I have an interview question guide. Anyone who's run more than a dozen interviews for any particular role will have some version of this.

There are skills you want to assess, ways of asking questions that drive better, more informative answers, and you want to have a large enough menu that'll fit the level of the candidate you're faced with, which more often than not can't really be told by looking at their resume. Mine is pretty good, because it stands on the shoulders of giants. I've copied, tweaked and polished questions from colleagues, other PMs and Product Leaders in the industry, added my own, and now I have one I'm happy with.

Here's the thing though. These help me separate a good candidate from a bad candidate. But a great candidate? One who will hit the ground running by grabbing the org by its horns, grappling with it and harnessing its energy towards a much better product. Much much harder. More of an art than a science.

There are general things that a Product person has to demonstrably show they can do through concrete, specific examples, with outcomes attached to them.

• Are people high-agency?
• Do they know what a problem worth solving looks like?
• How do they define hypotheses?
• How do they frame solutions?
• What does a great solution look like to them?
• How do they go from solution to spot on execution?
• How do they make hard trade-offs?
• How do they get everyone on board?
• When faced with stakeholders with conflicting incentives, what do they do?

With quite literally all of these, there's a pervasive, hidden skill that you can only really parse out some of the time.

It's that people were in the trenches, helping good decisions get made locally. One after another, like lego pieces that connected make a masterpiece, they clicked an unlocked a great product.

There was a tough conversation with a designer. A developer who was struggling with fitting into the team and was trying too hard. A CEO trying to cram all of their wishes into the product. A retro where the team wanted to refactor the whole thing. A demo where people kept insisting they didn't see the point. An experiment that reached a valuable customer who immediately reached out on Linkedin and said we were ruining the product for them.

All of these, the PM had to successfully navigate them, use them to build conviction about the problem they were solving, polish the solution to make it better than before, make everyone else more convinced than they were that this was the right thing to do. All until the final thing got shipped and it was obvious. This was the right thing to build all along.

Well done folks.