EMPOWERED

PART IIIStaffing

In the next series of chapters, I focus on the manager's staffing responsibilities.

I've made a big deal in the chapters so far about how important it is to coach and develop your people, but I have not talked yet about how to find these people.

Of course, much has already been written about staffing and hiring by many others.¹

What I'll be focusing on in these chapters is what is special about staffing when it comes to empowered product teams—especially product managers, product designers, and senior engineers/tech leads.

I'll start with recruiting, and then cover interviewing, hiring, onboarding, annual performance reviews, terminations, and promotions.

This might not seem like such an important or interesting topic to you—I know early on in my own product leadership career it was not—but I hope to change your mind about this, as it's one of the clear and essential differences between strong product companies and the rest.

There are three higher‐order problems I see in companies when it comes to staffing:

The first is that there is often very fundamental confusion about what to look for when hiring strong product people. Too often the company thinks that, if they want to compete with the likes of Google and Amazon, they need to hire exceptional people. This is a dangerous misconception.

Let me be clear on this: the best product companies hire competent people of character, and then coach and develop them into members of extraordinary teams.

This is why staffing ...