Insight
Stross: VP of Product must say no while maintaining team belief
“The VP of product is the choke point in a lot of ways for the whole company, where you're listening to all the different things coming in, whether it's requests from customers, or future customers, or what your engineering team thinks that needs to be done, or…”
Insight
Stross: Great product managers lubricate teams while bad ones grind progress to a halt
“Great product manager is like the oil that makes everything go well. And bad product management is the sand that makes everything stop.”
Disclosure
Stross: Greenhouse hires product managers out of its customer support team
“Something we've done is, like, we've hired a bunch of people out of our customer support group. Folks, because we saw that they knew the customer backwards and forwards and had good instincts as to, like, what they liked and didn't like. They knew the product …”
Insight
Stross: Visionary founders without product backgrounds struggle to direct engineering tasks
“The trap that companies will fall into is, ah, that you've got the CEO with some vision of, like, here's this customer problem, and I'm gonna build this product. But they've never actually been a product person, and breaking down that kind of generic vision in…”
Insight
Stross: High shipping velocity dramatically eases feature prioritization trade-offs
“Velocity is kind of everything. Like, if I know I can ship 20 things a quarter, I have to stress way less about the priority of those 20 things. If I'm like, ah, maybe I can do three, then it's like a bloodbath deciding which three I'm gonna do.”
Insight
Strauss: Find high-signal product hires by asking engineers who they loved
“Engineers typically very, ah, opinionated about product folks, and frequently in a negative way, and so when you go to engineers and say who's the product person you've worked with, who you loved you get pretty meaningful answers.”
Disclosure
Stross: Greenhouse tests PMs by having them spec third-party product features
“We do do a project with them, where we say, like, I'm looking for the kind of product sense, so we'll say, take some product that you use that's not ours, and have some complaint with it, and spec a feature to improve it. And then tell me why they haven't buil…”
