When hiring product execs, pick a lens! You can frame someone's experience through four main lenses: (1) company stage, (2) seniority, (3) sector and (4) business model. Intangibles like mindset matter too, but these are concrete criteria to start with. People can disagree on which lens matters most, but you have to pick. Hiring will always involve trade-offs and taking chances. The trick is to restrict the risk to an axis you're comfortable with. Suppose you're a fintech at series A selling to SMBs and seeking your first VP Product. If you only look at other fintechs at series A selling to SMBs to poach their VP, your target list will probably be ten candidates and you'll be lucky if one is interested. So decide what's essential. If you think sector matters most, consider the hungry PM looking to step up who already knows your industry inside out. If you think growth stage is crucial, speak with the proven VP at another series A company outside your sector and curious to try a new business model. The same goes for candidates seeking career changes. If you're a post-IPO product exec at an enterprise SaaS company, never tell me you're open to seed stage consumer! How would I credibly pitch you? Keep several lenses consistent and only swap the one that matters most to you. Meet hiring managers half-way in limiting the risk of tissue rejection. I said people can reasonably disagree, but in my view, the lenses that matter most are company stage and business model. People fixate too much on seniority when the best people are constantly moving up, and mapping the meaning of titles across companies is a minefield of ambiguity anyway, especially in a function as flat and predicated on soft power as product. 'Sectors' are also often too vague to be valuable. What's the use of bucketing talent into a broad church of 'fintech' when that spans everything from Adyen to Taxfix? But whether someone is a consumer or enterprise person often really does still matter. And it takes real skill to figure out if someone will thrive at seed if they've never done it before.
Generally I agree, but I see that lenses working a bit on a different levels. By saying that, I mean that: - Seniority can compensate lack of domain knowledge or vice-versa. It's more of a hard skills, something we can develop more or less quickly. - Business Model is about way of thinking, building a marketplace, serving businesses or end customers are more of a different mindsets. And its usually much harder to switch, but also depends on a person of course. - Company stage for me is more about the vibe/ pace. That is something that is rarely changes within a person.Maybe it can be compensated by motivation? So, in general, here is my prioritization: Stage -> Model -> Seniority = Domain. Looks similar to yours ) *- disclaimer - For Health, Payment or similar domain specific areas prioritization can vary a bit At the same time, I'm convinced that track record in any of this "lenses" is not always a good predictor of future success. But that may deserve a separate post 😅
Doron H.
2w
So true.... Same goes for candidates when deciding on the next role. Switching across multiple axes is hard and increases the likelihood of something going wrong.
I don’t think each lens is created equally therefore picking one makes no sense, it’s always a combined score. I think company stage and seniority matter the most. I also think sector is the most fungible (for any product leader worth their salt) and I think business model is highly dependent on seniority. Your example of the post-IPO doesn’t speak to the ability to do the role vs the motivation to do the role. Ability is likely high but motivation is likely low 😅.