Product #84
Hiring Product Managers, AI & Product Innovation and More
Hiring Product Managers · Kate Leto · 2022
Key Insight: Human skills are just as important as technical skills in product management.
It takes a special set of skills to continually experiment in times of stress and pressure and it requires a unique type of leadership and culture to empower teams to do that.
Product managers need both Technical Skills and Human Skills, achieving a balance of both is important. Technical skills represent what a product person does (during ideation, creation, delivery and iteration). If you prioritise technical skills too much, you’ll end up with a lack of human skills in the practice.
A job description provides great insight into how a company really thinks about a position. Design it well, and it will help build a great team.
Emotional Intelligence: ability to recognise, understand and manage your own emotions and ability o recognise, understand and influence the emotions of others
The four key dimensions of emotional intelligence (EQ) as defined by Goleman are:
Self-awareness - the ability to understand our own emotions and their origins, which enhances intuition and decision-making
Self-management - the capacity to handle both negative emotions and harness positive ones
Social awareness - the skill to navigate relationships while understanding others' emotional states and needs;
Relationship management - the ability to cultivate mutually beneficial relationships with others.
Consider a cross-functional role creation workshop. Build a role canvas as a group, you can translate it into a job description afterwards. Get agreement on…
Purpose: Why does the role exist?
Accountabilities: What are the goals or outcomes the tole will be working toward? - list the known goals or outcomes
Human skills: E.g: Leadership, conflict resolution, influence, adaptability
Technical skills: E.g: Roadmaps, design sprints, product vision statement, JTBD, OKRs
In interviews, behaviour-based questions are essential as they reveal not just accomplishments, but the behaviours, intentions, and impact behind them. When conducting these interviews, focus on questions that relate to emotional intelligence while carefully listening to identify the candidate's underlying motivations.
The hiring process you develop will have far-reaching effects on your team composition, work methods, product quality, and organisational culture. This creates a powerful chain reaction: from individuals to teams to the entire organisation.
When building your team, avoid hiring for cultural fit alone. Instead, embrace diversity in all its forms. This includes both inherent diversity (such as gender, ethnicity, and sexual orientation) and acquired diversity (like varied experiences and perspectives). Think of your team as a puzzle rather than a stack - each piece should be unique but fit together cohesively.
While candidates should align with company values, they should also bring their own cultural contributions. During interviews, assess whether they will challenge existing processes, bring fresh energy, and offer new insights. Always document your reasoning, whether it's based on their responses, body language, or other observations.
Treat your hiring process as a continuous improvement cycle. Regularly review and iterate on each stage of your hiring pipeline, gathering both qualitative and quantitative insights. Hold retrospectives with your team to discuss what's working and what isn't, and always conduct a post-hire reflection to learn from each recruitment experience.
Quick Links
How to split user stories · Article
Why there’s always more to any piece of work than you think · Article
7 traps that demote product manager to backlog manager · Article
10 Principles of empowered teams · Article
Artificial Intelligence, Scientific Discovery and Product Innovation
Aidan Toner-Rodgers (View Paper → )
AI-assisted researchers discover 44% more materials, resulting in a 39% increase in patent filings and a 17% rise in downstream product innovation. These compounds possess more novel chemical structures and lead to more radical inventions.
However, the technology has strikingly disparate effects across the productivity distribution: while the bottom third of scientists see little benefit, the output of top researchers nearly doubles.
Investigating the mechanisms behind these results, I show that AI automates 57% of "idea-generation" tasks, reallocating researchers to the new task of evaluating model-produced candidate materials. Top scientists leverage their domain knowledge to prioritize promising AI suggestions, while others waste significant resources testing false positives.
Together, these findings demonstrate the potential of AI-augmented research and highlight the complementarity between algorithms and expertise in the innovative process.
Survey evidence reveals that these gains come at a cost, however, as 82% of scientists report reduced satisfaction with their work due to decreased creativity and skill underutilization.
Thoughts:
To work successfully with AI we’ll need to get better at judgment and evaluation.
High-performing colleagues are going to become even more important when coupled with AI
AI might help us tackle bottlenecks in ideation and discovery, particularly in exploring new product lines or entering uncharted markets.
If replacing parts of your job with AI - make sure what’s left is meaningful.
Book Highlights
I never seem to come across anyone who identifies a bad decision where they got lucky with the result, or a well-reasoned decision that didn’t pan out. We link results with decisions even though it is easy to point out indisputable examples where the relationship between decisions and results isn’t so perfectly correlated. Annie Duke · Thinking in Bets
You'll always end your week by validating your potential solution with real users and customers.
Marty Cagan · Inspired
The severity of the discomfort may be relatively minor—perhaps her fear is below the perceptibility of consciousness—but that’s exactly the point. Our life is filled with tiny stressors and we’re usually unaware of our habitual reactions to these nagging issues.
Nir Eyal · Hooked
But one of the coolest things about using a story map is that it gives you and other collaborators a space to think through alternatives and to find a way to get a great outcome in the time that you have.
Jeff Patton · User Story Mapping
Quotes & Tweets
I have never seen ordinary effort lead to extraordinary results. Alexandr Wang
Theorising is not nearly as effective as trying. Charles F. Kettering