Consultants only excel in product if they hate purely advisory work
Dan Gill · Dan Gill, CPO @Carvana: The Most Wild Story in Public Markets | E1243 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings · Jan 8, 2025 · at 3:35
Dan Gill, Chief Product Officer at Carvana, discusses hiring philosophy and evaluating candidates transitioning from management consulting into product management.
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“We've had great success with a small number of consultants that have joined, but you've got to look for that very specific type. It is the person who comes from consulting and says, I hate it. We do all the research and we make these recommendations and then we hand it off to someone else To either do it or not do it. And I hate it. If you get the type of consultant who says, I know everything and now I should make all the decisions. Absolutely not. It's, you need the people who have been put through that meat grinder. Consulting can be very hard work have very high expectations of output. But you need the people who hate it because they don't get their hands on the finished product and they don't get to see it all the way through. And we've had incredible success with that archetype, but not the type that thinks like, now that I've seen the way that a dozen companies operate, I'll tell you how to operate yours because operating is hands-on business.”
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