topgrading interview Archives - Palarino Partners

Why Must Product Organizations Develop Sustainable Product Visions And Strategies?

May 19, 2022 by Dane Palarino

With changing perspectives worldwide, many new trends are initiating changes in the organizations’ core values. Sustainability is that one change. Consumers and the workforce have become highly critical of the products and services they pay for or get paid for. One way to describe this change is conscious consumerism. Another term could be green products. A set of two simple phrases is leading the evolution of the current product market into a space that was unimaginable two decades ago. Thus, product organizations need the best product management recruitment agency to help recruit future-ready employees. It is essential to understand that green markets do not emerge from just thinking. Product organizations need to take concrete actions to build innovative and sustainable solutions. It can be done when companies embrace sustainable business practices by bridging the gap between knowing and doing.

In general, a sustainable business model stands on three pillars- economic, environmental, and social. Before we understand the importance of sustainable product vision for product organizations, let us briefly know what product vision means.

What Do We Mean By Product Vision?

A product vision is like a map that guides you in reaching or achieving your product targets. It encompasses all the steps from the idea to bringing a product into reality. It saves your team from wandering aimlessly and helps your business plan and execute the product demands correctly. It helps your product team align products with the customers’ needs, i.e., staying on track.

A sustainable vision would mean finding a route to eco-friendly products and bringing a holistic change to society.

What Is A Sustainable Product Vision?

In brief, sustainable product vision refers to companies’ impact on society or the environment. Product teams would focus on one global problem and try to incorporate those visions into their business model that will help in bringing a positive change. A product manager needs to be intuitive enough to understand which issue needs the company’s attention then and in the future. Sustainable business strategies help in addressing several global problems, such as:

Income inequality
Depletion of natural resources
Human rights issues
Fair working conditions
Pollution
Racial injustice
Gender inequality
Climate change

Although it may seem as if being sustainable is purely ideological, the companies that incorporate green practices benefit extensively from it. Because they understand that a successful business strategy runs on three P’s- people, planet, and profit. Obviously, a product organization needs to be financially well to do good.

How Can A Sustainable Business Approach Benefit Your Business?

At first, it may sound like a bluff, but the sustainable approach to business does boost a business’s overall performance. Driving environmental and social change can also contribute to your organization’s overall success rate. ESG (Environment, social, and governance) ratings measure how ethical and sustainable practices a business operates. And as per McKinsey, the businesses with high ESG ratings often outperform their not-so-sustainable competitors. Investing in sustainability strategies can take your business to experience long-term benefits. Here’s how going green, inclusive, diverse, empathetic, and more can help your product business:

Builds and Protects brand image

Every product organization’s success depends on its reputation. You can imagine how much trouble an oil spill caused by your factories can bring to your PR department. Those days are gone when a user was just happy with the quality of products; today’s user demands transparency in your product development procedure. Therefore, following a sustainable approach will help your brand look credible and trustworthy.

Being purpose-driven gives you a competitive advantage.

Being purpose-driven may seem like an expensive choice, but it will get you a talented, curious, and motivated workforce. In addition, you will add value to your brand by ensuring a minimum carbon footprint.

Conscious demands and Vigilant consumers

According to reports, people today prefer to buy products that do not involve coercion or damage to workers and the environment. While absolute sustainability may be hard to achieve, still little steps can bring you loyal customers.

Final Notes

Today, sustainability as a term is familiar to every school-going child. They know the basic definition of sustainability- meeting the needs of the present without compromising the needs of future generations. That’s why product organizations need to know who they’re building products for the generation leading the light of change. Indeed, the market has become increasingly dynamic, but that doesn’t lift the responsibility of making a positive difference from your shoulders. Product managers need to be more flexible and interdisciplinary to lead the product teams for a better future. It is the beginning of a new era where our future product managers can usher in a much-needed change in every product industry. If you need more information about the role of product managers, visit our website.

Product Manager Interview Questions To Keep In Mind In 2022

May 10, 2022 by Dane Palarino

One of the most daunting tasks for product team leaders is to hire the best product managers for your company. There is no perfect way to hire the ideal candidate. It is all about selecting the right one from the sea of unicorns. And how do product manager headhunters do that? By asking the right product manager interview questions. Following a cookie-cutter approach is not the right way to hire managers. You need to have a solid strategy to determine an excellent fit for your organization.

The job description of a product manager varies from company to company. For instance – sometimes your organization needs a technical expert, or other times it needs a person who has hands-on experience in marketing.

Getting the right candidate adds an invaluable asset to your product team. But the moment you get it wrong, your company’s reputation is at stake. So, what is the solution in this case? The key to selecting the right candidate is to ask them the right questions. These questions will help reveal the value and intentions of the candidate.

Let’s find out the key product manager interview questions that you may ask from the candidates to select the best product manager for your company.

What Is The Role Of The Product Manager?

Knowing the answer to this question will get you an understanding of what the candidate thinks about this role. There are different types of organizations. So, people have different expectations for the role of a product manager. This question helps to give a clear idea that candidates know about the job they are applying for and do not feel disappointed once they start working in this role.

Do You Have Any Experience In Product Management?

The employer should have an idea of the candidate’s skills and effectiveness you bring to the table from day one. You want to know the kind of training the candidate requires with respect to the new organization. You may also need to know how the candidate deals with challenging situations when it comes to product management.

The education and professional experience of the candidate may differ. The candidate may have worked in the field of product management. They may discuss their past employment experience to describe the training they have undergone. For instance – A candidate may say, “In addition to my training, I learned different skills in the field of data visualization and market analysis.” An experience like this may impress the employers to a large extent.

Describe Your Technical Skills As A Product Manager?

Usually, product managers won’t keep a focus on the technical questions related to software development or engineering unless the candidate has specifically come for the technical product manager. But you might still want to check the technical knowledge of the candidate for his/her ability to communicate with the product development engineers. So, candidates should come prepared to speak about whatever skills they have in an easy manner.

If a candidate is applying for a specialized area like technical product manager, he/she should be able to clearly explain the technological concepts in his area of expertise.

What Is Your Favorite Product, And What Do You Like About It?

This question will let you know what the candidate feels about the products and do they value them? It will make you determine what the candidate finds useful about the product. Is it the product’s appearance? Or endurance? Or technicalities that make him adore the product. Ask them to critically examine the product they love. This question gives you an idea of how the candidate finds ways to improve them.

What Is Your Way Of Communicating The Product Strategy?

This question will help you determine the tools and methods that a candidate uses to get the tasks done. It also gives you the knowledge on whether the candidate is using data to back up the things or using a roadmap to meet the deadlines? Healthy communication is the key to developing a good product strategy and ultimately making the product a success.

Way To Become A Good Product Manager

The employers in an organization conduct a thorough process to find a suitable product manager for their organization. They conduct a topgrading interview for the perfect match. They believe that core competencies, developing a good product roadmap, flexibility to adapt to new features, and responding proactively to new obstacles are the key things that make a great product manager.

To Sum It Up

Conducting product management interviews is one of the important and final steps in determining the right fit for this role. Undoubtedly, every interview is different. So, use the same set of questions to evaluate the candidates. Track the answers of the candidates in the document to review it afterwards. It will give you a standard mode of comparison between candidates. After selecting the candidate, make the best offer and develop the best management strategy.

Top myths not to believe when recruiting product talent

March 28, 2022 by Dane Palarino

Product managers are responsible for the company’s production section in design, strategies to increase sales, and the stock and demand maintenance in the market. But the company faces issues that they cannot judge the right people, and hiring for this post could cause considerable losses to the company. Sometimes, the candidates are not capable enough to consider if they are fit and if they will be able to deliver anything close to the company’s expectations. This is a diverse profession, and the recruiter needs to understand all the various branches and judge them accordingly. In the case of product managers NYC, the selection process should not be as simple as that of other mainstream jobs, but it should be to judge if the candidate is the right fit to fulfill the organization’s demands. With the conventional thought process, certain myths persist in the recruiters’ minds that need to be removed.

Don’t Refrain From Rejecting Candidates Based On Myths.

There is a prevalent myth about the number of candidates and numerous unfilled positions. Still, less profit is better than huge losses. As a result of this, companies offer great salaries to existing PMs.

If you recruit the wrong person, it might have a negative or no impact on the business. But companies should work on marketing so that the market becomes the employer’s market, following which you will have more applications and selections. In this case, It will be better as you would also be able to save in terms of the salaries.

The Diversity And Expertise

The market is full of companies offering different products and services. It is time to omit the conventional recruitment process in which people were hired based on their experience in the field. Still, we need to understand that this is a more intelligent generation. Recruiters should consider both skills and experience equally as the chances are high that a less experienced individual might have greater skills and vice versa. Sometimes, a person might have expertise in some other sector, but he might have skills that just need a little polishing from the company’s side. Many people like challenges, and the young generation is always ready to face challenges and try to be on the winning side.

Strategic Mindset And Collaborative Activity

While interviewing candidates, ask questions that help you judge the person’s strategizing capabilities and the collaborative capability to know if they will be able to work effectively with the team to deliver desired results. A person with the abilities mentioned above will help him lead a team and execute plans successfully.

Recruit For Fulfillment Of Your Needs

One mistake that the companies make is looking for people with a specific list of qualities, which are the people who hardly exist. This is a wrong process that people follow as they end up hiring people with qualities that they sometimes don’t even need. Instead, they should hire people with rates to solve problems like tech or sales or their products. But here, understanding the company’s demands is one of the most important things if you wish to expand your business.

Hiring Companies To Recruit Production Managers

This is one of the best steps that one can take to hire the right people for such an important post. Hire recruitment companies that have appropriate experience and expertise to do this for you. We, at Palarino Partners, have delivered around a hundred successful recruitments to companies. These recruitments have provided even more than the clients’ expectations. We have done around $100 million recruitment for different companies.

Having been in the corporate world for quite a long time, we understand the difficulties people face in hiring Product Managers and because of the mis-hiring. We first understand your company’s demands and the technicalities and expertise of the candidates; that’s why we work hard and consider several factors to find a perfect match for your company. We are the best among product manager recruitment agencies that strongly believe in client satisfaction, and we look forward to building long-term relations with our clients. We have helped many esteemed companies from silicon valley by providing them with the best fit for their positions. We promise you the best services at the best prices in the market. Do check our website to know more about us and our services.

How To Approach Breaking Into Product Management: 3 Key Tips

March 23, 2022 by Dane Palarino

With changing market dynamics and customer base dynamics, there is an increasing need for professionals who work closely with a diverse team to deliver a product or service. The role of a product manager starts from the idea of a thing. The next step is to give form to this idea. Thus, product development involves a lot of thinking, analysis, re-thinking, etc. This continuous iterative process gives severe headaches to an ordinary employee, but a product manager copes with pressure easily. With the increasing demand, the companies want a professional to help them look at the build-up process of their product. That’s why product manager interview questions are so hard to crack. Before dwelling on the three essential tips, let’s learn a little about the types of product management interviews.

Common Types Of PM Interviews

A field as diverse as product management can involve a different set of interviews relative to the company’s scale and product. Nevertheless, the interviewer is trying to look into the brain and attitude of the candidate indirectly to judge if he fits the role at the respective company. An interviewer tests a candidate on these hard and soft skills like good communication, analytical skills, prioritization skills, etc. While skills are pretty similar, their application differs, which differentiates in interview type. Here we have discussed three types of interviews like

Basic Product Sense

These interviews primarily focus on questions like describing your favorite product. It is a form of an unstructured interview focusing on generic description and critique methods of products.

Case-Study

The product management interviews have evolved into more structured and specific product questions. Typically, these interviews want a candidate to develop a product strategy. The candidate must state his reasons for the proposed plan and give a brief analysis.

Cross-Functional

Product management is an interdisciplinary field with people from all professions. The primary purpose of these interviews is to assess how easily the candidate can collaborate with other teams.

No matter which type of interview you had, the essential criteria always test your soft and hard skills. That was about the interview type, but first and foremost is to understand if you fit into product management or not.

Tips To Get Into The Role Of A Product Manager

Getting into product management is challenging. It would help if you had a great hand at performing diverse tasks and solving problems. Your interviewer is responsible for finding the best fit for the company and teams to lead the projects. Things are drifting in product management to elevate up from the old biases.

So, worry not and consider these tips to approach breaking into PM.

Understand PM’s Role

PM is not just a job; instead, it is an art of getting things done. If you are eager about breaking into PM, devote time to learn the craft of PM’ing. Learning about PMs’ role in a company, skills required, tasks executed by a PM, etc. These questions will help you dive into the job of PM as a beginner. Other things you can consider doing is:

Learning about some great PMs and their art of product managing
Getting in touch with a PM to understand their high-low career points as a PM
Ask questions by going away from the basic know-how types like working with cross-functional teams.

PMs interact with many professionals every day from all careers like engineers, designers, communicators, etc. Learning from a PM about their unique perspective will help you better understand this job profile.

Learn And Apply The Craft

After learning your PM lesson, it is time to practice it. You can start focusing on a product you love and looking for ways to improve it. Start by incorporating user research into your daily checklist. Because knowing about the pain points of existing users will help you analyze the prospective scope for changes. With a valid reason for the change, you can now move on to defining the new feature and, at last, determining its practicality.

This technique forces your mind to answer the why-question about a product and helps you learn how to make wireframes.

Deliver The Value

People often confuse the importance of value with ability. But, value generally sheds light on your professional career, like the projects you have worked upon, your productivity scale, etc. The best way to identify and then deliver value to the company is by sharing your work on social media platforms like LinkedIn. This pm-style work speaks volumes about your expertise and niche area. You can also add your research in the intro mail about your finished product manager jobs to give a quick inside view of your skills.

Conclusion

With this, it must be apparent that breaking into PM takes a lot of hard work from your side. A PM’s job search does not end with dropping a resume. Also, the role of a product manager does not end with product delivery only. A PM’s job is to take the product forward, even if there’s no clear way. Sounds complex, but everything gets easier once you get into the position.

Interview Techniques For Product Managers: A Comprehensive Guide

February 8, 2022 by Dane Palarino

The hiring manager’s most important responsibility is to find a suitable candidate for the product manager job. If you make a recruiting mistake, one of two things will happen: either you will hire the wrong candidate or lose the best candidate. The overall impact on the organization might be essential. Therefore, it’s important to remember that the interview has a lot of ramifications. Hiring the wrong applicant might result in a blunder, resulting in a loss for the firm. It will be viewed as an expensive misstep if it misses a valued asset. There are several techniques for the topgrading interview to avoid making mistakes throughout the recruiting process. Understanding and implementing effective interview tactics will improve interview skills and lead to better hiring. As a result, in this comprehensive guide, you will learn the most critical interview tactics for a more sure hire.

Job Interview Techniques Of Various Types

Thinking about the interview in context and, most crucially, thinking about the exact plan for the interview ahead of time. Unique and varied approaches recognized at the interview should be used to get the most out of it.

The following are the most common forms of project manager job interviews:

Phone interviews
Behavioral interviews
Video Interviews.

The interview approaches will be used as a weapon by the recruiting manager to ensure that the job is done correctly. Overall, the candidate, team, and organization all benefit from a seamless interview process, which leads to a better outcome.

Techniques For Conducting A Telephone Interview

The telephone interview is the first stage of an interview. The first impression, as they say, is the last. So, in each interview, this is the determining element. As a recruiting manager, this process allows you to evaluate the best prospect. The most important thing is that you’ll have the ideal reason to call them for a personal interview. The telephonic stage of the interview is very crucial since it aids in the development of a positive relationship with the candidate. Your interview will ultimately define the firm, which will work both ways since the candidate will also have an impression of the organization. Consider the following points before the telephonic interview:

With your collaborative hiring team, plan and pre-determine your interview questions.
During the phone interview process, flexibility is essential.
Conduct preliminary research before the phone interview.
Provide opportunities for your applicants to ask questions.
After the phone interview, prepare them for the next stages.

Techniques For Conducting Behavioral Interviews

A behavioral interview evaluates the candidate’s conduct as well as their reaction in response to the questions you’ve asked them. On the other hand, the questions require more depth and analysis to assess the candidate’s critical thinking.

For example, you may ask questions like, “Describe how you would handle a change in work routine and surroundings.” Please check the following before the interview:

It’s all about the questions in behavioral interviews, so pick them carefully.
Don’t change the questions you ask from one applicant to the next. Maintain your consistency.
When you have an excellent collaborative hiring team, behavioral interviews work best.

Techniques For Conducting A Virtual Interview

Because of the impact of COVID on the digital platform, most business professionals and individual processes have gone online. So the interview was a frantic procedure in which someone had to make the applicant feel at ease and perform at their best. Because of the safety safeguards and the social distancing, the interview has been completely transformed into an online procedure. As a result, virtual interviews are increasingly popular among interviewers and prove fruitful.

For employers, here are the top four video interviewing tactics.

Put it to the test first!
Provide video conferencing software instructions to your prospects.
Record your interviews (with permission, of course).
Before you begin the video interview, find a peaceful location with a solid internet connection.

Techniques For Conducting Interviews

Interviewing prospects may be a stressful experience, especially if this is your first time.

There’s a lot of pressure since hiring a new employee carries a lot of weight. This choice can potentially change people’s lives, as evidenced by the interview. The perfect individual for your business and team, as well as your reputation and career growth, must be recruited. As a result, you should consider interview technique training for yourself and your team, learning various efficient interview tactics to have in your arsenal for many years to come.

To Summarize: Employer-Friendly Interviewing Techniques

Many interview approaches go unnoticed when we’re pressed for time to fill a job.

You may develop a toolkit of excellent interview tactics with the proper training to serve you well throughout your interviewing career.

Spend some time planning and preparing in detail. When a failed hire falls out after a few months, you’ll notice the difference between a successful long-term employee and the need to restart the hiring process.