Inbound marketing and recruiting are all good.đđ
But when you close a deal or candidate with outbound, it’s extremely exhilarating and inspiring. đ€©đȘ
Outbound works. You just have to make it about âthemâ and not about âyouâ.
Remember, if you don’t reach out and ask, the answer is “No” anyways! đ€·ââïž
We recently hired Sales executives at Avoma. One of the reasons we hired them vs other candidates – they demonstrated that they were better writers.
Thatâs our new hiring criteria when there are multiple options – hire a better writer. đ
It doesnât matter if that position is for sales, marketing, design, and even programming.
Better writing suggests that they have clarity in their thinking.
It means they can communicate effectively so others can understand it easily.
Which means there is less back and forth and faster collaboration. âĄïž
And that’s a secret sauce to achieve more with less.
In the previous post, I shared one of the hiring mistakes we did at Avoma that we hired for skills and not for passion.
But the question is still unanswered, how do you hire for passion in early-stage startups?
If I want to hire for passion in the future, I’ll ask these two questions:
1. What are your passions? (So clichĂ©d đ)
The goal is not to understand “what” their passion is, but “how” they talk about it.
Their passion could be about literature, painting, sports, etc. and not necessarily about early-stage startups.
But you can judge how passionately they talk about their passion, how deep they go, how do they find time to work on their passion, etc.
2. Do you have any side hustles?
The goal is to understand if they have the ambition to turn their passion into an additional income source.
It indicates their resourcefulness and creativity.
And that’s why they might have a higher chance of being more successful and instrumental in early-stage startups.
Do you agree? Is there anything that you would consider?
A friend of mine recently joined a big company as a Sr. Product Manager after heading the product at an early stage startup. He asked me how should he go about joining a big company, which will be very different in culture, pace, processes, and expectations perspective compared to his early stage startup.
I was surprised he asked me that question as he is an experienced product manager himself with 5+ years of relevant product management experience under his belt. In any case, I shared my thoughts with him and then thought I should expand it more and share it with the larger audience so that all newly hired product managers, irrespective of their position, may find this useful too.
Here are few tips (mostly in the order of its priority) on what you should do in your first 30 to 90 days as a newly hired product management professional in your new company â
First and foremost, you need to be excited about joining this new company and the new possibilities. Youâre going to meet new people, work on new products, and solve new problems. So bring your excitement to the office every day. There will be a lot of information overload and at the same time a lack of clarity in the early days. So unless youâre excited and motivated to come to the office every day, it will be hard to navigate through this haziness.
Also, your colleagues will notice your excitement and enthusiasm. They will understand you are there because youâre interested in the problem theyâre solving and want to make a difference and not just to earn yet another paycheck.
Your understanding of what the company is doing and what is their vision will be limited based on just interview conversations with them. So you need to dig deeper and make sure you truly understand their vision and strategy.
Talk to the CEO or VP of Product and understand the vision and strategy at the company level. Also, talk to your manager and peers to understand the vision and strategy at your product level.
Make sure youâre able to connect the dots between your productâs vision and strategy to the companyâs vision and strategy. If youâre not able to connect the dots, then discuss in detail with your manager or VP of Product to explain how your product aligns with the companyâs vision. That clarity in alignment is absolutely crucial to make sure you will be spending time on the important and required things.
Make sure to meet every single person from your product development teamââânot just the leads or managers, but every single person.
Identify which other products your product is dependent on. Accordingly, meet other product managers and engineering leaders of those products as well.
The success of a product is not only dependent on the product builders (Development, Design, etc.), but also on the business functions of the product too. So meet with all key cross-functional leaders likeâââMarketing, Sales, Finance, etc.
The common theme in these meetings should beâââintroduce yourself, but more importantly, learn about them. When did they join the company, what do they do now, what do they enjoy most, what do they hate most, what do they expect from your product team and specific from you, is there anything you can help them in the short-term, etc.?
Take good notes. Everything will be new to youâââpeople, products, processes, acronyms, etc. So take good notes when youâre meeting people 1:1. It will come handy in future as you start executing.
It would also exhibit your disciplined and detail-oriented execution approach to your colleagues.
Donât treat 1:1 meetings as a one-time checklist item. As they say, itâs a people business. Continue to hang out with your teammates at lunch, coffee, or any casual occasions and build the relationships. It will be a lot easier to get things done from people when youâve good relationship with them.
But make sure you donât abuse your relationship. Be authentic. Everyone is smart. They can smell your fake or aggressive tactics. It takes months to build a good relationship, but it would take minutes to destroy it.
While talking with people, learn how do they work â
This will help you understand whatâs the true culture of the company. Culture is not whatâs written on the âAbout Usâ page of the corporate website or some posters hung up on the office walls.
Once you understand the cultureâââdecide what you want to mend and when do you want to bend. As a newbie, you will find a lot of things different, inefficient, and broken. But resist the urge to fix everything.
First, try to understand the context and history of why certain decisions were made in a certain way. Accordingly, decide what you absolutely need to mend based on your product goals and vision. Sometimes, some battles are not worth fighting, at least in the early days of your career, so just learn to bend during those situations.
Based on what kind of product youâll be managingâââa consumer product or a B2B/Enterprise solution, there will be a different level of easiness to access and play with your product. In either case, setup a demo of your productâand be a power user.
Observe everythingâââfriction points, delightful experiences, wow moments, bugs, lack of documentation, etc. Make notes of these observations and discuss with your design and engineering leads about shortcomings and understand if this is something already known to them, and if it is on their roadmap or is it something by design a particular thing was done in a particular way.
Your goal is to not fix everything. Itâs to understand your product in and outâââwhat are its strengths and weaknesses, the reason why itâs designed and engineered that way, etc.
Once you become a power user of your product, itâs time to understand the mechanics of your product. Meet with the engineering leaders and architects to understand the basic building blocks of your product â
At the end of this exercise, you should be able to draw a high-level architecture on a whiteboard.
While understanding the past and current mechanics of a product is a great thing, it will be equally important to understand what will be its future. Make sure you get some inputs on â
Get access to your analytics system and understand the usage of your product. Understand which metrics are most crucial that defines the success of a product. Donât just look at the numbers, but ask your manager âwhyâ certain metrics are they way it is. It will help you understand how your customers behave.
If there are certain insights you want to know and if those are not available, then discuss it with your manager and see if can you add it. It will accelerate your learning of the analytics and reporting system inside your company.
Numbers will tell you âwhatâ is happeningâââlike which product is growing, or which feature is not working. But it will not tell you âwhyâ is it happeningâââwhy certain functionality took off or why no one is using a certain feature.
The best way to learn these things is to get in front of the customers or users. You can be a silent listener on meetings scheduled by other colleagues, attend any usability research interviews, listen to customer support calls or read customer support emails/chats. Your goal should be to understand why certain customers are happy vs some are frustrated.
Once you understand whatâs working well and whatâs not and why it is so, look for any low-hanging fruit that can provide high value. Ship and deliver the end to end functionality and announce it to the customers who needed it. Make sure to measure the impact of that functionality and report it to management.
By shipping and delivering a functionality end to endâââhowever small it isâââeven a bug, you will be exposed to a lot of processes (security reviews, tech support trainings, etc.) and systems (infrastructure, monitoring, etc.) in the company that are required to ship any feature or a product. This will be a much faster way to learn things than reading hundreds of documents.
Once you start shipping some features or new product releases, youâll feel the momentum of day-to-day execution. But make sure youâre not just spending time on checking off the product backlog items. You need to achieve important goals too and show that youâve moved the needle.
At the beginning of your joining, ask your manager whatâre her expectations from you. What 1 or 2 goals you should achieve by the end of 90-days and what should be its success criteria? And then make sure you focus on these 1 or 2 goals and do your best to achieve those. Ideally, you should aim to exceed these, but since there is a lot going on, simply achieving those would also be great. In general, having a goal-driven mindset is more important than simply getting things done.
Once you learn how your company works, what are the top sources of inputs for feature requests, what is valued moreâââvision or customer requests, etc., now itâs time to define your own frameworks for execution.
These are frameworks for â
The more youâll have clarity and disciplined approach in handling these things, the more effective you will be in your execution. Youâll be in a driverâs seat rather than just getting driven by everybody.
By this time, you should have a good understanding of your productâââwhat problems it solves, who has these problems, how does it solve it, how well it solves it, etc.
Now itâs time to start looking outward and learn â
Subscribe to some of the newsletters, start following few blogs, take any online courses, or buy books and learn as much as you can about your industry and itâs future. You will be able to provide a lot better recommendations in overall product strategy and future roadmap.
Product managers without a point of view will be just project managersâââwho will get things done that have been told by the upper management. But if you truly want to drive a product, then you have to have some point of view, unique insight, and some foresight about the market shift and next trends.
90-days is a good period to learn about the market you serve, your productâs strengths and weaknesses, competitive landscape, technology trends, etc. Once you have all this information, your job is to synthesize it and develop your own point of view. You need to able to clearly articulate â
As you start researching about the industry and future technology trends, share interesting and relevant articles with the broader team. This is an opportunity to inspire your team by sharing with them theyâre working on something thatâs going to be the future of the company and going to improve the lives of many customers.
You can also share articles or podcast episodes about the best product management practices and processes that other companies are following. Be the catalyst to bring good practices in your new company.
The most important thingâââdonât forget to have fun! Enjoy new learning. Celebrate wins and mini-milestones. Embrace mishaps and failures. Make friendships and laugh. If youâre not having fun in what youâre doing, then it would be very hard to give your best.
While this may not be an exhaustive list, I hope I covered most of the key areas. And I hope this will help you make a great impression and build a great rapport with your team in the first 90-days of your new career.
â If you enjoyed reading this article, then please tap or click ââ„ïžâ below to share these thoughts with others.
Aditya Kothadiya 