Effective Hiring for Product Managers & Building Diverse Teams (with Kate Leto, Product Consultant & Author "Hiring Product Managers")

Kate is a consultant who advises organisations how to build Product teams and practices. She is also the author of "Hiring Product Managers: Using Product EQ to go beyond culture and skills", a book that aims to help hire effective Product leaders in the first place, or develop Product leaders that are struggling to make an impact. We talk about a lot, including: How her experience hiring Product leaders helped her write a book about it, and how hard it was to keep it succinct How hot shot VPs / Heads of Product can fail if they rely too much on technical skills, and how as an industry we focus too much on hiring for them How long to stick with Product leaders before having that difficult conversation about their next move How new leaders often aren't set up for success through lack of coaching, and just left to get on with it The importance of a shared understanding of what the job role entails, and not just copying and pasting job descriptions from Google The problem with "Cultural Fit" and how you need different puzzle pieces and not a stack of the same How neurodiversity fits into a high EQ world and how to adapt hiring processes to cater for different ways of thinking What progress we've made with advancing women in Product Management, and what hasn't changed at all And much more!