 Hello everyone, my name is Kanaxinat and today I'm going to talk about qualities and competencies of a great product leader. I work at Facebook and I carry 15 years of experience in product management where I work with corporates like Microsoft and HP. I also worked at startup and founded my own couple of companies. Today I would be providing insight from the hiring manager perspective that how we strategize the interview and what we look forward when we try to add a strong product leader in our team. So with that, let's get started. Let me share my screen here. Okay, I already provided my intro. And the agenda for today as I mentioned what we look for in a strong product leader, what is our hiring strategy, how do we screen candidate against the criteria and how one could differentiate himself. So regarding hiring strategy, my advice to hiring managers would be to carry a vision to hire for long term companies fit well than filling just a short term requirement or right. And the right way to do that is to ask what does your team wants. And normally what I do I try to conduct a whiteboard exercise with my team members, where we list down essential competencies, skills and qualities that we look forward. PM do best when the existing team members want them there and that's the foundation to establish someone for longer term success. I would also suggest that not to leave the interview metrics conglomerate or open ended and better to formalize that that way we as a team would make more data driven decisions. Now, normally we try to divide the criteria into three categories, the qualities, the competencies and the required skills. Quality is a part of personality and it's hard to teach, like how would you teach customer obsession or product intuition. And it could further be divided into two separate categories. One is product related qualities and the second other personality traits which I will talk later in my slide. The second criteria I would say is required competencies. Now this could be gained over time with experience and mentorship, but it takes longer time. Now you have to ask question that is your team ready to provide that level of mentorship to the new person. Few examples are technical expertise, industry expertise. Now product management as we all know is essentially a wide space store. So it's better to ask that do you need someone who is a general PM or you need some expert who could get the ground running from from day one. And that also depends on that what are the existing competencies in the current task force and what are the gaps. So identifying those gaps would help to hire someone for a longer term company fitment. Now then comes skills and skills could be learned with some reasonable time and effort like tech skills or some certain tools and technology. To be honest, I would not keep that as top metrics I would say it's nice to have, but qualities are must have and competencies are should have. Now how do we screen those, you know, in a candidate, especially the product related qualities. Past experience and providing product strategy and design problem, I would say is a good way of screening a candidate because I have observed that it provide a more clear view of how the candidate would be approaching a problem. So there is no right or wrong solution here it all depends on how the person is approaching the problem. Now, to quote few must have parties here. Let's start with product mindset and customer empathy. Every product exists because of certain problem we are trying to solve for for the customer. So it's very essential to identify the right problem. Many are times I see candidates who won't pause on the problem and just, you know, start solving or providing the solution. And that could only happen like identifying the right problem when the candidate is really really obsessed with the customer. Other kind of pattern which I observe normally is when the candidate just select the first of first thought that comes in his mind and start solutioning it which I call a tunnel approach, rather than providing multiple solution, doing trade-offs, calling the risk and then, you know, providing a more holistic view before taking the design approach or digging deeper into a solution. And the third kind of pattern I have observed when candidate talks straight away talks about the execution model. Now nothing wrong here but I would say that that goes more towards the project management mindset than the product manager. The second essential quality I would say is to be visionary. Once you have the right problem to solve it also is very critical that the person could envision the best solution that could solve that problem. Once the candidate has the solution, the right solution in mind and the problem, what we require here is a team builder and a collaborator who could then rally everyone behind that goal and solution and collaborate with a different stakeholder, execute against those goals and deliver the product. So these are the top four, I would say, followed by sense of ownership, which is very essential because we as a product leader are not just responsible for the success of today, but also the success of the team members who we put behind those product and solutions. And I would say this is not an easy journey. The ride is not going to be easy. You will encounter nights where the problem is so vague, it's abstract with no clear suggestion or no clear view, but still you have to guide the team through it. You still have to learn to navigate through vague problems and be the torch bearer here. And the next I would say if you are in a customer facing product then carrying good design sense is really essential and that could be evaluated by providing design problem, how the person is approaching the design, how the person is kind of reviewing an existing design or highlighting the problems or coming up with the solution or is open for different ideas there. The last in my list for today is self evaluation. Now, I have observed very talented and strong product managers struggling through, you know, killing or divorcing their initial proposal. And that's very essential for a product manager to not to get so closely attached to it and carry the nerve to kill their own proposals at the right time. But I have also observed when, you know, there's a there's a fine line there and at times the product manager could go and bleed through standing for his or her own, his or her ego. And that may backfire. So I would advise to have a very critical eye on yourself to be successful longer term in term in this role to self evaluate yourself at times, when you are really attached to a particular product problem or solution. Now let's talk about other personality traits. There are people who are more relationship oriented. There are people who are more reserved and outcome oriented. I would say avoiding the extreme and and carrying some balance is always better, but still you'll see people leaning toward one of these, these quadrants. What I normally do, I try to see what kind of personalities are already there in the team and what are the gaps and try to add people accordingly so that they can create a balance. We need people who could glue everyone together. We also need people who could execute and, you know, are aggressive in terms of bringing the result in case of tougher problem and strictly realized. Now let's talk about competencies and screen. They are based on past job related questions and exercises. Sometimes we give exercises to see where the person stand in terms of the, you know, the, the arts competency or skill, and sometimes we just ask what he or she didn't pass. Competencies at times may take precedence, depending on how, how the industry is shifting and skills again I would say I would bucket it in a nice to have category, then a must have qualities, I would say, the must have criteria followed by competencies which I could say should have criteria and then skills. Now, let's talk about how one would differentiate himself or herself, come up with clear, crisp, real fast examples that helps a lot and that give us a idea about how you would be working with your team. You would be, you would be approaching the problem where you need some mentorship. So come up with real past examples. Now, there is no right or wrong solution here. Again, the approach matters more. It's also essential to own it fully on your mistake. Don't be hesitant to share where you stumble and where you face challenges. It may be, yes, you know, there are products which failed in past or there are scenarios where you felt you could have done differently, which is all fine to share. So whether a candidate is open to new ideas or not also matters. So you could always show your openness and try to think on those lines if the interviewer is suggesting you some other approach. And again, qualities matter more here. So with that, I'm going to wrap up. We covered qualities of a strong PM overview of hiring strategies, competencies and skills and how one could differentiate himself and how one should keep a critical eye on certain qualities in this role. Thank you, everyone. I hope you found it helpful. And I will keep talking and posting through through this group. Thank you, product school.