa Perri: The one thing I have a hard time too when I'm assessing somebody's emotional intelligence and I do this in interviews all the time. Like I was interviewing this candidate for a CPO role last year and he just talked over me the entire time and I was like, well, can I, I need to like get my question in and I immediately was like, okay, well, this is a point blank. I can say that they're not hitting my human factor side of my like CPO scorecard.
This person does not understand how to have a dialogue with a peer or how to explain things. They're just trying to like talk, talk, talk. And I knew it wouldn't work with my exec team. So I was like, okay, that's clear cut. But sometimes I'm interviewing people and I'm like, yeah, it's just something off.
They're not connecting. There's something there. And in the book you talk about really pinpointing those things and calling out what doesn't feel right so that we're making sure that it's not like a bias that you talk about. And it's more of something that is concrete that's not working. How do you call those things out?
Do you have any tips on like what do you do in those situations? How do you like pinpoint those little nuances?
Kate Leto: Yeah, it's tricky. So in the book I talk a lot about behavior-based interviewing. So it's a different interviewing technique in which you focus on some of these behaviors, right? And how maybe they behave in a past work situation and how that behavior might impact others around them. And if they don't change, how that might kind of carry through to work working with you in your new organization.
So with behavior-based interview questions, it really is kind of focusing on competencies like emotional intelligence, self-awareness, resilience, adaptability, the ability to listen, active listening is another thing that you can really kind of test on. Conflict resolution, how does somebody deal with conflict is something else that you can really focus on. And the idea is to ask some pretty simple, basic questions.
Again, they seem really basic but a question that might even help you understand how somebody does react to conflict. So you ask them, how did you react when somebody disagreed with you? Really easy, right? And the kind of scenario that happens to you probably about five times a day. But asking somebody in an interview setting what their reaction was gives you kind of an interesting way to really kind of read their behavior.
By asking these questions, you can find out a bit more about how they behaved in the past and how they may behave going forward to help you pick up on these kind of weird little things and try to make something as intangible as like active listening or conflict resolution more tangible. So in doing that, a lot of the onus really on making something like that work is on you, the interviewer, right? Because you need to really...
Again, you could use some of your product management skills here in interviewing. You need to listen to the narrative that the candidate's sharing with you on whatever has happened in the past or what this situation was like. And really kind of probe on it and nudge and follow up until you can make something that seems intangible real.
So for example, with conflict resolution, get to the point where you understand how does this person feel about conflict? Like, do they engage or do they walk away? If they do engage, do they want to make it so that everybody feels good about what's happened and there's a win-win situation or do they want there to be a winner or loser?
So it's another interview skill to learn and to really hone. But you can learn a lot about these different idiosyncrasies that you might be picking up on by just asking some really basic questions. Yeah, that makes sense.
Melissa Perri: I like that. I like looking for trends in the different stories. One of the ones that comes up a lot when I interview chief product officers, especially if they're going to work with a founder, is asking them how they got along with their CEO or head of sales or somebody before. You can sense this little tension if they didn't get along where they're like, well, they just didn't understand what I did.
And you're like, well, did you explain what you did or what did you do through that? And at that level of that, at that level of a chief product officer, if you can't get your CEO on your side, that's not good. That's a skill set we look for. You need to be able to get your CEO on your side. Now, if you're a product manager or a junior product manager or a director of product, I'm not expecting you to influence the board.
I'm not expecting you to influence the CEO. But it's those little hesitations I feel like that crop up over and over again. You're like, oh, they didn't really have a good relationship with them.
Kate Leto: Yeah, there are patterns you pick up on and also like the body language, like you're saying. Yeah, you can see with some of the questions you ask, you see people maybe their shoulders tense up a little bit or they get a little fidgety or you lose eye contact with them. It's things like that. It's signal to pick up on. Yeah,
Melissa Perri: Definitely those little fidgets. I like that. I know I do that. Yeah, it's telling. But I like that past behavior questions because I think that is a practice. I don't hear so many people do behavioral interview questions for product managers, but the way that they work with the team, how they think about that, I think that has so much to do with the success of product managers.
And the thing I was nodding along to, I felt like my neck was getting sprained when I was nodding along to your book with all these human factor pieces. It's unfortunately the thing that I see people lose their job or have to move on for the most. It's very rarely can I build an MVP and very rarely do I know how to write a user persona.
And I find all those things are teachable. You can train somebody in those. But it's this human factors part and this product sense. I think of, do you have the mindset for creating and standardizing and scaling a single product? And then also, can you work with everybody to get that done? It's the part that people are missing.
Kate Leto: Totally. An example I use often is even a roadmap, right? Building a roadmap. So we all have kind of our favorite template or tools or a way of setting it up or communicating. Those are different things we read about in our blogs and our talks and all of that great product content. But it's really the ability to actually work with stakeholders and influence stakeholders to bring them along with the vision you might have with this roadmap and putting it together or the leadership skills with your team to bring them along with what you have in mind with the roadmap or conflict resolution skills.
Because there's always conflict when it comes to putting together a roadmap. So we just need to keep in mind that our fundamental aspects of a product person being a roadmap or interviewing customers or whatever it might be, or even doing design sprints and discovery work, the technique and the tools, it's just part of it. You got to have the human skills as well to actually make it real.
Yeah, that makes sense.
Melissa Perri: The roadmaps are a communication tool, right? I think that's the key part of it.
Kate Leto: Yeah, totally, right? And it's all these tools that we use. They're not the panacea of everything. They're not going to solve all your problems. It's really what you do around those tools, how they aid you. And that's where I think the communication is key.
Melissa Perri: So one of the questions I think when we get into hiring is how do we increase diversity of the people we do hire? And that's a huge problem for tech companies, as you and I both know. Yeah, absolutely. And it's something I see. So many companies hire the same person over and over and over again, and that's not great. We get that group think. We get people who are all approaching problems in the same way and not getting innovative solutions. So what do you recommend to make sure that we're increasing diversity? How do you help people hire for that?
Kate Leto: Yeah, it's such a big problem that we have in our industry, you're right. So what I try to encourage companies is to think as they're hiring that they're putting together a jigsaw puzzle. And when you put together a jigsaw puzzle you don't want a stack of the same piece. You want actually pieces that fit together, that complement each other.
So instead of really going down a line of focusing on cultural fit, I try to encourage people to think about things a bit differently. Like an idea they call this idea of creating a jigsaw puzzle, culture contributions that you're looking for. Or at Spotify they call it culture ads. Adobe calls it culture compliments.
Looking for pieces to fill in the gaps and to complete the puzzles versus just adding another stack, another piece of the stack. So I try to encourage folks to, number one, look outside, understand where they are. Understand what are the values of the organization, which are essential to really kind of the type of culture they're creating, but to not try to just replicate that culture, but to try to fill in the missing pieces.
Melissa Perri: Yeah, I think that makes sense. I feel like I get stuck with organizations and I really want to hear your perspective on this. When I try to convince them with culture ads, it just feels so uncomfortable sometimes with people, right? Bringing them on. And I have a lot of CEOs who are like, oh no, we just want everybody to get along and work the same way. Is it too much to level them up or have them learn our way of working? How do you break through that kind of thinking?
Kate Leto: Yeah, it takes a lot of time. It's not easy. You're totally right. Just kind of like everything else we do, it's a little bit of experimentation. And with hiring, of course, you can only experiment to a certain point. And then you have to take the risk. You have to take a jump and you have to encourage people to try something different.
Because, of course, if they're looking for a change, then they got to live up to that and stand up to that and actually try to make the change and introduce more diversity. So in some organizations, it starts to happen quite naturally, because they learn about or they begin to understand that there needs to be more diversity in their product teams to help produce a more diverse product for a diverse customer. So that kind of message seems to be picked up on rather easily, right?
But in organizations where they kind of just feel like everything is going well and we get our customer and all of that, it's a challenge. It's an ongoing conversation. And I usually try to encourage, let's make that first hire that we feel slightly uncomfortable with. And let's stand behind it and support it and see how it goes.
And I'd say probably nine times out of ten, it works out. There's always an opportunity it won't, but often it does.
Melissa Perri: Yeah, I like that. It's funny. I had this experience. One of the first companies I worked with, it was an e-commerce company. And I talked about it all the time. But we had 98% of our customers were women. And our entire leadership team were men. Our head of product was a man. I was the only woman on the product team.
And I remember having this debate with my head of product. I was getting really upset and this is ultimately why I left because I was building all the internal tools. And I wanted to build the stuff on the front end. I wanted to build the things that all our users got to interact with. And somebody that I was mentoring as a product manager was given that opportunity instead.
And I was like, that's what I want to do. And it got to this point where we started to ship these features that our customers really didn't want on the front end either. And I remember there was this one moment where leadership decided that we were going to, this is when Facebook was all viral. We were going to ship this new feature where anything you bought on the site would post to your Facebook feed.
And now you sound like a little horrified. I was like, I do not want people knowing what I'm buying on the site. And we had some personal stuff on the site. Some of it was closed but other stuff you don't want people knowing you were buying. And I was like, this sounds like a really bad idea. And they're like, no, no, no.
That's how we'll go viral. That's how we'll go viral. And they launched it and I think we were answering customer service calls for the next 96 hours straight. It was people were so mad. But I believe that having more diversity and being a little bit more like your customers in those points too. Having people who can empathize with them is important to running into issues like that.
But so many companies are just like, no, no, no. It's okay. We can empathize. Right? Yeah. It's not like we don't have to be like our customers. We can just empathize with them. But sometimes it's hard to get that many diversity of opinions just through empathy. It's hard to understand how those people just through empathizing from a second degree.
Kate Leto: Yeah. Absolutely. I mean, it's something that especially depending on the customer and the audience that you can only go so far. Right? And understanding or thinking you understand your persona really well and you are the voice of the customer and all of that. That only gets you so far. So I think having, building diversity within your product teams and your organizations is just a no-brainer.
There's a lot of research out there that shows that organizations that are more diverse actually have better results in the market. Better rates of performance. Better turnover. Better profit. It's something that makes a lot of sense. It's just sometimes it is hard to convince the leaders within that this is the right way to go.
Which in my mind then makes me wonder what's actually going on with the leadership? How can we work with them in a different way to think about this differently?
Melissa Perri: Yeah. And I think that's really important. One of the things that I do see a lot and especially when hiring product leaders or in these organizations like banks or healthcare where it's a very specialized area. You need a lot of domain knowledge on it. As we get into these debates about subject matter experts versus product managers or do I need a product manager that is a subject matter expert?
And I think that gets into your point in their book where you talk about diversity of experiences. So how do you know whether you need a subject matter expert or a product manager? What do you kind of advise people on when they're building that roll card to look at?
Kate Leto: Yeah, I tend to encourage people to think again more about kind of the human skills aspect that's essential to the work and being able to do things like be a great leader or have really good influencing skills or being resilient and adaptive and emotional intelligence and all that stuff. I think that subject matter expertise is great but I don't feel that's as much of a nice to have or as much of a must have as a nice to have. I feel like it's something that people can learn.
I guess I even use myself as an example and you could probably point to a lot of similar situations as a consultant. We can shop and change industries and organizations pretty easily. I can learn about a new industry or the way health care is working versus maybe fintech. I can learn that pretty easily but the thing that allows me to do that are these human skills.
So while I think subject matter expertise is definitely something to keep in mind and to look for, I would probably rather hire somebody who has strong core human skills over that kind of bang on subject matter expertise. Yeah, I agree.
Melissa Perri: I try to explain that to leaders too when I'm hiring that you're going to want somebody who is a product thinker. Like somebody who gets a lot of experience in product management and you can usually apply that to so many different domains. I went to work with an oil and gas company. I don't know anything about that.
They're building a data platform and I'm like I know how to build a data platform. I'm not going to be able to tell you exactly what all the tools are that they want to do with that data until I interview them but I know how to build a data platform very easily and what most of those components should be. I feel like that's a skill set.
We only look at these data experts or like do you understand all the codes that need to go into like prescribing a prescription for somebody so it can talk to CBS and that is a skill but I don't find that as a product skill and I feel like we get those confused a lot in many industries.
Kate Leto: Yeah, no, I think you're totally right.
Melissa Perri: Yeah, I feel like I'm on board with you. I was like I have learned so much about healthcare and banking in the last couple years that I feel like I could go work for either one of those companies but I knew nothing about that. I worked in e-commerce before. Then I went to like work at SEO Marketplace.
That was a data platform that was very similar to what that oil and gas company was doing and it transferred industries but I didn't need to be an expert. You know, on that industry I just needed to be able to learn. But one thing that I look for and maybe it's the culture add pieces that we started to talk about was really looking at what is the rest of that team's expertise and if you have a million subject matter experts like you certainly don't need another subject matter expert.
Kate Leto: Absolutely. I mean, I was coming to a colleague about this earlier today. Putting together a team is again kind of like putting together that jigsaw puzzle, right? You don't need everyone to have the exact same skills. You want to have something that fits together and complements each other and does add on.
So I remember a long time ago now, I worked at Moo.com. You know, that was a print on demand. I had big business cards. Yeah, I did too. I still do. Happy to say. But it's like I knew nothing about the print industry. Absolutely nothing. I came to Moo from working at Yahoo where I was working on local search.
So, but that didn't stop me. It was something I was curious about and I got to learn about. And that helped me as I learned it did help me like know the product better and know its limitations and constraints. But by no means did it stop me from doing the job.
Melissa Perri: Yeah, I think that's incredibly important. It's just as a product manager you should be able to learn and I think that's a skill that we need to look for in our product managers as well.
Kate Leto: Yeah, absolutely. Learner's mindset, growth mindset, all hugely
Melissa Perri: Important. Cool. Awesome. One issue I hear from product managers all the time and I'm curious, like how you work with leadership on this is they have such a hard time going from senior product manager to that first director role. I've heard maybe a hundred cases of this in the last two months, people asking questions about it.
It's like everybody gets stuck there. And I had a friend who was working for a really large company who was basically playing that director role but he didn't have any direct reports, but he was leading multiple teams across the organization and they said we're going to hire a director into that position after his boss left. And he went up for it and he didn't get it.
Which was interesting because they actually told him: no, you're qualified to be a director, but we're going to hire somebody else out from outside. And I said: well, at least are they going to put you into the director position and give you the title bump that you deserve? And they were like: no, you have to wait like a whole, another year and a half to get that position and that title bump.
And I'm like this is ridiculous. Like how is he supposed to get the title to be able to be a director and you won't hire him as a director, right? Even though he's proving that you can do that. Yeah.
Kate Leto: That's crazy. It's one of those situations where I remember when I first started in product I really wanted to get into it but I couldn't get the job because I didn't have any product
Melissa Perri: Experience. Yep, exactly. It's just one of those ridiculous cycles and loops. Yeah. So what can we do as like hiring managers to see if somebody still has the capabilities and the skills but you know if we ask them what's your past experience in this they might not be able to say like hey I've been a director before I've had all the opportunities in the world to create a very robust product strategy but how do we tell if they actually do have the capabilities to do that? Yeah.
Kate Leto: I think a lot of it again going back to the idea of thinking about the role before you name it or before you hire. It is really good because you're thinking kind of blankly right about what do you actually need this role to do and what are the skills, both human and technical, are going to be essential to making this role work. And then it's evaluating people based on those skills.
So a lot of times I think in director level roles again, we're focusing on that technical side and our job descriptions and I don't know what kind of role scope was provided to your friend, but I bet you it was very focused on a lot of things that the leaders in the organization felt. You know, a director must have this kind of experience and it's a tick box again versus really getting an understanding of a more comprehensive look of what human skills are also really important and overall kind of what capabilities is this role going to? What does somebody really need for this role?
So I think a lot of it goes back to kind of we look at pedigree you know where somebody went to school and what their background is and what specific type of experience they have, sometimes even like what degree they had it and for their bachelor's or graduate school instead of really like looking at a more comprehensive picture of what do we really need in this role and can we. Through our hiring process, make sure that whoever we're bringing in aligns to this complete picture versus just a segment of it? Yeah, if you're starting to hire, we got these positions open.
We got to fill them sounds like you start with the role canvas. What do you do next? Like how does anybody get started trying to fill this position correctly? Yeah, so starting with the role canvas is great, and the role canvas, like so many of the other canvases that we use in our world, is it's an internet tool and it's a communication tool.
So it's something that teams work with off and on while they're trying to figure out what this job really is. Eventually it becomes a job description and it's something that we communicate out. And then I think it's really interesting to look at the CBs that are coming in based on your role canvas. So in job descriptions, we quite often see that organizations are using words that might misconstrue, might throw people off and might turn people off.
A lot of research around specific words like competition or even sometimes best practices, these different kind of more focused wording, can turn some people off to even applying for a job. A lot of times it will turn women off and maybe turn men on to applying to a certain role in a certain job description. So I think after you put your job description out there, it's up to you to really see what kind of candidates are coming in right.
And look at those CBs. It's really interesting to see, like are you getting a lot of guys applying? Are there women applying? Are there people of different kinds of backgrounds applying, or are you getting a lot of, again a lot of the same, a lot of same same that you then bring in for interviews? So I think that's another kind of stop and reflection point to see how is your job description really representing what you're looking for and what are the candidates like, who are responding?
And then you can go back and change that. What I talk about in the book is hiring is a cyclical process, just like everything else we do in product, you know it's. Everybody tries to think of hiring as a linear thing, whereas I go from you know job description to maybe looking at CBs and then doing a call with somebody for a screening interview and going from there all the way to the offer is made and a kind of a five step linear process and it's just not like that.
We need to realize that within any hiring process there's going to be some loops, learning loops along the way, and it's great to have these kind of inflection and reflection points where the team can come together and look at things like: what are the CVs like that are coming in? Do we need to go back and change our job description? And then, what kind of interview questions do we want to ask?
How can we kind of come together around those to make sure that we're not only focusing on the technical skills and maybe and how somebody's product performs, but really what are the human skills like as well? So it's hard to say specifically: follow these five steps and you'll have a great hire, but instead I say, try to remember that the concept of continuous improvement applies to hiring as well and build in space or reflection and change and iteration as you go along.
Melissa Perri: Well that's great thank you so much for joining us Kate where can people find you and learn more about your book and your consulting
Kate Leto: Yes so you can find me at my website which is KateLedo.com You can find me on Twitter which is at KateLedo I'm on LinkedIn of course so yeah please get in touch
Melissa Perri: Great thanks for coming
Kate Leto: Thanks Melissa
