Hired a Rockstar PM?

Finally, you hired the Senior Product Manager you always dreamt of? Strong background in big tech, super good in the interviews – now they can jump right into the thick of it and solve all your problems right away. 

Please pause and take a second

I have seen this many times: We as managers want to fill the space that has a blatant gap (and that we often have to deal with ourselves). Once we finally have someone, we want that person to jump into the problem right away. 

When you hire a new rockstar for your band, you might want to do a few practice sessions before you go on the big stage.

See it from the new hire’s perspective – they have done great things in their previous role (that’s why you hired them). And they want to show you what kind of ballers they are. However, they lack the context, and the personal relationships they will need to clarify a messy situation. Going even further, if the only source of information they have is you, they are bound to just do more of what you did, and the team will lose an opportunity for a new leader to come in and take a new look.

Before they start – hiring process

You want key stakeholders like the Engineering counterpart, key business people etc. to meet your candidate during the interviews. If people had a chance to weigh in, the hire later has their support. Read more about PM hiring in my article here.

On day one – the on-boarding guide:

The first few weeks are magical, and critical to later success. I recommend making it easy for your new hire to set themselves up for success by meeting the right people, learning about the product and adding value quickly without drowning. What I highly recommend is to create a document that contains all key information. Do the first one very thoroughly, so that you and the team can re-use it. Here is what to include:

• Context about the organization: Write a bit about what you are really doing and what the big things are that you are pursuing.
• Who to meet: Ask the new hire to set up intro meetings with the critical people on the team. Tell them also if they should set up recurring meetings. They won’t be comfortable just scheduling calls themselves. Funny story: In my first job I was asked to schedule a call with Sridhar Ramaswamy (now CEO at Snowflake, by the way). I would never have dared to do that myself, but it turned out to be a quite important conversation.
• Which meetings to join: Tell your report which meetings they should be part of.
• On-boarding project: Pick a clear on-boarding project, something that does not take very long and is not in the critical path, but would be helpful for the team. That will allow for a soft landing, and will create a positive connotation within the team. 
• Share and communicate with the team: Introduce the new person to the team, tell the team why this person is awesome and what they will initially be working on.

Conclusion

My experience is that the strongest Product Managers will feel the urge to do more quicker, help them ease into it. They will need a few weeks until they have the lay of the land, and have enough relationships to get things done. That is how I onboarded new hires and this is how I was onboarded and it made things so much easier.