20Product: The Five Step Process to Hiring the Best Product People, The Four Core Skills the Best PMs Need to Have, The Two Product Documents that Drive World Class Product Teams & Why the Best PMs are Writers with Scott Williamson, Former CPO @ Gitlab
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
The Twenty Minute VC
4.4 • 637 Ratings
🗓️ 21 February 2024
⏱️ 56 minutes
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Summary
Scott Williamson was most recently Chief Product Officer for GitLab, where he led a team of 65 in Product Management, Product Operations, Growth, Pricing, and Corporate Development functions. Before GitLab, Scott was VP of Product for SendGrid for over six years, where helped lead the company to a successful IPO and $3B acquisition by Twilio.
In Today's Episode with Scott Williamson We Discuss:
1. From Sales to Product Leader:
- Why does Scott believe sales is a great starting point for product people?
- To what extent does an MBA help someone wanting to pursue a career in product management?
- What does Scott know now that he wishes he had known when he started his career in product?
2. What, Who, When: How to Build a Product Team:
- Is product management art or science? What is the ratio?
- What are the four core roles of a product manager today?
- When is the right time to hire your first PM?
- What is the ideal profile for this first PM hire?
- What are the single biggest mistakes founders make when hiring PMs?
3. Hiring the Best Product People:
- What does Scott's hiring process look like for all new product hires?
- How does Scott test for systematic thinking and problem-solving ability?
- What questions does Scott always ask in interviews?
- What are the best case studies to use to test a candidate's skill set?
- How important is it for the candidate to have domain expertise in your product category?
4. The Best Product Teams are the Best Writers:
- What are the two different types of documents that product teams must use?
- How do you know when to use a one-pager vs a six-pager?
- How does the discussion and planning cycle for the different documents differ?
- How important is it for PMs to be great writers also?
Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | There's four buckets for an individual PM. |
| 0:02.7 | One is around valid, I call it validation. |
| 0:05.1 | Customer interviewing, product usage data, |
| 0:07.8 | kind of like gathering insights. |
| 0:09.8 | Two is build, which is how well do you work with engineering? |
| 0:13.5 | Can you make trade-offs? |
| 0:14.6 | Can you tee it up for a language they understand? |
| 0:17.4 | Three, the business, do you know which KPI is set? What the thing you're working on is going to drive. |
| 0:24.5 | And third is communication skills. You need to man it up to execs. You need to talk to customers in their language. |
| 0:31.2 | You need to speak to engineering in their language. |
| 0:33.7 | This is 20 Product with me, Harry Stebbings. Now 20 Product is the monthly show where we sit down with one of the best product leaders to discuss how they hire, scale and maintain the best product teams in the world. Now, today I'm thrilled to welcome Scott Williamson. Scott was most recently Chief Product Officer at GitLab, where he led a team of 65, and before that was VP of product at Sengrid for over six years. |
| 0:56.4 | But before we dive into this incredible and very granular show with Scott, your website is the |
| 1:01.2 | front door of your business, but the way teams build and optimise it is broken. |
| 1:06.8 | Stuck between inflexible templates and cumbersome code-dependent solutions, there is a better and faster way. |
| 1:13.6 | Enter Webflow, a visual first platform that empowers you to create freely. |
| 1:19.6 | Experience a CMS where you can build dynamic content without code. |
| 1:24.6 | Native localization that lets you translate your site in one click to reach global |
| 1:30.3 | audiences and third-party apps and integrations so you can build faster. Now, you can ship |
| 1:36.6 | web pages in weeks instead of months and save millions in development costs. These are the real |
| 1:42.5 | results for companies like Orange Theory, |
| 1:45.5 | Dropbox and IDO. Get started today at webflow.com. That's webflow.com more than a website builder. |
| 1:54.1 | And once you have a great site or product, the next question is, how do you get your users |
... |
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