In this 30 minute podcast, I deep dive into what makes a great startup product manager and how to create successful product management organisations. Listen in to learn:

• What teams need to thrive
• What makes a great product manager for a startup
• The difference between a product owner and why they are not what your startup needs
• How to scale product teams infinitely without losing productivity
• Why startups and big companies are different and how to hire appropriately
• Which questions to ask in product manager interviews

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Read the transcript

You can find the full transcript here:

Nick Black 0:01
very fundamentally, in organisational psychology, there are three things that teams need. They need to have a sense of competence, that they’re able to execute what they’re doing. They need to have a sense of autonomy, that they’re able to make their own decisions. And they need to have a strong sense of relatedness.

Olha Dehtiarova 0:16
People who are creators, I feel that they are the people who are very passionate about what they do. And having these people in the right place is something that will definitely make the world a better place because then the companies are going to be creating the products that care.

Tom Hunt 0:37
Hello, and welcome to shine a podcast by start, I’m your host, Tom hunt. And today we have a slightly different type of episode we are joined by startup founder and chief product officer, Nick, black and also stars, very own Wallah, that’s your rover, Deputy Head of Product Management, here at Star to illuminate how to hire product managers. This is a big challenge that a lot of companies, whether startups, larger agencies, etc, are facing as we move into 2022. So we bought together these two powerhouses of Product Management in order to try to understand how to structure a product management team, what interview questions should be asked, and what the difference is between a product manager and a product owner. So let’s jump right now into that discussion. And the first voice you’ll hear will be that of Nick.

Nick Black 1:36
So I founded a tech company in London in 2005, which is a very long time ago, there wasn’t much tech going on. And after I managed somehow to raise an a round, my investors said, Hey, Nick, we think you should be head of product. So I went back home and I Googled, what does the Head of Product view what is product management? And that was in 2006 2007. And that set me on a journey the last 1314 years of still trying to answer that question. So over that time, I built a product organisation of about 25 people. And I’ve done hundreds and hundreds of interviews, hiring product managers, product designers and researchers. So to share a little bit of that today. 16 years of experience. You’re really dating me, but yeah.

Tom Hunt 2:18
Incredible. All and over to you, please. Yeah, I

Olha Dehtiarova 2:21
actually have digital marketing background prior to join in star and star was my first job as a product manager. I managed to grow here from junior to co heading a product management department right now. And also being a product lead on one of our largest projects at the moment. I think one of the cool things is that I managed to work in over 10 projects over these last five years, probably more if you include all of the discovery projects and in different spheres, the IoT, health care and ad tech primarily. And also, the fun thing is that our product management department is currently over 30 people. And we grew, I think by 30 plus percent just over the last year. So this is unprecedented growth for the product manager department and the topic of hiring product managers has never been more relevant for us.

Tom Hunt 3:15
Incredible. Okay, so let’s jump right into the first question, what kind of product manager or would a startup organisation need for their first product manager? And, Nick, I like to go to you first, please.

Nick Black 3:29
So I break this down into three things. Firstly, the first thing is to figure out what is the next major milestone you need to hit what I’ve noticed in my own organisation, and in the companies that I work with today, the companies that are super clear on what do we need to achieve next? Are we trying to launch our product? Are we trying to go from our first 10 users to find product market fit? Or are we trying to scale globally? Those are three very different things. So firstly, figuring out what is your milestone. And that will then lead you to what type of product manager you need for them. The second thing you want to layer on to that is what type of a founder Are you? Are you commercial sales driven? You want to be with customers, you want to spend all your time with the customers your non technical. Are you very, very technical, but not very consumer focus? Or are you a product founder, someone who would experience a product management and kind of knowing yourself is going to help you choose what type of product manager how much experience you need. But no matter what you choose, your first product manager is going to be somebody who can understand your customers. So that drives a need for a high EQ, high empathy, ability to listen, ability to interpret customer feedback and turn that into a really solid problem description. They’re then going to need to be able to go out and discover solutions to problems that’s both with the customer and that’s also working with your tech teams to create those solutions. And finally, they’ve got to be really good at finding fit. So like methodically cranking through experiment after experiment until you find the breakthrough moment,

Tom Hunt 4:57
a very comprehensive answer, answering the question with a question And I think in this case was very effective. You said that, first we have to understand what a milestone if we need to understand what kind of product manager we need. I want to pass this over to all quickly to get your opinion on the difference almost between a first product manager for a different type of business. Right. So Nick obviously answered from his extensive experience in the world of startups, but obviously started more of a product catwalk professional services company, do you think it differs? In the first product manager you need?

Olha Dehtiarova 5:32
I’d like to start with basically backing up everything that makes it totally aligned on that. And I think just being a product manager, you always start with a question. That’s just kind of the core of what you do in anything. And hiring a product manager is not any different from that. What is the goal? Why you’re doing that? What is the internal setup? Who are you working with? And I think one of the questions, an additional question that we are asking ourselves as a professional service technology company is not just who we need, you know, as a product manager for star, but who we need as a product manager for our customers, because that’s kind of we are trying always to accomplish these two goals. At the same time, we are hiring a person, you know, for our company, but we are also always looking for people for specific projects. And it’s never just for a specific project or just for a company right, we are trying to find a person who can, who can satisfy different needs, and I assume that some of the things that we would require are slightly different, maybe some of the things that are more important for a startup or a product company, which are very focused in one topic in one domain in one specific sphere, they would require maybe probably more in depth knowledge in a certain in certain spheres, right, versus we value, probably much more flexibility, and this cross domain experience and cross domain knowledge that a person may have, because we understand that the person may have to switch projects may have to switch domains have has to adjust very, very quickly to any circumstance to any stage or product, on its product development phases. And we do value these, these qualities that allow you know the person to be able that to be to be that flexible to be able to work in different environments, to be able to work with a small company and with a large company with a lot of rules and with non rules, right with the different types of diversity with scaled business versus something which is very, very early stage. And we do value that and we are looking for that kind of experience in people and that kind of mindset. If that makes sense.

Tom Hunt 7:54
It makes total sense. Should this first hire first product management hire be a product owner, or manager?

Olha Dehtiarova 8:03
I guess my first question to a question. And this one as well is how do we define the product owner? Because I feel like the different definitions of a product owner there is a Scrum or agile definition of a product owner as a person who is managing the backlog and tasks and mostly working with the delivery team are not really making any major decisions, especially around strategy,

Nick Black 8:28
or sorry, on that to help educate me like that role in Scrum. That’s a role, right? It’s not necessarily a person. Yeah. So it’s like a job that you do. Yeah,

Olha Dehtiarova 8:37
yes, yes, exactly. But that may be a person, right? That may be a specific role. Or that may be maybe a specific job, right, depending on the size of a business and the size of a project. But that may be a role that someone is doing you’re you’re exactly right. But we do often get a lot of confusion when we are talking to certain businesses, especially those who are maybe less acquainted with Scrum and Agile, because the perception of the word owner right kind of means that you are owning the decisions or owning product strategy. Versus in Scrum, you don’t. So what are we talking here about the product manager who is making decisions or a product owner who is managing the backlog?

Nick Black 9:18
Yeah, I can carry kind of add a bit to that, because I think that definition is really important. And clearly you need a product owner, you need somebody who is going to be looking after the backlog prioritising who’s there every day to work with the development team to work with the designers, the data scientists, you need somebody who has that kind of presence. But to me, the problem comes when you split that level of presence and focus on the product that’s being built from the bigger question of the business problem, the value proposition, the business model, the experiments that are being run at the other end. And to me, the whole point of product management is that you align the problem that we’re trying to solve, grow our business. engage users, you align that problem with one person who has the complete ability to understand the problem and the solution space. And I’ve experimented a lot with this because it can be hard to find great product managers who can own that full domain. But I’ve never seen any evidence of anyone, particularly in a startup environment where things are moving quickly. I’ve never seen good evidence of anyone managing successfully split there, and have one type of product manager dealing with customers and market. And another one dealing with the backlog. I think it kind of comes back to what I said before around knowing what type of founder you are. So if you’re really product driven founder, and you have genuine insights into your customer, so I don’t mean like a gut feeling. But genuine insights, you know, you’ve been working in that industry for 15 years, you have a PhD in the area. And you know about product management, and you love coaching people and developing people, then you can have a model where you have more junior product managers, and you help grow them throughout, you know, you train them grow them. But there are far fewer founders out there who really enjoy coaching and training and enabling people than there are who just want to execute and get stuff done.

Olha Dehtiarova 11:09
Yeah, I feel like from our experience, and we work with so many different setups, right, because we have different customers, different products and different products, different sizes, again, as I mentioned, so and we also have one more player in the game, we have a customer and customer may have a product manager on their own, and they can be making their own decisions. And they may not they may have a set of stakeholders that are making certain decisions that we need to collaborate with. So we can either support them by having a product manager on our side, who is a little bit more involved with the delivery side of the business and working with the development team and basically being that that link between the customer and the product strategy and the development and delivery. But we also have very many cases where in case there is no, you know, single product manager on a customer side, we are taking over that role. And we are collaborating and facilitating some of the decision making that they may have, and kind of supporting them in what they do. And especially for discoveries, especially for early stage startups, especially for proof of concept projects, where we can have a team of people here, including strategy and product managers supporting that level, and all product vision, early stage. But we also have very, very large projects that end products that may have a bunch of different teams and a bunch of different Scrum teams in them. And in those scenarios, it’s inevitable that you are having product owners or business analysts supporting product managers with this day to day delivery. Because with that amount of work and scope and stuff that needs to be done, you can very easily get lost in the routine, and in these daily tasks, so managing the requirements and supporting the delivery, and then lose the focus of the big picture. So we do no need to divide these roles a little bit. But I’d still say that any business analyst or any product owner should understand why they are doing that. Right. So it’s still not just backlog management. There is a lot of involvement and collaboration in some of the pieces which are around defining the strategy and priorities. It’s not that someone has just given you the priorities, and you’re ready to go with the backlog.

Tom Hunt 13:25
Yeah, I just wanted to dig a little bit deeper into this concept, which I think we may be getting closer to the definition of a product owner. And you both mentioned it is that this person, the person responsible for the product, the owner, must have the insight of the customer, and also be managing the backlog. And Nick, you said that you’ve never found that to be multiple people that have to be one person in a business. Is that right? Yes. That’s what I found. Okay. So and that person you would call a product owner?

Nick Black 13:54
No. So I think all his definition of product owner in the scrum sense is a very correct one. There’s a methodology how you manage backlogs and within that people play roles, and one of the roles is product owner. But the difference between a role and a job title is you can inhabit multiple different roles. Sometimes you may play the role of a salesperson, sometimes you play the role of a product manager. But fundamentally most of the time when I so if we go back to that, right, why was Where did the term Product Manager enter the lexicon in Europe, it was in enterprises in Europe that had figured out that in the US and Silicon Valley companies, they had these things, product managers who were driving so much the success and growth in tech was back like 1020 years ago, these big enterprises wanted to get in on some of this. But they didn’t want to give full business responsibility to one person because they felt the business unit need to own the business. And tech is basically just it who delivers solutions to the business unit. So they created product owners who would go and ask their stakeholders what the stakeholders needed. And the business people who were the experts in the business would say what was needed, and you had these product owners who would translate that in requirements that complete I mean, whether that has worked or not, I don’t know, that’s not the era I get involved with. In startups, that’s just never going to work. You know, the idea that there’s one person who can define all of the requirements, you’re dealing with a startup, which is, you know, most things are unknown and uncertain. And things are changing incredibly quickly, something you think, you know, today, you talk to five more customers, and you have a completely different way of seeing. So the ability of a startup to learn quickly, right and to, to learn and adapt to the market is one of the big things that creates success, the way you grow quickly in the startup is by learning quickly, if you put multiple people in between the source of learning and executing the learning, it just doesn’t make sense, you’re going to massively decrease the efficiency. So that’s one functional reason. But the second reason I see when people say this, oh, you know, we don’t have much budget, so we’ll get a lower cost product owner in and the founder will essentially tell them what to do. If they’re a good person, if they have what it takes to become a really good product manager, they’re very quickly going to realise that they would like to be a product manager, they’re going to ask for a pay rise, and you’re going to have to give them one or they’re going to go, and they’re going to ask for full responsibility, and you’re going to have to give it to the mother or they’re going to go the type of people in startups who hang around as product owners grooming backlogs without having responsibility for the business outcomes, they tend to not be the best product managers. And in a startup, you need a team of absolute A plus everybody needs to be amazing.

Olha Dehtiarova 16:28
A second that I think one of the one of the differences, where we, for instance, have more business analysts and product owners a star is because we work both with star startups and enterprise. So I do agree with that the business analyst and product owner role is more for the enterprise projects that we have. I would also argue that there are different kinds of startups right there is a 10 person startup and there is 800. person startup. Yeah, which grow very, very quickly. And I think it’s then a matter of the how do you scale the business? And how do you scale all of your teams, not just the product manager role? Right. And I think it’s another more large, interesting topic.

Nick Black 17:07
Yeah. Without, you know, making the whole show about definitions. The definition of a startup is, is that it’s an organisation and search for business. Funnily enough, Steve Blanks, definition from back in the day, once you found a scalable, repeatable business model, you’re not a startup anymore, you’re a business on the way to becoming an enterprise. And then things are quite different.

Tom Hunt 17:28
Go, I want to move on to now structuring product teams. So question is high level, how should we structure an effective product team and this is purposefully open to allow you guys to share your your opinions from different contexts. So Nicholas, start with you.

Nick Black 17:44
So very fundamentally, in organisational psychology, there are three things that teams need, they need to have a sense of competence, that they’re able to execute what they’re doing. They need to have a sense of autonomy, that they’re able to make their own decisions. And they need to have a strong sense of relatedness, both to each other in the team, and relatedness to other people within their organisation. So these things has been really well documented in both academic psychology and Google and other big tech companies that are massive experiments with this. So you’re looking to get competence, autonomy, and relatedness into any team. That’s the foundations, when we get a bit more specific, how do we actually do this in a product team, I generally look to have a product manager, the product manager owns the value proposition, the business model, most of the definition of the experiments which are being run, and to a certain extent, prioritisation of the backlog, you then have a tech lead. And a lot of the startups I see in the UK are really missing out on having strong tech leads. This tech lead is like the emissary of the tech team. Ideally, I would have all of my engineers in every customer discovery meeting I ever do, so that they can hear the voice of the customer. But someone does have to write some code as well. So that’s not really practical. Your tech lead is somebody who who come to the meetings with customers who can listen to the interviews, who understands the business problems, but they’re the people who can also translate to you the product manager and say, Hey, so that solution you’re cooking up over here, if we just did it this way, it’d be way way quicker. You know, we could do it in three days, not three weeks. And I find those those breakthroughs are super important. So a tech lead really, really important. And typically, you have also a product designer, a product designer is often quite misunderstood. This is not just somebody who used to be a UI designer and has done a few courses. This is somebody who really gets things like customer discovery. How do we interview customers? How do we get inside their heads? How do we build value propositions? How do we run experiments to validate that our design ideas are right or wrong, then often a data scientist, but typically you’re looking for this kind of troika of product manager Tech Lead Designer, they’re a really close knit team. You know, the teams I’ve worked on when I’ve been quite functional, sort of doing the product manager role. You Just have this amazing relationship where you kind of know what each other are thinking, you can anticipate what you’re going to say. And the roles blur away, you know, the the, suddenly you’re in these meetings and the difference between tech, lead designer and Product Manager kind of goes away, you’re all focused on this goal. And you’re all throwing in your own ideas and your own perspectives. So I’d love to hear some of that all those things as well. So

Olha Dehtiarova 20:22
now, I think that’s a great and almost textbook like definition of what an ideal product team should look like, I would just add another kind of layer to it, that when we are looking for larger product teams, when there are there is more than one product person after all, in the setup, there is also something else that we are looking for, we basically understand that the knowledge tree for a product manager is enormous. And it keeps growing all the time, right. So there are so many things that a product manager is supposed to or expected to know and to learn and in the spheres where he should be knowledgeable. And it’s almost impossible now to find it in one person. So I feel like when we are building those teams, we are also looking for complementary skills and knowledge from different people to make sure that when we kind of put that puzzle together, the people puzzle together, we have some people who are stronger. And I know in a tech sphere, we know that someone is a bit stronger in analytics, we know that someone is more skilled in strategy and research. And in that way, first of all, the team all together, they grow at the same time, right, because they learn new things from one another. But we also complement each other and bring more value to the team overall. So this is kind of another layer that we’re looking for. But I like your definition.

Nick Black 21:46
Either that that’s made me think of one of the hot questions is always asked around product management in startups, which is the role of domain expertise, you know, how important is it that my startup, my product manager is an expert in financial services, or an expert in AI or an expert in something else? And I you know, I empathise a little bit, I see the points of some of those arguments if you’re operating in a highly regulated industry, and you need to get your product out there. It’s helpful if you have someone who understands those regulations. But at a practical level, I’ve seen no correlation whatsoever between the domain expert product managers, and the ones who really get product management. And I think the problem is, if someone put it to me the other day, they said, Look, when I’m interviewing these candidates, I have 330 minute opportunities to tell who they are. And then I’m supposed to make a call on this person who’s driving me who’s going to be you know, driving my product. So if you put the focus of your interview on interrogating someone to know whether they know everything about financial services regulation, you’re going to answer that question, you’re going to find out what they do or don’t. If you put all of the focus of your interview on figuring out can this person get product market fit? Do they know how to do it? Have they done it before? Are they a team player? Do they know how to work with developers? You’re going to answer that question. And I believe that having a positive answer to that question is more predictive of success of the team?

Tom Hunt 23:08
Yeah, that’s super interesting as a really important insight, I think for anyone listening with regarding hiring product managers.

Olha Dehtiarova 23:15
Yeah, except that he didn’t see the correlation between the sometimes the expertise, like the deep expertise, right, and the good job to be done. And I would, I would second that, and I would say that I’ve seen the opposite. I’ve seen that the coolest ideas grow on the intersection of different domains, expertise on cross, kind of functional expertise, etc. I feel like when the experience is diverse, it may bring much more to a product manager, it brings constant learning and brings constant ideation because you are dealing with different things in different domains. And they may bring you some amazing ideas on how to implement something very unusually. So I feel like this is super important, not just for our type of business, but for any kind of startup.

Nick Black 24:03
And it goes broader than hiring, you know, it’s this, it’s the old adage of when you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Like if you’ve spent the last 20 years doing a very traditional type of marketing. And you’re presented with a startup problem, you’re going to assume that it is can be solved at the top of the funnel with ads and optimization and different spend. If you’ve been a product manager in a big enterprise for 20 years, and you’re presented with a problem you’re going to think it’s about you need to build more features or improve the UI. But the reality in startups is you have to bring people with different divergent diverse viewpoints and experiences into the room and then solve the actual problem by just time want to give one more thought on team structure because this is a really big one that a lot of people get wrong. That the way you scale a product team successfully is you have this kind of troika of your product manager, your product designer, your tech lead, and then you have your engineering team who work with them. They’ve got to be ring fenced, so they’ve got to be 100% focused on one problem. It’s not like you can’t come into work one day and the CTO borrows the best, you know, engineer for this project because we’re out of React Native developers, like that’s just not going to cut it. That doesn’t work. People need to be focused on one problem. That problem needs to be expressed as a KPI. So there needs to be one metric that the team is chasing. Now that, for example, the percent of users who activate each week, so imagine that’s all you think about the product teams? Okay, well, 25% of the cohort activated last week, let’s see if we can get it to 27. Let’s see if we get it to 29. What experiments are we going to run? And when you have that type of focus, you can parallelize that you can have any number of teams with these very specific focuses. If your product managers are getting genuinely overwhelmed, there’s too much to do. What can you do? Well, you can narrow the focus of the team, you see, you have more product managers with a narrower focus. So that is, you know, you can really see the picture, right. That’s literally how you put more wood behind fewer arrows. And of course, above that, you have a Northstar metric. So everybody is aligned on one Northstar metric. So we’re not all going in different directions. We’re all converging on one behavioural metric, which we’re driving

Tom Hunt 26:07
awesome insights from all of you. It’s like an avalanche of product management expertise, coming with every question. Now I want to go back to we touched briefly on interview strategy. I know that both of you have you’ve either run or been in many product management interviews, what would you say is the most effective interview question you have ever asked?

Olha Dehtiarova 26:30
One very simple one, I actually asked my product management community right at star because I was like, Okay, what was the most interesting question that you’ve ever got an interview? I’ve got some fun answers there. But I think the one that I really enjoy myself, and I think it’s basically the essence, so anything that you ask within the interview is very simple. And it’s why and it can apply to anything, right? Whether it’s certain decisions that a person has made around the product in past experiences, and generally a value past experience questions a lot, because they think that they bring up the actual stuff, right? The actual expertise, the the reality, the truth, not just the theory, right? But they highlight the actions of a person. And they are super useful for behavioural questions, but also for the expertise questions. But then you go deeper, and you ask wise, and it’s almost the five why’s rule, right that you can apply on an interview as well. And you can go very deep and understanding and seeing if a person really knew what they were doing. And if they were asking the question on why they were doing certain things, I felt like this is super important for a product manager to ask wise in their everyday life and to be able to answer some of the whys.

Nick Black 27:51
Yeah, I like that approach, I’d say. So I split interviews into three sections. The first thing I want to do is understand the personality of the person and their values for personality or US ocean, the Big Five personality traits, open mindedness, and so on four values, I look at the behaviours of the company that is hiring them. So what are the sort of five to 10 behaviours? And then can the product manager prove to me that they have exhibited those behaviours in the past? Then what I do is, and this is, I think, the most valuable question, I do an experience based Deep Dive. So if the milestone of the company is fine product market fit, if the milestone is we needed to hire a chief product officer in Europe, so we can scale globally? It’s very simple. You say, when was the last time you scale the product globally? And then you just interrogate that? What happened? What was the outcome? Who did you do it with? What was your team? Like? What support did you get? What did you learn? So you’re both figuring out what kind of a person are they? Are they someone who can learn from their mistakes? Are they humble? Do they recognise the input that their team has given them? But you also trying to figure out? Are they telling the complete truth, and this principle of anchoring, where you ask someone to reference something that’s happened in the past, and then dig into questions about it. It’s exactly the same principle you use in user interviews. You know, if you’re doing research for a product, people love telling stories, and we just naturally make stuff up. And we have these false memories we make. If you really try and anchor people onto a specific thing, specific time when you scale the product globally, and then ask them the questions you can get really useful info. The third and final thing I do is a simulated workshop. So whatever your work, your working style is in the company, you do a sort of a brainstorm a strategy session, a design session, backlog management, it doesn’t really matter. You just want to see how will this person really work? And often I see in that what founders will often do is they’ll try and put on their best side you know, they’ll be particularly jolly and happy and come in and be really conversational or something. And just try and get people to be natural. You know, you’ve got to be completely yourself and then you Want to see how the product manager behaves when you’re being yourself?

Tom Hunt 30:02
Yeah, so

Olha Dehtiarova 30:04
I like that I can actually the second point, I think that you brought up is around the values and the people that you are looking for. And I think that’s one of the themes, which is, I don’t know, it’s a secret sauce to how we are hiring to star right alignment to our star DNA, what we are calling star DNA Seto values and principles if we expect the people to have because it’s the core or what our people are, right. And I mean, you’ve worked with us, you probably know a little bit around it, right? And how high certain expectations are specifically around values and around how proactive people have to be how they need to care, even though it’s a professional service company, right how, how much they care about what they do. So we have these set of principles and values that we are also trying to cross check a person to fit in. And I feel that this and soft skills, as you mentioned before, is some of the things are much more important often than then the hard skills that you can easily gain. So we’ve

Tom Hunt 31:01
been quite specific, in almost actionable, most of our questions now for this final question I like to go a bit more high level is the question we ask at the end of every episode of shine. And that is how does hiring better product managers ultimately make the world a better place? And all I know, you have a good answer for this one. So I like to go to you first.

Olha Dehtiarova 31:20
I think it’s very easy for me, because I think that product managers are the people who are creators, I feel that they are the people who are very passionate about what they do. And they are the driving force behind so many things, including product and teams and everything else. And having these people in the right place, doing the right job having enough freedom to do decision making to do certain things around team management, to do a lot of ideation. being passionate about what they do is something that will definitely make the world a better place. Because then the companies are going to be creating the products that care, right, not just the products that have to achieve certain things, but but the products that care. So I feel that the product managers role is huge in this and having the right people doing the right job is super important, and will ultimately make the world a better place.

Nick Black 32:16
Yeah, we’re living in an age where we’re witnessing software taking over everything, right. And the product managers role is pivotal in that there is not going to be an industry left on the face of the earth in 20 years time. That is not driven by software. I think having product managers with a very strong moral compass, a strong sense of what is rights and what is wrong, who really deeply care about the people they’re serving is undoubtedly going to make the world a better place, and will stop the world from becoming a worse place.

Tom Hunt 32:52
Wow. That’s a good one. Amazing, guys, I think we probably could have gone for like double the time and still like got like the same quality of wisdom from each of you next, specifically, the biggest insight for me hear from you was about arranging or focusing the whole of your product management team on this one metric. And doing that will reduce their overwhelm but increase their focus. So that was an awesome insight. All I love your point in their final question about how having more more passionate and effective product managers is going to improve the products and therefore improve the world. Finally, I love for each of you to share with the audience a little bit more about where people can find about you or your business. Nick, I know you’re doing a lot of work in this space right now. So let’s start with you.

Nick Black 33:41
Yeah, so I’m working with startups, helping the founders and leadership teams align all of their organisations behind a single set of outcomes. So starts with deciding what the company needs to do. And then helping them structure their product teams so that they’re delivering, you can find out more at Nick black, Dr. U. S.

Tom Hunt 34:02
And that will be linked in and around wherever you’re listening to this episode. All over do.

Olha Dehtiarova 34:07
It’s very simple with me, it’s my LinkedIn and also the star blog on our Star website, where I have been contributing from time to time in several industries. Yeah,

Tom Hunt 34:18
and you guys are actively still hiring product managers. Oh, yes. Awesome. So if you are listening to this as a product manager, you can reach out to all on LinkedIn again that will be linked in this episode. Guys. Thank you so much for coming on and sharing all this wisdom. I think it’s been a super valuable episode on the question hiring effective product manager. Thank you for joining.

Olha Dehtiarova 34:40
Thank you Tom.

Tom Hunt 34:45
And thank you so much for listening to this episode of shine a podcast by thoughts a slightly different style of episodes. We don’t have a big theme or a big question to ask but if you have any feedback about this style is more actionable, specific type Both episodes then please do let us know and form an apple podcast a rating and review. I would like to thank Nick and Paula for jumping on and sharing everything they’ve learned over the many years in the world of product management and of course I want to thank you

Photo by Michal Czyz on Unsplash

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