the playbook part 3: talent management
sunk thought’s - the playbook
“the playbook” is a mini-book delivered in 8 posts (the forward and seven chapters.) The cocoon that will help your team grow into a product engineering monarch butterfly.
Talent/People Management
Hiring, Engaging, Growing, & Retaining Talent
The world is awash with bad people managers, but some of that is owed to how they are used, how much authority they are granted, and how they are taught to think about their role.
Contrary to popular belief, leadership is not a rank. It is a role.
As a people manager you are generally expected to do a few things:
Recruit and hire new talent; onboarding them as seamlessly as possible (getting everything they need signed, set up, and read to be able to know and do what is expected of them.)
Build relationships with all employees. Work to ensure the employee is happy, getting opportunities to grow in their role and achieve their goals, and ensuring they are as effective as possible in that role.
Build a cohesive chemistry and sense of belonging within your team.
Evangelize the company culture and ensure everyone on the team is aligned with said culture as well as the constraints of their individual projects when making decisions.
Act as an employee interface to the company to help them resolve any needs or problems they might have.
Various up-level reporting and administrative duties (periodical planning, progress reports, cross team collaboration, performance reviews, and more)
Hiring
Hiring is really hard, but sometimes we make it harder than it needs to be. Some interviewers attitude is to seek to disqualify candidates when you need to be seeking to qualify them instead.
So, how do we attract, qualify, and hire the best talent for our culture and skill needs? How do we engage, grow, and retain that talent? Here are some thoughts.
What are the Attributes of Your Best Employees?
I know I mentioned this at least two times in the previous chapter. So, isn’t it a nice little benefit that you’ll be reusing that research here? Bring it back!
Zig Ziglar has a story where he asked business leaders to define their perfect employees. He pushed them for over an hour until they had written out 114 attributes on the board. He then wrote an “A” next to all the attitudes and a “S” next to each skill. 107 of the 114 attributes listed by these leaders were attitudes, not skills.
“Hire for attitude first,” was his conclusion. Worker’s attitude, motivation, and cultural alignment are the strongest indicators of success within your organization. Even more so than their skills (which can be learned.)
The Standard of Qualification
This isn’t to say you want to be hiring incompetent employees that are super likeable. You want to be qualifying and hiring people who have similar skill sets and attitudes of your best people. No less.
Your organization may use any number of ranking methodologies, but I lean toward is the “No Sevens” method. I didn’t invent it, but I have used and like it.
In this method evaluators rank candidates on the role’s important metrics (skills and attitudes) on a scale of one to ten. The one exception is, evaluators are not allowed to use the number seven. This makes your team move past the often default/easy seven rating and make a difficult choice: “Is this candidate a ‘D-plus’ or a ‘B-minus’?”
You then rate the candidate for every skill that’s important for the role, for the team, as well as the attitudes important to your organization’s culture.
I also like having two free form inputs for written “Observations” and “Intuitions.”
Observations are demonstrated by the candidate in either submitted work or in the interview process.
Intuitions are feelings or hypothesis that the evaluator has about the candidate that are not quite scientific observations. They’re not sure, but they get this feeling...
Quantifying the Value of Adjacent Skills & Superpowers
There are bonus skills (skills not required for the job they are doing) that every employee brings with them to your company. These skills can help hires improve potential deficits in required skills, they can prove helpful as other teams (which use another technology) grow, they could be useful in the future if your team makes a technology change, or maybe said skill is just glaringly underrepresented by your team. All their skills help.
Just as with the primary skills and cultural attitudes that stars in this role posses, evaluators also have a section to add other “Adjacent Skills” and “Superpowers” to the candidate’s evaluation, along with “no sevens” ratings for each.
Adjacent Skills are skills that translate to the primary job function of this or another internal role.
Superpowers are skills that your team is trying to add to the team wherever possible.
Finding Your Team’s Baseline for the Role
Of course, before you run this exercise on new job candidates, you must run it on yourselves. Employees who weren’t interviewed thus should go through the process of being rated themselves. They should rate both themselves and the employees they work with.
These scores can then be averaged out and used to divine a baseline for new hires, but these records are also helpful beyond hiring. They can help you understand employee growth potential as well as identify possible cross-functional usage of your team in a pinch.
More concrete examples on what this looks like later in “Evaluation of Candidates,” but this will suffice for now.
Techno-Evangelism Part 1: Job Postings, Messaging, & Requirements
In the beginning, there was your team. It was good. Now you’re growing, and you’re going to make it better than ever. You know what boxes the people you want on board check (their skills, and their attitudes.) Now, how do we attract them to our cause?
I’m certainly not the first or last to say this, but job postings as a whole basically leave much to be desired. Agreed? How do you stand out from the average uninspiring job posting in what is your organization’s first communication with this valuable human resource?
To prescribe heavily is to miss the point of standing out and being your true self as an org, but here are some of my thoughts on the subject.
First, lead with “guild” or “team” culture. Have these micro-organizations define their group ethos. How do they express organizational culture and what makes their jobs awesome? Lead with these expressions and your team can act as a magnet for like-minded talent.
Next, define the cultural attributes you’re looking for and how they would be utilized by those in this role.
Only then do we list experience and other “legacy” requirements. Again, ask yourself why something is required. For example: Does this role actually require a Comp-Sci degree if I meet all your other requirements?
When qualified candidates are hard to attain, causing who knows how many of them to skip applying due to a deficient “requirement” that ultimately doesn’t actually qualify or disqualify one to do the job is a :facepalm:.
Remember, you’re selling with this communication. This is a pseudo-marketing document. Make a pitch that will be remembered and inspire.
Techno-Evangelism Part 2: Interview Process
Interviewing is the worst. Almost no one likes it the more they do it, on either side. Your employees interviewing and candidates are both doing their best to keep upbeat, on point, and practical. Both want to figure out if they have a future together. Both of you have other options.
Given the state of the process allow me to define the minimum requirements of a successful interview process. Anything else is ceremony.
“Who are they?” It must tell us who this person is. What motivates them, what tells us they have the ideals and attitudes we champion?
“Do they have the capacity to do the job?” It must show us how well they can actually perform or learn to perform the duties of the role - in the real world, not an abstracted version of reality.
“Are they on our level?” It must leave evaluators with an impression of this person’s real world skill levels in various areas, their ability to grow, and how that tracks to success on their teams.
“What are the risks?” What are the things that tell us that they aren’t a fit for either our culture or the job. What is the likelihood this candidate would fail in our structure?
“Are they a fit elsewhere?” Don’t be so eager to lose good people. If they aren’t a fit for this role, is there another role they are qualified for?
How you answer these questions is really based a lot on your comfort levels, ethos, and ideology. Some things you’re doing are obviously effective, keep them.
Consider also how you might spend the same amount of time (or better yet, less) actually qualifying a candidate. Perhaps it’s doing something new, or an alternate take on something you’re already doing really well. Just make sure it reflects both your culture and the real world role.
Is there a way to let them perform in a simulated environment that is familiar? Is there a way to test their teamwork and other soft skills? Let’s try.
A “Group Exercise” Interview
This is an idea I’m really into right now. We already all have our candidates sit down with multiple people, usually those with their skills or that they might interface with in that role. I’m going to walk you through how it might work for two different roles on the same team, with the same evaluator resource requirements.
Let’s say you’re hiring for a front end developer and a product manager for a nimble “pizza team” that usually consists of front end devs, back end devs, designers, and product managers.
So, our two candidates need to meet with at least one front end dev, back end dev, designer, and product manager. I suggest having this whole group meet together (before or after the individual interviews.)
Then, rather than having the candidates tap dancing for our evaluators’ pleasure, we make everyone sweat a little.
So, in each exercise, the person with the role the candidate is up for (front end engineer or product manager) acts as the Session Leader for the exercise. They will pick a sealed envelope out of a pile. Inside this envelope is a task.
Example: Create a functional web app I can use to keep score of bowling games on my phone. Then write a proposal for a phone app that uses the device cameras and sensors to automatically score games. Provide a development plan and timeline estimate for this plan.
This person communicates to the team the challenge in front of them and the time limit. During the process the team works together, presenting their ideas and work to the GM.
During this phase I think there are times when providing additional stress on the situation might also help suss out attitudes and teamwork. Perhaps time is suddenly shortened midway through, perhaps there are pitfalls built in. I think there are lots of fun ways to test a candidate’s ability to actually work with others, roll with the punches, and observe their demeanor here.
As the team and GM work from concept to a deliverable with a candidate, evaluators will inevitably have a better sense of what it is like working with this candidate.
Always Be Selling While Interviewing
50% of every evaluator’s job is to make sure this person is interested in working at your organization, qualified or not.
It’s important that they are trained and understand what they can do to help excite candidates about your team. Some of those things are:
Be Interested in the candidate, who they are, and treat them as though they are already a colleague. They might be soon, after all.
Be Honest, but never negative or disparaging.
Be Fair to the candidate, and judge them as you would judge yourself. Use your skill and empathy to gauge others. Ask yourself if you would have passed your own interview, when you started here.
And Share a story about a recent project that epitomizes how your team works at its best or something about how a colleague has inspired or mentored you.
Ultimately, if they are qualified, we want them to join. It’s important to start with this point of view from the first handshake or phone call through the last interview.
Evaluation of Candidates
There are so many ways to go wrong here. So, let’s start by reiterating some points. The job here is to remove bias from evaluators, define fair and realistic exercises, and then a method to quantify evaluator’s impressions (both concrete and intuitive.)
Homework is okay. Motivated candidates will comply with reasonable opportunities to demonstrate real world work capability. Asking for a screen capture or a video of them working through part of the process might be too much. Less invasively, you could ask a coder to check in every thing they tried, even if they know they are going to delete and try again. This demonstrates not just the final answer but their thought process.
I could go either way on allowing evaluators to see their own personal evaluation (or letting them see their team’s averages) in the same format they are going to evaluate this candidate. It might add a bias or resentment? It might make their expectations of candidates more realistic. I’m not 100% sure there’s a right answer.
The individual or committee that do ultimately make the decision will of course have that information. Showing both the evaluator and role averages, in line with the averages of the candidate’s evaluation scores. They’ll also have observations and intuitions. This is where things tread into a “more art than science,” grayish area.
In the end, we have to take what we can quantify (both cultural and skill evaluations) and come up with some sort of internal math that then also takes note of non-scientific input (intuitions of evaluators) and any potential skill profile risks and spit out a result.
Techno-Evangelism Part 3: The Offer to Hired
This chapter has gotten a bit long, but we’re getting somewhere. Now, take a second to quantify what it’s cost to find this qualified and culturally aligned human resource. How much in job ads, recruiter time, how much in pro-rated evaluator salaries not performing their core duties has been spent? Let’s reel them in before they say no and that cost starts all over on someone new!
If your job post was pseudo-marketing, and your interview process is 50% marketing, then this stage is 100% full court press. Make an impression.
Your offer should be glossy, exciting, personalized. Make them feel special, accomplished, and understood. Put some effort into it. Get people excited!
Is there a way you can use a non-compensation lever in a way specific to them? Perhaps Joan loves traveling, so perhaps offer her the chance to work remote for one month a year? The more individualized the better.
Techno-Evangelism Part 4: Day One
Day one is about making folks feel at home and ready to begin working. Go the extra mile to welcome them.
Do something nice for them, that’s specific to them. Like what? Maybe you could stalk them on instagram? Then, you might know to get Sally a cute St Louis Blues jersey because you saw her instagram post at the Stanley Cup Championship parade doing keg stands with her grandma.
Get crazy. It’s a one time cost that pays dividends.
It’s also imperative that you help them make their way and introduce them to some potential friends.
Engagement Rocket Fuel: Fostering Employee Connections and Friendships
This is not just touchy feely stuff. There’s a lot of research and case studies around employee happiness, gratitude, sense of purpose, and friendships within your company that dictate how engaged an employee is.
Fostering connections and friendships is tricky. You have to allow and plan for it, yet it has to feel authentic. It has to be true to who you are as an organization and fun. It’s a tightrope walk. It’s all about that trust word again.
As a remote org, my last company would get all our employees together twice a year at some different location (Jackson Hole, Costa Rica, The Dominican Republic, etc.) This gave everyone an entire week where we were all doing things together, making meals together, and living under the same roof for 6 days.
Employees who had joined several months before their first hack week would say, “I now understand what this company is all about. I get it now.” I figured at scale I could just do a hack week with a different segment of employees every week, all year round. Just evangelizing and allowing room for connection. Let me know if you need a guy to execute that for ya. I’m in.
Techno-Evangelism Part 5: Growing Together
Nothing excites me more about hiring folks than having a hunch about their growth potential. Finding diamonds in the rough, as it were.
People are not fixed resources. Everyone is growing in their abilities based on their experience, intellectual curiosity, motivation, goals, etc., but we are all growing. It’s important to factor this into your understanding of each employee so you can understand and channel their motivation for growth to effective ends for both of you.
Mentorships, brown bags, conferences, constructive feedback, and exposure to new challenges are a few of the levers you can use to grow talent. Test and iterate.
Hopefully your org will grow too, right? Then you’ll need them to be ready to grow with you as your scope of work and complexity expand alongside your company.
Speaking of growth, “A Growth Rosetta Stone” is up later, in part 6 of this series. In that, I’ll show some parallel ways codebases and organizations scale up together over time.
For now, however, we’re going to talk about the Product Management process for a couple chapters. It will help us understand how these teams work and ultimately how to scale them in ways that maximizes your increasing team resources.
