Building teams, part one: the best answer ever to the most important interview question.
“I am good at apologizing.”
Building product teams, part one
Building products that matter starts with hiring and measuring high-functioning product teams. I wrote about measuring product teams in parts one, two, and three of the metrics series.
Hiring is a broad topic I’m splitting across another series of articles, starting with building well-rounded teams. I’ll follow up with musings about the product manager “programming test,” hiring for product skill sets or domain expertise, matching on core values, and creating a great new hire onboarding experience.
Today, let’s talk about the most important interview question and the best answer ever.
“The Question”
We reached the most-important-question-of-the-interview moment.
“Tell me one thing you are really good at but hate doing and would be a happier person if you never had to do that thing again.”
Her answer floored me.
“I am good at apologizing.”
Building teams, avoiding super chickens
Building high-performing product teams and hiring great product managers is hard. Assembling smart, technically gifted, independent-minded, critical thinkers into a group that meshes together, executes flawlessly, and runs down the mission? That’s impossible, right?
I failed several times to build teams that thrived. They worked well together, but correcting the course was challenging when things didn’t go as planned. Was it me? The team? Individual PMs? The company?
Conventional wisdom recommends hiring high achievers with a well-rounded skill set who are smarter than you. This is reasonable advice. However, focusing on hiring well-rounded individuals doesn’t always result in building well-rounded teams. Research backs this up.
Purdue University biologist William Muir conducted a fascinating experiment on chickens. He grouped average egg-laying chickens and prolific egg layers (so-called “super chickens”) and measured flock health and egg production over six generations. The “average” chickens did well, living harmoniously and producing plenty of eggs. All but three of the super chickens pecked each other to death.
Margaret Heffernan has a fantastic TED Talk about the “super chickens” research and applies the concept to building business teams. In it, she says the super-chickens suffer a fundamental flaw: achievement comes at the expense of others’ success. This manifests in the business world as the pecking order, a zero-sum competitiveness drilled into us from a very young age.
How do you find the best people for the job without building teams of super chickens?
Be careful what you get good at
Companies generally don’t care what you love; they care what you are good at. We agree to exchange service for money. When you are good at something, your company will ask you to do it. Expecting otherwise is, well, foolish.
You’ll likely have done a task–statistical analysis–often and well. I crunch numbers! But, feeling no passion for number crunching, you soon tire of it at your current job. Bosses and colleagues praise your statistical analytics skills, and maybe even endorse you on LinkedIn, so you include it on your resume.
Your profile advertises your recent experience, and statistical analysis is the first (maybe second) bullet. I crunch numbers! Your next boss sees that and says, ooh, I need someone who can do statistical analysis. You get the job, probably for more money, and you immediately hate it without quite knowing why.
Mix and match passions
For most of my career, I hired product managers based on skill sets and achievements. One day, I remembered an early mentor’s guidance. “Always hire people based on their passions, not their skills. Anyone can become good at something, but everyone is always amazing at what they are most passionate about. Find people with a mix of passions, and you’re bound to have a good team.”
The advice continued; figure out what the combined skill set of your high-functioning team looks like, then look for people whose passions match those different skills. Don’t try to find perfectly well-rounded individuals; focus on building a well-rounded team.
I started asking candidates about their passions, and candidates dutifully enumerated lists of skills at which they excelled.
I was frustrated with their answers, unaware I was asking the wrong question.
Humans suffer from an unavoidable negativity bias. I explored the concept, experimented, and learned useful trickery. The fastest way to get people to tell you what they love is by first getting them to admit what they hate.
So I invented the most-important-question-of-the-interview moment.
“Tell me one thing you are really good at but hate doing and would be a happier person if you never had to do that thing again.”
Let them answer. It usually takes a while. And then follow up with, “Well, what do you really love doing?”
When the mix of passions matches the skills you need, you’ll likely have a great product team.
The best answer ever
Back to our story.
I interviewed a woman who told me her superpower was her disarming demeanor. I felt disarmed and liked her immediately. We talked more, and I got a strong sense she would be perfect for a customer-facing, outbound role.
Then, I asked, “Tell me one thing you are really good at but hate doing and would be a happier person if you never had to do that thing again.”
I promised to listen without judgment.
The answer went something like this.
“I am good at apologizing.”
A software deployment went horribly wrong for a customer, and the woman’s VP was unavailable. The company sent her to the customer to do a mea culpa. And it worked. Her disarming demeanor defused the situation and saved the customer. Colleagues heaped her with praise.
So the company asked her again. And again. Until finally, disarming angry customers was practically the only thing she did anymore. She was praised, promoted, and the subject of a CEO callout during an all-hands. And she hated it.
Bosses and colleagues never suspected she disguised debilitating introversion behind her disarming demeanor. She was anxious and miserable in her job, but the misery came with satisfaction from doing something well and succeeding for a larger purpose. And she was doing something super valuable for the team–getting deep customer insights about the product. Over and over, she psyched herself to meet with angry customers, only to spend days, sometimes weeks, recovering from each encounter.
Superpower, indeed.
So I asked the follow-up, “What do you really love doing?”
“Writing the story of the product.”
To write the story she explained, she dove deep into the backlog. This was her passion.
She was very technical and had transitioned to product management from a software development role. She got along well with developers, who were similarly disarmed and trusted her technical acumen. Development progressed smoothly with fewer “I don’t get why we are doing this” conversations. Product quality increased because she knew what to ask during planning and what to look for when accepting work.
Framing is everything
Imagine if I’d asked the question differently. “Tell me about a time when you had an outsized impact on your product, company, or customer.”
Posed this way, she answers with the story about the mea culpa, the customer's happiness, and the praise and promotions. But she doesn’t tell you how much she hates it. You hire her, ask her to do that job, and she leaves prematurely, frustrated and resentful. You find out what she loves from her exit interview with HR.
Interviews should make space for storytelling and conversation and create the conditions for a genuine answer. You give her permission to tell the part of the story she’d be otherwise reluctant to tell. The status quo doesn’t care about passion; it cares only for skills and achievements.
I hired her, of course, promising not to send her to mea culpa meetings. She fitted into the team brilliantly.
Ask now
Ask your team members this question now. Learn whether your team’s passions mix well or whether you are trying to manage a flock of super chickens. Reorganize them, hire new members to fill the gaps, or replace people who don’t fit the team. Lead by knowing your team members love what they are good at, and detect when they don’t before the misery wins and team morale suffers. Place every team member in the right seat.