Any Questions For Us?
Interviewing from the opposite perspective, how to optimize (or not!) your life/product and a fun article on how to up your glassware game.
The Art of Leadership got me thinking about what small things contributed to other bigger theoretical things in my life. This got me thinking about how you can tell whether or not a company is actually a good fit. Right now it seems like a ton of people are at least exploring the possibility of a new opportunity.
In management circles we spend lots of time talking about tuning hiring funnels, thinking about how we can create effective hiring practices that analyze people’s skills rather than whether or not they happen to be like us. I decided to flip this on its head and think through ways to weed out and eliminate companies during the hiring process by focusing on a similar problem from an interviewee’s perspective: likability. It’s hard to tell if a company would be a good place to work or if it’s a case of a likable hiring manager speaking the “values lingo”. I also think it’s a good way to evaluate whether or not the current role you’re in meets your needs. I present you:
Questions To Ask During the Hiring Process - (link)
If we use "Work-Life Balance" as the theme, I might ask a question like: "Tell me about a time you had to work hard in order to hit a commitment. How did you coordinate with the team and what did you learn from the process?" I like this type of question because it's open to the idea that sometimes teams will have to stretch to do things, but also asks them to articulate what they did in that situation, but without asking them if they'll give me the day off when I work an 80 hour week. I'm not boxing them into a corner with the question, but can hopefully get a good sense of how open they're being.
Some Links for the Road
80/20 is the new Half Ass - (link)
It reminds me a lot of this article Embrace the Grind, but the basic tenet is this: you can’t optimize forward. The 80/20 principle is a great example of power distribution in existing systems that can allow businesses to focus their efforts on high-value clients/projects/etc. It’s a fundamentally reflective process. I remember in one 538 podcast episode Nate Silver says something like “Everything is usually reverting to the mean, but the problem is it’s hard to know where the mean is.” It’s better to think through the application of principles rather than blindly applying them to every part of your life.
5 Things We’ve Learned About Great Product Management - (link)
A lot of top-5 lists (especially about a topic as deep as product management) are bs, but this is not. It’s not a prescriptive list of things you should drop everything and do tomorrow. It’s a list of 5 observations, explained in a straightforward way, that encompass great product management. I especially liked this one:
We intentionally communicate very little about the long term, resulting in a very short roadmap. We try hard to never commit to what we’re going to work on six months from now. We tend to be much more granular and have high certainty in the short term.
Your Glassware is Too Big - (link)
This is a paywalled Insider article but it’s fun so I figured I’d share. It highlights the why behind the different types of glasses and the beverages they were designed for. It’s not always just to look fancy!