Sara Lindquist:
I'm Sara Lindquist from Fuse. We're an early-stage venture firm based right here in the Pacific Northwest. And just like the founders in our portfolio, we are just getting started. We believe that founders deserve more: more urgency, more community, more expertise, more reliability - more of everything. And we aim to deliver.
Today we're continuing with our operational excellence series focused on the hiring journey. Building a high performing leadership team is critical to success. It is imperative to do the proper upfront work when exploring and screening candidates. But as a founder, knowing what to look for based on your company's stage and how to vet the right person can be a daunting task.
In this interview series, we aim to help by providing insights on how to ensure you are properly looking for and finding the best possible candidate for your company.
Join me as I sit down with Fuse operating partner, Satbir Khanuja to talk about hiring an early stage product leader.
Satbir has decades of experience as an operator, founder and investor. He's seen and experienced firsthand what it takes to build the right team at the get go to take a company to the top. Today he's going to share some of his insights with us.
Let's get started!
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Sara:
Satbir, thank you so much for being here today and sharing a bit of your wisdom on the startup journey.
Satbir:
Happy to be here!
Sara:
Well, you've certainly seen and experienced a lot throughout your path as a leader at Amazon and in your own time as a startup founder and advisor. So I'm excited for you to share some of your perspectives on the journey. We kicked off this whole series by first discussing the VP of Sales role with John, and today we're going to talk all about product. So safe to say that the VP of Product is arguably one of the most important decisions a founding team will make in the hiring journey?
Satbir:
Yes, absolutely.
Sara:
Well, I'm excited to dive in. So to start things off, it would be great to ground this in some real world illustrations. Could you share a few examples of some great product leaders and can you describe what it is that makes them great?
Satbir:
That's a really nice question to ask. Even though the examples I'll give, they're not the VP of Product, but really help with the understanding of what makes a product leader great. And we are very lucky that we've seen many examples of this over the last 25 years. I want to pick three. One I had the privilege of working directly with, Jeff Bezos at Amazon. And then two others that I have read extensively about, Steve Jobs and Elon Musk. They all have had a huge impact on humanity over the last 25 years. Let's start with Steve Jobs. Clearly he reinvented the modern smartphone and then this whole concept of an App Store, where mobile users can basically get access to hundreds and hundreds of thousands of very valuable services with a click of a button. You look at Amazon, Bezos basically pioneered two new markets, first in eCommerce where people could buy any product with just a click of a button and then the product is at your doorstep the next day . And then he basically took the same concept and re-imagined cloud computing through Amazon Web Services.
And lastly, Elon, who's in the news a lot lately with his Twitter acquisition, he has his own amazing track record of fundamentally changing new industries. First was electric cars through Tesla and then re-imagining space through SpaceX. And you look at what do all of these three people have in common? And in my view, the four things that they are extremely good at, and they're very rare where they have super powers in these four things. But let's just go through basically the key attributes and then key skillsets these leaders need to possess to become amazing in product.
Number one is they're just super smart from a business perspective, they really understand the market, really know what the customer pain points are, really know how to create innovative products to be able to address those customer needs and also basically truly understand the "north star" of their company and how solving this product fits in into the grand scheme of the industry they are re-imagining.
Number two is, they also are extremely technology savvy. They've all taken advantage of some new technology platform and used that as a way to create something unique. So let's look at Bezos. Internet comes in and now you can have unlimited shelf space and he takes advantage of that to allow for the earth's biggest bookstore, which was previously not possible in a brick and mortar world. And he takes advantage of the unique attribute of internet technology to re-imagine a completely new business. Or you look at Steve Jobs, really looking at a set of technologies that he had seen in research and re-imagining basically a touch interface, technology that had not been commercialized, but really thinking through what will make a mobile phone or a smartphone so easy that anyone in the world can use it.
So you look at the familiarity with technology and really contextualizing the technology to solve the problem in a very unique way. They're very, very good at.
Number three is they're also amazing product designers. Just because you have an unmet need and you have a product idea, lot of times products they get complex. People try to solve too many things. And when I look at what has made these three leaders amazing is their ability to distill the product in its core essence and make it extremely simple and intuitive. None of these three products, even though they're very complicated, require a manual to operate.
Sara:
That's true!
Satbir:
They're very intuitive and that's a superpower - that not only theyAcan think about a product solution, but they have a really good knack for product design.
And the last piece that they're all marvelous at is they're really good in imagining new ways to drive customer adoption, something native to what they're building. So let's again look at a few examples.
At Amazon, Jeff came up with this idea along with his team about Amazon Affiliate and the whole idea of Amazon Affiliate was there are millions of websites that were getting constructed. They'd all like to showcase some product. Can Amazon give a one-click approach to all these websites to be able to show contextual products? So a jewelry blog basically is able to show a jewelry product or a blog about a certain author can show just that product. All that stuff became a tremendous distribution for Amazon. And prior to Amazon, nobody else had done it. It was very native to what Amazon was doing it. And then Affiliate became an industry for a lot of people to go acquire customers.
If you look at the App Store as a way to drive adoption of Apple iPhone. All these app stores now had motivation to go and tell their customers, "Hey, if you want to consume my services, go basically buy an iPhone". Or Tesla for example, is a great example where Elon Musk doesn't have distributors and/or doesn't spend any money advertising. He's basically just built a direct relationship just sharing the product development in social media and building a fan base where people are equally aligned with his mission of reducing the environmental footprint of gas guzzlers. And then as a result of that, he's building an amazing installed customer base. So again, reiterating the four things, they're really business savvy, second technology savvy, amazing product designers and geniuses in terms of driving product adoption.
Now one of the things is these are examples of rare individuals. That can't be the bar as we talk about filling in a product role in a startup. But the reason I wanted to share these examples with you and what makes them great is - as a CEO and founder of a startup, it gives you a high level playbook that between your skill set and your team's skill sets. You try to emulate as much of these four high level superpowers as a team, even if you can't have it in one individual.
Sara:
Yeah, that's really good. And yes, I like that you use word superpowers because each one of those is a superpower in and of itself. And yeah, I do want to hone in on, obviously in the startup journey, founders are wearing lots of hats. CEOs are wearing lots of hats. But it is so interesting that this VP of Product role, you really are the true Swiss army knife. It's not just being able to touch each of these subjects, but real savviness in each of them. And that's a really awesome place to start. Ok, so now that we have that framing for the goal, the big hairy audacious goal of what to become and what to look for - focusing in, so if I'm a founder or a CEO listening on this Satbir, what would your advice be for when and how I should approach hiring a product leader?
Satbir:
The short answer is: there are many different approaches - and your decisions are guided by two primary things. One is the stage of the company. I'll walk you through multiple stages and then what skill sets you need to be successful. And then the second thing is skill sets of the CEO and the existing team, because as I've just said, we are trying to get those four key skill sets of the great leaders and it's nice to know and be self-aware of what you currently have and what do you need to add to together as a team to possess basically the collective superpower of these individual strong leaders.
Let's start with the stage of the company. If you start from the beginning, a founder or a couple of co-founders, they see a pain point that they would like to address and make it their life's mission and create huge impact. That's how the journey always starts. In that context, these individuals may have different skill sets. So let's take a founder who has a sense of the product, because typically when you think about a pain point, you're at least conceptualizing some version of a product. Imagine this person or a set of co-founders between them, they have the business skillsets and they have the concept of a high level product. And if they're lucky, they may have a technology person and between the three they can basically build an MVP and check out a product-market-fit.
But if you don't have those three skill sets, and if you're a business person and have some high level awareness of product - but you have never shipped out a software product, then in that case the very first person you want to hire is not a product person, but a technology person who will have product jobs and they can provide both those skill sets because your resources are constrained and you don't know whether your idea has a product-market-fit.
So you want to be very judicious with your resources in terms of how you build skillsets. So in that case, the founding team is: you have a business Co-Founder with product awareness, and then (they either outsource it or bring someone on board, either as one of the early employees or a Co-Founder) a technology leader who can not only help build a product but also can take your high level construct of the product and give it some shape, which in a later stage, a typical VP of Product will do it - but since your financially constrained, you're trying to basically have the Head of Technology be able to play that role.
As you get to the next stage where you have product-market-fit, you can still run with this approach, especially if you're a product person. If you're a product CEO, because you still don't have tons of customers and you're still trying to find the product-market-fit and you're not being pulled in other directions to build other functions at this stage. So you have all the bandwidth since you're competent and you have all the bandwidth, you basically try to continue with this existing team. The interesting next stage comes in, as you're beginning to do early scaling where you're beginning to have multiple customers, some of these customers will have different needs. And then you're also basically trying to do your CEO job - where you're trying to build out a sales team, you're trying to build out customer success team, you're trying to raise monies.
And at that stage you just don't have the time to be able to take your high level construct and be day-to-day interfacing with the technology team and the sales team and then really bringing in the next level of detail for a product to really get to the finish line. So at that stage, if you're hiring a Head of Product, think of them as primarily as an individual contributor, but who has the skill sets to build the team later as the business has expanded. So that's the formulation that I think in terms of the stage of the company - as well as trying to bring in an individual who can really complement the CEO and the founding team to get them to a stage where product-market-fit can be demonstrated as well as a place where early stage scaling has started.
Sara:
Yeah, we've had this conversation before, but I really appreciate the point you made too about - part of it is obviously being practical in the CEO, assessing their own skills and gaps, but it's also looking in the mirror and actually understanding what your expectations are. We've seen circumstances where maybe a founder was thinking about bringing a VP of Product but actually didn't want to let go of the reins on product. Can you talk a little bit about that?
Satbir:
Absolutely. I think one of the hardest transitions for a CEO/Founder is they are there from day one. So they know the customer, they know the product the best. And especially if you're trying to bring in a VP of Product one to two years after the company's inception, they will take some time to ramp up. It's very hard for the CEOs, but the successful CEOs do manage to delegate more of the responsibility to the CPO. Now, if you are a Jeff Bezos or a Elon Musk, you're never going to basically not think about the vision of the product because you are so good at it. The key is can you surround yourself with the next generation of visionaries who can take a high level, hundred thousand feet idea and really reimagine it using their innovative thought bubbles and then actually give it shape and actually bring those products to reality?
When I look at each one of these three places, Bezos leveraged Andy Jassy, who's the current CEO to power AWS, even though the high level construct came from several members of Amazon team, and then Bezos really elevated it up. But when I look at AWS, it would not exist, if Andy would not have used his product chops to really think through what's the order, the whole cloud computing industry needs to be born. And for him to distill it down to two primary products, S3 for storage and EC2 for compute, who knows what direction and what trajectory that cloud computing would've taken. So to me, two things. One is a great leader will hire a team at a certain point, and we've already defined those critical points, especially through early stage scaling, and then really making sure that they've complimented their skill sets with this new product leader if they still want to continue to think about the next huge idea.
But people will have to fill in the details to really drive customer adoption, really reimagine the products like the way I described for AWS, then they will need to surround themselves with the right kind of product leaders who are visionary in their own style. They may not be able to come up with the next big idea on their own, but once you conceive it, they can truly give it birth and really figure out the details and interface with the rest of the functions. And without them, you as a leader will not have a chance to create that kind of impact.
Sara:
Thank you for sharing that. I think it's a really important point to emphasize as well. So now Satbir, once the founder determines, "Okay, it's the right time to make this hire"?. You obviously spoke about this in your three examples at the beginning, but what are other key attributes that they should be looking for in a successful product leader?
Satbir:
As you mentioned Sara before, product is a pretty interesting multifaceted discipline. In order for someone to become very good, they need to be very skilled in a lot of different things. So again, I basically come up with key things that I look for and I have seen in successful leaders that make them great. One is they just have a really broad business acumen and then they have insatiable curiosity. They're very well read. They understand change in business models that are taking place in the marketplace. They understand "what are the changes coming in the technology platform stack?". They're looking at other successful companies and contextualizing "what are the insights there that they developed that we can apply to our business and our problem points and create value for our customer base?". But you really need a person who has a tremendous amount of capability to absorb and then learn about new things that are happening all around the world, and then really incorporating those insights into the business.
So for example, if you look at - as SaaS became a thing in 2008 when salesforce.com demonstrated that, and so basically people doing large license-based software installation on-premise. The next generation of software can be delivered on cloud and can be charged in a very different sense as Software as a Service. You look at two of the early adopters, you give them credit. Adobe and Microsoft, they go in and actually just say, "Hey, this is an amazing new way for us to service our customers on the Cloud where we have an ongoing relationship, we are constantly shipping product. It's not a one-time purchase, and now people upgrade it every two years or three years. This is our way to serve our customers really, really well. And by the way, it has superior economics because since I'm delivering services to my customers all the time, I can move into Software as a service".
Both these companies, they were early adopters because the leaders over there identified it and made the switch and created a ton of value in terms of servicing the customers better and also taking the value of the company to the next level. Each one of them have grown at least 10 fold just purely by embracing that change. So you want product leaders who constantly looking at that "next thing" and then, "okay, AI is the next thing. How can it help my business?" So you want to keep going deep - or "Crypto is the next thing. What is Web3? How do I take advantage of token economics? Does it apply to my product? How can I basically unleash new value for my customers? Reimagine business models?". So this is very important for people to have that insatiable curiosity.
Number two is, they're super at listening to the customers and understanding their pain points and really distilling down those insights into really awesome products for the customer, where customers are compelled to make the change to these products because they're 10x, 100x better than what they're currently utilizing.
This is also - there's an art and there's a science to the whole equation, and you just get better with more reps under your belt because you don't get it right all the time. So you need to fail to really understand "why did you fail?" and use that as a way to keep getting better and better. But that's extremely important. I gave you the example of Steve Jobs. There's so many companies who tried to attempt including Blackberry on the smartphone side, and they get vetted to a form factor. And then the next generation of all the smartphones post-Blackberry, where just incremental tweaks on Blackberry versus Steve Jobs just completely re-imagined the touch interface. And it was so intuitive that once that was launched, people couldn't think of otherwise consuming basically the smartphone. The whole industry changed. So basically just distilling things down and making the product so essential and so intuitive that once the customers see it, they cannot un-see it. That's one of the things basically these product leaders need to have.
Number three is - now that you've conceptualized the product, you need to have huge amount of cross-functional influence and leadership. This is because the product team - unlike Bezos, Elon and Steve Jobs, the whole company reported to them - but if you're a VP of Product, the whole company's not reporting to you. So you have to influence while not directly managing these teams. The key thing you need to really look at is you need to be an extremely good communicator. You need to be an extremely good listener. You learn things from the customer, you talk to your engineering team and they tell you certain things can be done easily. Certain things cannot be done easily, especially if you have a time constraint. If you want to ship out something in three months and six months, they'll tell you what's doable versus not.
How do you distill all that stuff to find a common goal that'll appeal to the customer? And that'll be done by your team and also involve the sales team or the customer adoption team - or thinking about product hooks that you want to build into the product - but you are trying to do so many different things while you're giving birth to this new product that you are an orchestrator. You're the mini-CEO of this product, and that's how it's structured in large companies. And essentially as a VP of Product, you have that responsibility to basically think like that and then really influence the functions surrounding is extremely important.
Sara:
The great orchestrator across all!
Satbir:
Exactly. Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. They're the amazing orchestrators. And the last piece basically as I said, is if you make an amazing product but you do not help drive adoption, then it's a job incomplete. And there are a lot of examples of that where really amazing successful products fail to drive adoption because they didn't really imagine distribution from the scratch. So one of the things that has become more important, especially in the last 20 years, is really incorporating distribution as a hook into the product - it is extremely important from the beginning as opposed to conceiving of the product and then just basically throwing over the wall and actually telling the sales teams "go sell it".
That formula doesn't work - especially for technology products, especially for products that require a lot of iterations, especially a product that has multiple aspects of functionality to it and multiple functions that are involved for its success. So again, insatiable curiosity, really ability to distill customer unmet need into intuitive products. Third thing is an ability to influence across functions so that all these people work together, with VP of product as an orchestrator to deliver this awesome product. And then just really the building the right hooks into the product so that customer adoption becomes very easy and intuitive.
Sara:
So I'm curious, with all the product leaders you've seen and worked with over the years, is there one of these that you feel like is more, not rare, but sometimes harder to come by in exceptional product leaders? Obviously having all four of these deliverables is the ultimate goal, but I'm just curious.
Satbir:
Yeah, I think the examples I chose for you are the ones that are very good in all four, but there are examples like we have had. If you look at Mark Benioff from Salesforce, an amazing business leader with an amazing track record as a sales leader in Oracle, understood the sales segment and the importance of CRM. But then he had a Co-Founder who could provide the technology chops. You typically find people instead of basically being a single founder, even Steve Jobs, he had a technical Co-Founder in Wosniak, and then Steve was basically a marketing genius and a product designer. But then Wosniak was a genius in terms of actually building the product.
So a lot of times, one of the things I'll highlight is even though we put these product leaders on a pedestal, they're successful because they're surrounded by amazing team members around them. In some cases, I think those team members are highlighted because they're co-founders. In other cases we don't know much about them. But fortunately for me, having been part of the Amazon journey, I saw how Jeff was so respectful. So you look at another example, Jeff did not know much about logistics, but he found his soulmate in Jeff Wilke who completely re-imagined the logistics for amazon.com and forever left the imprint on Amazon and basically for the whole eCommerce industry.
Pretty much every e-commerce company or every retail company is trying to hire someone from Amazon Logistics because what is taught in those organizations is next level. And then pretty much everyone wants to access that knowledge and that DNA and incorporate into their company. So again, coming back, to me even though we celebrate these leaders and they're very, very unique, but for all the impact that they have created, they've super smart to have really hired the right leaders to help augment what they already had.
Sara:
That's awesome. Thank you for sharing that. Okay, so this has been great. So Satbir, you've given us great insight on what to look for and what matters in finding the right person. But my next question is, how should founders or CEOs go about uncovering these attributes? What should they look for in a resume or a LinkedIn profile to screen candidates?
Satbir:
Yeah, I think there are three things that I look at to screen. One is: product leaders need to be "missionaries" and have a builder mindset because these journeys take place over a long time. Again, you look at Andy Jassy joining Amazon two years after its inception and has been on that journey. And I basically know so many of my friends who are still at Amazon and they have been "missionary". They were around after the bubble burst when the market went down and Amazon stock was clobbered. We all stuck around because we believed in the mission and we wanted to make what Jeff had visualized come to fruition. And we all collectively believed that this would change humanity, which is eCommerce and every aspect of it. You really want to find someone who's basically "a missionary" and a builder. And one thing that you can quickly rule out - these are people who are not "a missionary" and builders - are people who stick around in a company for two years and then switch, and switch and switch from one organization to another. Two years is just not long enough.
So even if you have an amazing resume where two years you're in Google, two years you're in a startup, two years in a Facebook, two years in an Amazon, I prefer to stay away from these candidates because in my view, whenever I have talked to them, they just do not have, they're not "missionary", they can often be mercenary. They're jumping from one role to another. And they're not the ones that you want to have in your team, especially as one of the founding VPs of Product in your team. You want to have someone who's going to be part of your journey because they're excited about the mission and they have proven, demonstrated experience as builders. So a big red flag for me is people who are frequently changing their jobs, every two years. You want to rule them out.
Number two is you want to see the track record of shipping. It's about product. And you don't want someone who's going to be learning on the job, especially if you're delegating this important function to them as a startup. So you can stretch them, that is okay, but you definitely want them to have a proven track record. And you should basically look at what kinds of products they have built. You can play with their products and be ready to interview them just so that you understand how they made certain choices. But you want to basically make sure that they have a successful demonstrated experience of shipping out products.
And in here, if you are building a B2B product, you may lean in on people who have a background in B2B, because typically customer adoption on enterprise is very different than basically customer adoption on the B2C side. That doesn't mean you can't have individuals can crossover. There are a lot of individuals at Amazon who basically made a successful crossover from the retail business into B2B, AWS business. But if you already can find someone whose work in B2B, if that's where you are, you're just de-risking your choice.
Satbir:
And the last piece that I look at is professional trajectory and what kind of organizations that they have worked in. If they are really good, then you'll see them actually having professional trajectory. Getting more and more responsibility as a function of time, especially if they're working in an organization where there is a very high bar of hiring talent and there's a very high bar of promoting talent. That's also very, very helpful in terms of who you should lean in to as you're looking at - just purely based on resumes as to who you should invest time to talk to.
Sara:
That's a really good point. That's important to use the resume in LinkedIn screening opportunity as an actual strong filter. So that's great. So helpful insight on the initial screening process. So what about the interview process? Any advice there on the best approach that once you have these candidates through the door, how you dig in deeper?
Satbir:
The connecting framework here is: you are looking to find out of all the four superpowers needed to be an amazing, amazing product visionary - so, business savvy, tech savvy, product designer, have skills in driving scalable product adoption. You want to assess for all those skills and some of the skills we talked about in terms of insatiable curiosity and cross-functional influence. So you're trying to assess all that stuff. And one of the framings that I have found to be very effective to assess all of those in one question is I ask them about the most impactful work that they have done. And what it allows me to learn is their definition of success.
What does impact mean to them? And once they have framed it, how good are they at communicating the problem that they were solving? How good are they in terms of the choices they made? I'm able to come at the same question and assess pretty much all the skills that I'm looking for in that question by either asking them to give me an elevator pitch or diving into detail, really trying to understand what worked the very first time, what did they fail on, how did they iterate?
But it allows you to dive into every aspect of what we've discussed in this session so far, just around a product or a business that they were involved with right from the beginning. So that's one.
Now that's clearly their comfort zone because they have worked on it and they should know those things inside out, provided they have done the work. And the second framing of the same question is then I ask them to look at our company or the founder's company from an outside-in perspective and ask them what is their vision? Just looking at it from an outside in, regarding the product and the business. And one of the things I found is if you have found a "missionary" product leader and the person with insatiable curiosity, they're not going to come in an interview or a session without digging in and trying to find more about what the company is trying to do.
And while they're doing it, they are constantly problem solving even before they come talk to you. So you want, in this aspect of the interview, for them to really try to learn about your business by asking really pointed questions. And you can see how they think about a nebulous thing where they may not have all the information, but how are they piecing together the Lego blocks to create a picture of what this company is trying to do and where can this go? But they're adding value in the interview. If you come out of the interview feeling like "I learned a few things from this individual during the interview that helps me take the business to the next level, or it basically helps me push my thinking to the next level, then that's a good candidate. You should have more conversations with that candidate. But those are the two things that I like to do.
And then of course, the CEOs can basically have their own sets of questions to compliment it. If it's respect to how do other people think about them. What do they think are their strengths and superpowers, and what are their development areas? Because you want these individuals to be self aware about what are they good at and what can they improve. And then when you do the reference check and other things, you can really see does it really match their own self assessment of what they're doing? But the primary two questions are, "tell me the most impactful thing that you've done?". And the second piece is, "tell me how you're going to basically take my business to the next level."
Sara:
Got it. That's really good. Thank you. So before we wrap up, what other parting words or advice would you have for founders or CEOs as they're really looking to find the right fit here?
Satbir:
There are few final parting thoughts, but I think, look, as a CEO/Founder, if you find an amazing product leader, their ability to compliment you and the team and take the company to the next level is immense. So this is a very high impact position, and founders and CEOs should not rush to make a decision. They should take time. And one thing that I found that is very helpful is if you really had a good session with a candidate and they are really a "missionary", they themselves don't want to jump in and join the company right after one session. They really want to know-
Sara:
That's a fair point.
Satbir:
That this is the right setting, and those are the right candidates that you want to talk to. So you want to basically start simulating as if they're working for you over the next couple of sessions. Have a whiteboard session and you literally share more about your company and let them start engaging with you as if they're part of your team. See how the chemistry is between the two of you. See whether you can push each other. And the outcome of those meetings is finding a better outcome for the customers, better outcome for your team. I will really encourage to not rush, take multiple meetings - and the right candidates will like to invest time with you to really see whether this is a good fit or not. And if they're rushing, they're the wrong candidate for you.
Sara:
That is such a good point.
Satbir:
The second area that I really think that founders and CEOs should spend time on is reference checks, and being thorough with referrals. I've seen in many instances, if you hire a recruiting agency, you outsource this piece to a recruiting agency. Please don't do it.
As a CEO, this is such an impactful position to fill, you should proactively reach out and request references that can give you a 360-view on this potential candidate. Try to see if they would like to introduce you to one of the customers that they worked with closely. And the customer can give you their viewpoint in terms of how good were they in terms of figuring out their pain points and listening skills.
Sara:
That's a good idea. Yes.
Satbir:
You can talk to other cross functional leaders, technology leaders, sales leaders, and then really try to see how well they interfaced with them to really give birth to the product with a successful adoption. You can request a reference check with the CEO. A CEO can say, "Hey, do I see basically a mini-CEO here in the making with a high potential"? Similarly, you can ask basically their team, how good are they in nurturing the next set of product leaders? Because you really want this product leader, very similar to how you're going to nurture them, you want them to be nurturing the next generation of product leaders because as the surface area of the company expands, you need more and more product leaders and the more you can bring the next set of product leaders from within your organization as the organization expands, those organizations tend to do very well.
You look at Tesla, Amazon, Apple, they just have such a deep bench because they have become an amazing organization to nurture the next generation of leaders. So again, really making sure two things, have multiple sessions, pretty much simulate the real working conditions before you say yes to this candidate and do an amazing reference check just so that you have all the 360-views about this candidate. And then if you get basically the right candidate, magic will happen!
Sara:
Oh, I love that. Well, those are some killer final words there, so thank you for sharing. Satbir, this has been a gold mine of information. Thank you so much for taking the time and for paying it forward. Grateful to have you here!
Satbir:
Yeah, it's been a pleasure. It's been a pleasure and I really enjoyed talking to you.
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Sara:
Thanks for tuning in. Be sure to check out our next conversation on the hiring journey. Next in line is a discussion about finding a rockstar finance leader. Thanks again and we'll see you on the next one!