In this weeks opinion and rants, I look at what does hiring decision on impact vs tenure have anything to do with 4 stages of competency model, digital maturity and transformations.
In featured news this week
- Google's 100 million educational fund and credentials
- Bloomreach raises 175 Million in Series F funding
- eBay to add Crypto as a payment option
Essential PM reading
- Opportunity tree mapping article by Susan Stavitzski is a high level summary of some of the key points in Teresa Torres book.
- Jason Cohen, reviews the myth of hypergrowth especially explaining why VCs, founders & startup employees confuse quadratic growth for exponential growth.
- Jeff Gothelf advises that outcomes are a measure of human behavior and why these behaviors don’t happen in a vacuum and should be mapped to impact metrics.
- Bandan Jot Singh, wrote a case study that brings forward one of the most important trends in product and tech world i.e Writing!
He advises on how to do it well and why how you write would determine multiple things in future
Featured podcast
- Jason Knight shared an interesting podcast with no other than Melissa Perri where she even talks about her consulting experience at Spotify and the challenges the organization went through with standardization. And not to mention she also addresses a very interesting viewpoint of her views vs Marty Cagans.
Announcement:
We have a new look on the website and some upcoming changes will be coming with the website structure. Be sure to check it out and let me know what you think.
In the coming weeks, I will be launching www.theproductdigest.com where all this content will be migrated and www.digitalproductjobs.com will be turned into a jobs portal.
A big welcome to the new productnauts and thank you for joining the non for profit product digest community on a mission to enhance product people's careers.
Be sure to checkout the below free resources and archives below:
1- Want to indulge the curiosity in your brain and get stuck into 3000+ word research papers - checkout the research paper archive.
2- Want to improve your product management skills or disrupt your organization - checkout the guides archive
3- Missed a week - checkout the weekly digest archive
Google's 100 million educational fund and credentials
Would you go to google school or send your kids there instead of Universities? I know I would.
But wait - It's got nothing to do with college education, and instead, focuses on giving up-and-coming data analytics, IT, project management, and UX design students the tactical tools needed to start their careers with a bang.
Quote
"Elon Musk has famously said that applicants don't need a college degree to work at Tesla -- he looks for ability and a track record of achievement. Others, like former CEO Daniel Schwartz of Restaurant Brands International (parent company of Burger King), say they are most interested in people willing and able to learn."
So a question for the future generation remains - is Uni going to be the thing that becomes the barrier to entry for a job or CODING/ technical skills!?
Bloomreach raises 175 Million in Series F funding
Bloomreach has been on an interesting journey from enhancing commerce experiences for organizations that use it to enabling them provide better search experiences to customers. In the last week they raised 175 Mil?!
Read more
eBay to add Crypto as a payment option
The world of web 3 isn't going away anytime soon. Crypto is going to be everywhere. Do you have a wallet yet?
Prashant Jha
What does hiring decision on impact vs tenure have anything to do with 4 stages of competency model, digital maturity and transformations.
Hiring based on Impact vs Tenure
Talent acquisition is the hot piece with the global talent shortage - specially in tech.
Yet companies have not changed their draconian hiring practices and habits. Most still look at candidates with this lens of "why do you want to work for us" rather than understanding that its the other way around, "why should a candidate work for us".
I recently ran a poll on hiring practices to understand if people look at tenure vs impact.
As traditionally most hiring managers and HR folk I have worked with look at tenure and as someone who doesn't really have tenure but drives impact, it always comes up for me in the job hunt process.
The results - 71% of the people who voted on LinkedIn went with Impact over 18% on Tenure and there were some interesting viewpoints shared in the comments with some industry verticals such as recruiting where Tenure is more important to drive impact, so tenure is important consideration.
In my opinion, there is no correlation to experience and tenure, however most think experience is assumed to be gained over tenure rather than what the person does and impact they leave behind.
I have seen people in the same role for 3 - 5 years or even longer sometimes and are just coasting with no impact to the organization.
While for example in digital agency world we equate 1 year of digital agency experience to 5 or 7 years of client side experience simply because of the rate of change and impact that these roles go through in a short period of time.
When I am asked about the difference in client vs agency roles, I often tell people that "you get paid to shut up when you are working client side and paid to disrupt when you are agency side".
Post agency life, I had learnt to hit the ground running and found I do not need a traditional 3 - 6 months on-boarding period to understand a business.
I generally find that by 3 months into a role, I have delivered impactful results - most often what I call disrupted the business and turned it around or started the change for becoming better business.
Furthermore, post leaving these businesses, I have seen the changes multiply and improve in most of the organizations - not go backward.
I have also worked with plenty of A-teams where this is the same. Most often I have found contractors and consultants that are able to hit the ground running as there is a pressure to deliver results quickly.
Ability to change & rate of change vs degree of change with degree of impact
One of the counter arguments raised by Angus McDonald, a principal product manager at Terem Technologies towards the poll was that degree of change and degree of impact.
He believes, high degree of change may result in low degree of impact and that it takes time to lead, coach and mentor an organization through change. Further to that he believes, it takes time for others to change course and come on the journey with you. For you to replace the people that couldn't make the leap to a new future, and realize you might have lost something precious in the process. (Link)
While there is merit in this thought process, we need to consider rate of change and ability to change. More often than not, the hard truth to transformations is to get new teams in and restructure the organization.
In the 16 transformation programs that I have done in the last 4 years, I normally find there are 2 things when it comes to a successful transformation :
1. audience's ability to learn and change
2. audience's appetite for change
I often say this, "You can lead a horse to water but you can't make them drink the water".
Pro tip: This literally means sometimes you have to just move on. It's a skill to learn when is time to move on. Understanding the factors that drive change can help make this decision. Some organizations are just not ready for change and probably won't change. Something I tried to address in this paper with the differences between project organizations and product organizations.
KJ Sethna
Appetite for change, I have found comes with either realization that one is incompetent or a catalyst that forces it.
While ability to learn and change is something we need to look at the 4 stages of competence model.
4 Stages of Competence
A true story - in 2021, I got a role as head of product and technology in a pre-revenue startup that lasted only 3 months as we ran out of funding and couldn't find product market fit!
This startup was in the learning and development - learning analytics space and the founder had shared this model of competence with me which she has used for 20+ years to train and coach teams. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_stages_of_competence
It is important to note that people in the first level are hard to coach, mentor and lead.
Funny enough, one month in working with me she said she felt she was in the first level before I joined her team and through the discovery processes that I had facilitated into product strategy, her eyes had opened and then she was in the 2nd level where she realized her level of incompetency.
Her view is that people can be moved from unconscious incompetence to unconscious competence.
This is quite similar to that of spiritual enlightenment. My all time favorite quote from Arakawa comes to mind.
Quote
The beginning of wisdom, is to acknowledge you own ignorance. When you realize your own ignorance, you will admit to your own insignificance, and that will free your spirit for growth without limitations.
Arakawa Shichirobei
Catalyst for change
But wait - Enlightenment is not always possible.
This is where I believe ability and appetite for change comes in and rate of change applies. For instance, I have worked mainly in the retail industry where rate of change is fast. If you are unable to pivot your strategy weekly, monthly and sometimes daily you have already lost market share and the battle.
Why?
The stakes are high and there is always a catalyst for change which drives the appetite for change.
Change and the impact happens so fast its results and outcomes can be felt and seen instantaneously.
This is why so many retailers close their doors overnight as compared to other businesses in different industries where it takes years to see a failed strategy. So in that sense competition reacts fast, growth works in hyper growth not normal.
I have also found that this is where the digital maturity model comes in at an organization level. (Link below)
The teams that are able to adopt and change are the ones that have
- Accept their Maturity level and know they have to change
- Have the core competencies and ability to change and drive the results required
KJ Sethna
Opportunity Tree Mapping
I have been reading the book continuous discovery habits by Teresa Torres which was released last year. In this book she writes about opportunity tree mapping. I find this important method to note and use as a product manager as it drives outcome focused value creation. There is always 100s of ideas and opportunities to solve and sometimes many different solutions. This mapping method helps visualize, communicate and distinguish them during a discovery.
This below medium article by Susan Stavitzski is a high level summary of some of the key points in Teresa's book.
Susan Stavitzski
Click the below link to checkout the book on Amazon.
The Elephant Curve
A long paper from Jason Cohen, reviews the myth of hypergrowth especially explaining why VCs, founders & startup employees confuse quadratic growth for exponential growth. It also looks at why marketing is the reason that growth curves look consistent across even "exponential" successes of the last 2 decades. Not even Facebook, Slack, Hubspot, Trello, Lyft, or Dropbox ever had exponential growth, and each of them used marketing channels, multiple markets, new products, and new tactics to invigorate growth as old channels/tactics slowed.
5 Reasons why experimentation programs fail
In this brief article Jordana Rauber looks at on top 5 reasons why experimentation programs fail and how to overcome them. She also looks at how to overcome these challenges
- Lack of strategy
- Lack of a process
- Lack of data
- Failure to share learning
- Lack of executive buy in
Jordana Rauber
Mapping outcomes to Impact Metrics
Jeff Gothelf in this article advises that outcomes are a measure of human behavior and why these behaviors don’t happen in a vacuum and should be mapped to impact metrics.
Skip to content
Writing in Product and Tech - Stripe case study
Bandan Jot Singh, wrote a case study that brings forward one of the most important trends in product and tech world i.e Writing!
He advises on how to do it well and why how you write would determine multiple things in future :
i) Whether you get hired
ii) Whether you can influence people in your organization
iii) Whether you grow in your company
Bandan Jot Singh
Jason Knight shared an interesting podcast with no other than Melissa Perri.
I highly recommend spending the 45 mins listening to this. For those who have read Melissa's book Escaping the Build Trap, this is a great listen.
23 mins in she talks about her consulting experience at Spotify and the challenges the organization went through with standardization.
25-28 mins She also addresses a very interesting viewpoint of her views vs Marty Cagans.
Podcast Link
Start a business, its never too late.
Think its too late to found a business? Think again. Paul Tasner shares his story on how he became an entrepreneur at 66!
- Ukraine has received 37 Million in crypto donations
- Notably, UkraineDAO also sold a tokenized Ukrainian flag for 2,174 ETH ($5.95 million) to support local civilian organizations.
- Oil prices spiked to their highest level since 2008 last night after the US said it was discussing a potential ban on Russian supplies with its European allies
10 things to get your team to love Mondays
Andre Albuquerque shared 10 things that can get your team to love Mondays - post link He shares that there is significant research that shows >50% of people are unhappy at work. For a manager, this is like building a product and more than half of your users are unhappy before logging in, and while using it.
The 7 Type of Rests
Anuj Magazine shared an interesting Ted Talk by Saundra Dalton-Smith and created the below image from it post link.
Mentorship Program
Did you know I offer a 1:1 Mentorship program for those looking to being aspiring product managers or are product managers looking to unlock growth in their career and become group product managers.
Be sure to check it out or forward it to a friend who might need help.
As this is 1:1, I currently only have 2 spots left. I try to help as many people as I can at a time, but I find it cyclic - where people I help find their next career move and then free me up for taking on more mentees.
KJ Sethna
