People Management: Defining Roles, Assessing Candidates and Making Hiring Calls

How do you go about hiring people for your team? Walk the interviewer through your approach, using a real hire where you can. ```hint Start with one real hire Pick a hire you made or helped make, and explain what the team was missing at the time and how you checked whether candidates could fill that gap. ``` ### Clarifying Questions - Should I assume a brand-new team, an existing team that is growing, or a backfill for someone who left? - Which roles do you have in mind: product managers I would manage directly, or engineers and designers whose hiring loops I would join as the product partner? - Is the headcount already approved and on a deadline, or is part of the job making the case for the hire? - Would you prefer my general process or a walk-through of one specific hire? ### What a Strong Answer Covers - How the role and its must-have skills are derived from the team's current gaps and upcoming work - A structured evaluation: who assesses what, how each skill is tested, and how bias and inconsistency are kept down - How the final call is made, including interviewer disagreement and the cost of a wrong hire versus a slow one - The product manager's realistic place in hiring, whether as hiring manager or as an interviewer in a partner's loop - A concrete example with its outcome and a lesson drawn from a hire that went well or badly ### Follow-up Questions - Tell me about a hire that did not work out. What did your process miss, and what did you change afterward? - How would you hire differently for the first two people on a new team than for the tenth? - One interviewer you trust is firmly against a candidate everyone else wants to hire. What do you do?