Navigating the product career ladder — Mirela Mus on The Product Experience

• Follow Mirela on LinkedIn and Twitter
• Product People
• ‘No Rules Rules: Netflix and the Culture of Reinvention’ book by Reed Hastings and Erin Meyer
• Open Roles at Product People

Episode transcript

Lily Smith : 0:00

Hey, Randy, what’s the difference between a VP of Product, a Director of Product and a Head of Product?

Randy Silver: 0:06

I don’t know, Willie. What is the difference between a VP of Product, a Director of Product and Head of Product, and why do I feel like I’m being set up?

Lily Smith : 0:15

No, it wasn’t the line for a joke, it’s a genuine question. And also, while you’re thinking about it, if you could tell me the best way to assess the competency at each level, that would be great.

Randy Silver: 0:30

Well, I just so happen to have just the person to answer these questions for you. Merela Moose is the founder and CPO of Product People and in our chat we took a deep dive into the different steps on the product career ladder.

Lily Smith : 0:43

That sounds great, let’s take a listen.

Randy Silver: 0:49

The product experience is brought to you by mind the product. Every week on the podcast we talk to the best product people from around the globe.

Lily Smith : 0:56

Visit mindtheproductcom to catch up on past episodes and discover loads of free resources to help you with your product practice. You can also find more information about Mind the Product’s conferences and their great training opportunities happening around the world and online.

Randy Silver: 1:12

Create a free account on the website for a fully personalized experience and to get access to the full library of awesome content and the weekly curated newsletter Mind. The Product also offers free product tank meetups in more than 200 cities. There’s probably one near you, Merela. Thank you so much for joining us on the podcast this week. How are you doing? I’m doing great. Thanks so much for inviting me. So for anyone who doesn’t know you, who doesn’t know Product People, who hasn’t seen you talk or blog or any of that stuff, can you give us a quick introduction? What are you doing these days and how did you get into the wonderful world of product management in the first place?

Mirela Mus: 1:50

Sure, I’m Merela, founder of Product People. We’re about a 41 people company doing interim product management as a service, which primarily in Europe. Our ideal customer profiles are product-centric companies from Series B to publicly listed. We also give back to the world by curating free product management events, which we livestream every Tuesday and also are available on our YouTube channels, together with a few offline events. We aim to onboard fast, align teams and deliver outcomes. I started Product People a few years back and we grew tremendously, especially in the last three years. What we do a bit differently than other companies is being at the intersection of management, consulting and body leasing shops, where we focus on outcomes, as, in the best way, product management should be interpreted rather than just shipping a list of features or more delivery-centered, project management-centered type of work. That comes often from outsourced services, and some of the use cases we cover would be parental leaves, especially in Germany, nordics, netherlands, which are some of our core markets. These take from three to 12 months and it’s also good for the people leaving that someone covers their job and they can be re-emboarded when they’re back coaching and consulting in some capacities or running separate product discovery. Of course, in between the parental leaves, this is the most formal and extended type of leave, but it could be someone exiting the company or being exited, and that’s usually three to six months, or taking a longer sick leave or any other type of temporary need for extra help.

Randy Silver: 3:45

Great.

Mirela Mus: 3:45

And.

Randy Silver: 3:46

I’m sorry. Remind us how did you get into the world of product management in the first place? What was your first job?

Mirela Mus: 3:52

About 12 years ago, I was taken over from a business analyst because sometimes this is how the role was called and I started doing the job before knowing I’m doing the job. Then, later on, I transitioned formally to an attic company that was later sold to Pandora and thereon I’ve changed domains and company sizes and scope, including managing product managers and designers, until I started founding product people.

Randy Silver: 4:26

And we asked you to join us TABIS. We’d had this conversation about the levels of product managers and how do you arrange an organization, and I’m curious. You see lots of different companies. You have to place people in different companies, so you’ve obviously thought a lot about this. Can you just give us a quick overview? How do you divide this up in your mind Executives and juniors and where do you even start?

Mirela Mus: 4:52

Sure. So one reason why this is important for product people is because we have multiple stakeholders. The obvious one is the client, who is bringing in our revenue. Employees are also an important stakeholder for product people and, if you think of the professional services firms that are very well established, a lot of the ambitious people go there for the brand and career experience, and this is also what we looked. If you’re a smart person who wants to transition into product, or a mid-level product manager who wants to turn into a product leader, or a senior who is kind of tired of being pigeonholed as the FinTech or the B2BPM by all the recruiters, what are you going to do to amplify your career? So you could come to a company like ours and there are very few companies that would take you in a tour around the world, let’s say, while still being under payroll and having exquisite attention to your career. Or you could be lucky and end up at a hypergrove company where you end up doing lots of jobs throughout the growth of these companies. So it turns out to be different companies altogether, because we’ve been working with companies like Tier, for example, throughout their hypergrove time and what they were at 300 and 500 people and 800 and 1500 are literally different companies. So for the people who stayed there long enough, especially in the product role, and went around the beach from internal to be to see products and other things, then these people saw multiple companies while being the same one. So there’s very few places where you can get this experience. That’s why leveling is also important for us, so not only for, let’s say, what we offer to clients, but also what we offer to our people. And how are we judging all the inbound applications that we get against our internal levels and aspirations of what we want the team at Product People to be?

Lily Smith : 7:00

So how do you normalise the expectations of people across different types of businesses? Do you have one set of levels that you apply to all of the businesses that you work with?

Mirela Mus: 7:13

Yes, we have our internal. So one of the strategic decisions that we made a long time ago is to have people in-house and I know that this is sometimes confusing to also the community, and we get approached so often by independent contractors that, hey, I want to serve your clients and we’re like this is very nice, feel free to apply, but, by the way, you need to be in-house with us and be a full-time employee at Product People, see, if this is something you want to do. So for us it’s just the Product People leveling. We of course, look and compare and appraise whenever we see this leveling at our clients or we’re asked to create them for the client. But what we judge our people the most against is the Product People expectations, and that has made things a lot easier, as we’ve gotten in the past people who weren’t a fit for us long-term. They managed up to a client quite well and were liked by that client, but they weren’t as collaborative and helpful internally as we wanted them to, and that was also one of the learnings that we really embedded in our leveling but also in our principles. So I can go with that, but it’s more. We judge on Product People’s levels and when we talk with clients, we try to understand the level of sophistication there and not go necessarily by the labels, because especially if you talk with recruiters it’s the absolute worst. But also if you talk with the head of product or with someone that say I need a senior, but sometimes they mean I need someone that has good stakeholder management skills. Or at a larger organization they need someone who has handle cross-functional initiatives, sometimes being a product manager without having a product team, because they needed to convince other product teams to implement their initiatives. So that’s way more complex than just being a senior who needs to stand up to a few stakeholders or what’s the technical complexity, what they’re going to do. So there are so many layers to this and that’s why we mostly go by our leveling and try to figure work backwards from what our clients say. The easiest is, of course, when we already work with a client, because then we can integrate super fast and staff the next people way easier.

Randy Silver: 9:28

So do you see companies describing these levels in a fairly standard way? Do most of them have explicit levels written down, or is it a bit haphazard?

Mirela Mus: 9:40

I was surprised how late this comes in. I’ve seen it appear when a company has 800 people or in between these 500 and 800, whereas we had it from the get-go. But I think we had it because we were forced to, because our type of work attracts very ambitious and motivated people and all the things. That ambitious and motivated people want some sort of appraisal and some sort of recognition, and that could be all right. When do I promote? When do I get the salary raise? I am the greatest? I mean not like that. And then also sometimes these people are self-conscious and they would go from oh I’m messing up, do I’m the greatest? Do I’m messing up, I’m the greatest. So that’s more like the profiles that come attracted to the line of work that we do, which then also forces us to have these conversations very often and has made us create a very mature structure for it. So maybe to give it a bit more depth how we have it, we have nine levels within the company. It starts with intern, ends with VP of product. I mean ten would be with mine, with CPO, but in general these are the levels that we hire at. Then the compensation is based on tenure within the role. So this is something we’ve introduced recently because also, in some cases we promote that 80% of sustained performance at the next level. So you could be at an L4, you promote to L5, when you’ve hit 80% of what you need to do for L5. So this way we wanted to appreciate the tenure within the company, but also the tenure within the level, in a way that people don’t feel like the only way they could get more money or they could get more appreciation is to promote. This is also, of course, not our idea. We saw it at a client and I was like why didn’t I think about this? This is the best thing. They did it a bit differently on tenure within the company. As you know also, it takes a bit for someone to onboard when they’re new. So the way they have is this stage salary increase from six months and then from one year onwards, and then you start at a salary. We made it within the level also thanks to the fact that we don’t have people need to hit 100% on all the dimensions that they’re being ranked on to promote to the next level, which, of course, is not sometimes what everyone focuses on, and I could give also more context to these dimensions Go ahead.

Randy Silver: 12:18

Yeah, before you do sorry, you talked about hitting 80% of the things at a level as grounds for promotion, so let’s just go into At the next level, at the next level excuse me, but let’s go into how you describe a level and how it’s written out. Is it more in the philosophy of you have to have certain competencies or is it there are very specific skill sets and specific things that you have to demonstrate? How do you write these levels out?

Mirela Mus: 12:47

All right. So maybe One part that’s unknow negotiable, and we learned that through trial and error is the principles. It’s, of course in hindsight I could have looked that up. There are also some consultancies that who could have a top performer Exited based on a principal violation. So for for us were not that harsh, but we do see an assess long-term fit, also based on our principle. So I can start with that. We have only five, one being low maintenance, high results, solving for the client and our company, spread knowledge generously, be excellent and can date with each other, optimized for long-term profitability and growth. So we try to hit something that includes work for our company, good work for our clients, good work with each other. This spreading the knowledge also refers to the community, but also how we expect people to behave internally, as I know a lot of pm Kind of our bees lone warrior somewhere, or they elbow each other. A lot in organizations we actually penalize this type of behavior, whereas elsewhere it’s very successful. So that’s why we try to also have this product people fit. So we have the principles and aside from that, we have competency areas as, as you probably guessed, one of them is product management and within that you have the skills, the product scope, ambiguity level, and another important one is commercial leadership. The other part we talked about also relating to that is the complexity like what kind of Tech or human complexity have you demonstrated working with? Because we can have a very political client with very low tech complexity Could be, you know, a B2B that somehow does work for governmental clients, b2b successful right. That that could have a lot of human complexity, but from the tech side it could just be a glorified exo file, just very well positioned in their market and very Successful right. So who is to judge against that? On the other hand, you could have Super high tech complexity, in a sense that other deaf teams inside the organization could out edge you. You need to work with the applied science team, you need this and that, but the human complexity can be relatively Simple because everyone is very helpful and things are set up properly there. So that’s, that’s one of the parts that is sometimes harder to explain, but we saw it in our Missions and and we brought it up. The other part is how you Delegate, how you execute and then how you mentor people. But so it’s the part of are you a Good individual contributor but can you also help others and can you break down scope between you and the people that are working with? And? And that’s a bit of a back and forth, because we didn’t notice that sometimes the the people some people Execute well but they cannot teach very well, or can teach but don’t execute that well. So so it’s also a very interesting mix of skill that we’re needing and and the other parts would be product people, internal contribution and external contribution to product people that we expect here.

Lily Smith : 16:04

Awesome, that’s so much information and I know it’s a lot.

Mirela Mus: 16:10

But it is what it is right. If you’ve come somewhere, say, hey, I want to promote, would be like, hey, here are all the things and here are also examples and so on.

Lily Smith : 16:20

So, marella, how do you work with the, the people that you’ve placed in various businesses at the various different levels, to assess their competencies and and how they’re performing against their principles, and then develop those people, because Typically that’s done within, I guess, the framework of like the people that they’re working with on a daily basis, like within the business.

Mirela Mus: 16:46

Mm-hmm, that’s. That’s an excellent question. I realized there’s a bit of context that I didn’t give which I’m also going to share. I cannot share here. So we have a way of serving clients that Looks like body leasing, but it’s not in a sense that let’s say your client wants to work with us to staff. Apparently they will probably want to talk with one person, one or two people, because most of the time the clients wants at least to have one Chat. So the person they have the chat with and designators their first point of contact, we call that the client facing PM. That person then comes with two other people from from our side that are not charged separately to the client. So some clients have joked. It’s like buy one, get three, and depending on seniority, let’s say, if we staff a product manager, the backup body will be an associate and they will be mentored and supervised by a director of product. It could also be a senior we senior PM with a more senior associate and with a VP of products, so that those are the constellations that we deploy at clients, meaning that everyone will request the same level of access and accounts and Then the supervisors, which is the director of product or VP of product could see how the people are working behind the scenes. So not only like what the PM is saying, they’re doing. They’re going to see coms on the slack channel, they’re going to see decks, they’re going to see mirror boards, they’re going to be involved in a lot of things. And the other part is we run quality of service calls with the main stakeholders. We work with that as specific client and that has also been Pretty good way to see if there’s something that the client needs to be, the client needs to be swayed towards or our people need a bit more coaching, and it sometimes can be a super positive feedback when we catch a few things that we could do better and give that to the team, because of course, our ideal scenario is that we catch problems before those are Even becoming visible at clients. But we could have also cases where our PM performs very well but there could be some stakeholders at the plant which are upset because the person who brought that spin is not their friend or they have like some sort of dynamic going on and then that stakeholder could be high maintenance for our team, while there’s nothing actionable for us that got us seen there. It’s more of okay, understanding the dynamic and seeing how we work with that Does this make sense? So we have this visibility across all the engagements at clients and also visibility on how our people are running internal initiatives. So one internal initiative could be the podcast we’ve experimented with. Another one is the live stream events, which all require different levels of coordination, execution, communication, which are all core PM skills. And this was one of the things that took a bit of time to sink in internally that we also treat the internal initiatives as client missions and that we expect the same level of attention and stakeholder management as we would with external missions, even if we know that sometimes things can flare up at the client and we pause the internal work.

Lily Smith : 20:13

Hey listener, do you fancy leveling up your product management skills and are you ready to take that next step in your product career?

Randy Silver: 20:20

If you do, you’re in luck. Mind the product runs regular interactive remote product management training workshops where you can dedicate two half days to honing your skills with a small group of product peers.

Lily Smith : 20:33

You’ll be coached through product challenges by an expert trainer and you’ll walk away with frameworks and tools you can use right away.

Randy Silver: 20:41

I really like the idea of two individual half days. There’s lots of time in between to decompress and process all of the day’s light bulb moments.

Lily Smith : 20:50

Clever and you can choose from product management foundations, communication and alignment, metrics for product managers and mapping to solve product problems.

Randy Silver: 21:00

You can find out more and book your place at mindtheproductcom slash workshops.

Lily Smith : 21:11

I think one of the things I find really interesting about this model is for me personally, having worked in various different businesses and with different teams, you learn so much by being put in those different situations and experiencing those different dynamics and different products and markets and everything. So do you see this kind of structure and format of deploying product people as like almost like an acceleration program in learning product management? Or do you think it takes the same amount of time to develop your skills as a PM in this type of structure?

Mirela Mus: 21:54

Amazing question indeed. We joke that product people years are like cat ears because in general someone may have three or four engagements and it usually plateaus at some point right after you get over the onboarding and a few things that change. Then, unless your organization is going to a restructure, mna, hypergrow for something, it’s kind of going to stay the same and the scope is going to stay the same for a PM. So the learning plateaus at some point. We did notice that for some people our setup has accelerated their career and we’ve had tremendous development either internally or through the exits we saw from when people decided they wanted to take on a new challenge. It is sometimes overwhelming for some people, so that’s why we also look at the promotion more of a time frame. You know, if you need more time within a certain level, we want to encourage that. So that’s why we’ve also introduced the tenure-based compensation increase within a level, because we saw internally that people were having this stress of okay, I’ve been an associate and I haven’t promoted in my first three months, because we had a few cases where associates promoted after three months with us into PM because they had all the other transferable skills. But there were also people with 10 years of work experience in a lot of other domains. So of course they did. But then if there’s someone out of college who wants to say, okay, I will now promote into PM after three months of being an associate, it’s probably less likely to pan out. So we started having this differentiation that we can accept people from different backgrounds and work of life in the associate PM role, because even if they have a lot of transferable job experience, we can’t have them client-facing on their first day if they had a non-product elsewhere. It’ll also be a bit amusing for the clients, right? So people who haven’t done that and and can’t be leveled as a client-facing PM for us then are offered an associate position, since and some of them can move out of this in three months and have but more likely it’s going to be three to six or sometimes 12 or 18, which is also normal, right, because it’s compared to other area at other companies, it’s way little so that’s dead.

Randy Silver: 24:19

You’re talking about that at the associate and junior levels. I’m curious. I’ve had people working for me who are. They’re great at what they do, but they’re really hungry for promotion and I’ve had to tell them yes, you’re really good, but you just you haven’t seen enough to move to the next level you have the skills, but not necessarily the experience. So just be calm, we’ll get you there. And I love the idea of what you’re talking about 10-year-based raises. Is there a typical time frame that people should expect a minimum of when you’re moving to say, product manager to senior or senior to VP and director type thing, before, instead of saying is it every year, is it or every 18 months that they should be looking for a promotion, or do they just, really, at that level, need to wait a little bit longer?

Mirela Mus: 25:04

I think the consensus in the industry is is waiting and and getting this varied experience in product with product people. We give people this opportunity, but we also are cautious to not promote too soon, because we’ve had cases where then it can become too much for people you know, because you need to then sustain performance now at the next level, and demoting someone is probably super demotivating and there’s something we wouldn’t want to do. So we need to be careful. Okay, we see that this person has a bit of a tendency to push themselves. We need to make sure that they’re able to sustain this, not by just throwing more hours at the problem, which sometimes happens with people are super ambitious and then trying to do more but figuring out strategies, how they could be more effective or how they could be prioritized or even prioritize super aggressively and so on. And that’s that’s where we see this tipping point towards more seniority, because at at the entry and mid-level, it’s fine to put in a bit more time while you’re figuring things out, but if to move to senior, you actually need to get a little bit lazy and, under a min max, a few things right, or get very good at delegating these to juniors and figuring out which junior person will will take this forward, then accept that they might fall through and someone is over.

Randy Silver: 26:35

Does it also follow that if you’re more senior, that you’re better at all of these skills than somebody more junior, or is it just you’re developing different skills at that point?

Mirela Mus: 26:46

I feel people are just better at different things in general, so I would have probably people in my organization that are better than me at a certain skill set. It more matters how well they can function in there, and there are also some cases where the culture of the company actually affects the performance of the people that we have running there. So that surprised me a lot that someone who would perform super well in all the missions we’ve had them when added at a high maintenance client then they actually got them motivated and underperformed a bit because the client just wouldn’t let them do things. And it was the type of setup where people were very interested in the form but not what they were actually doing, which was also a bit counterintuitive because they were a startup. So you would have expected them to have less corporate behavior, and that threw us off for a while until we decided to just be a bit more forceful and pushback. So short answer no. I think there are certain skills that are expected at a certain level, right? For example, when someone becomes more senior, they’re expected to hold their ground and be able to talk with director level or C level change information depending on their recipient. It’s one way you explain things to the product analyst or the devs or the designer, and another part on how you’re pitching your initiative to the CEO. So this type of conflict management or a few other soft skills. Then let’s say, someone that’s a bit more junior, but we did notice sometimes it also comes embedded with how a person developed themselves, because there could be someone that’s way more senior and needs a bit more polishing on their communication, as just they’ve come from very direct cultures.

Lily Smith : 28:45

And Mirella, we’ve talked about the need for like a hierarchy in product development, but there has been a sort of trend I’m not sure if it’s still a trend at the moment of having kind of like a more flat structure across a business. Have you experienced that as well and, you know, does that cause issues or is that actually like a good sort of bar to aim for?

Mirela Mus: 29:11

My philosophy is it’s a good bar and, due to the market down turn, we didn’t know this in a few client organizations. So, first of all, having less headcount in general or having product teams that are merged or restructured together, then we did notice, in some cases even more aggressively, one or two layers of leadership were cut. So, let’s say, would be VP and head off, or CPO and VP, and then product is not at sea level anymore, which was a sad development, but we did see it in a few cases. So that is happening also due to the trends in the market. We’ve also seen a trend where there are fewer designers and user research folks per team and this has been another part where we see, okay, before that, let’s say, each team had a designer or there was a designer to two teams. Now there’s one to four teams. One factor would be that our personal personal preference that product people has also been relatively flat. So we this nine level, it doesn’t mean that there’s a super large chain of commands. So currently VP of product reports to me, then there’s a director of product reporting to the VP of product, but there are also some people reporting directly because we want to build up more people within this role over time in what we call pods, which some companies would call streams or squads, or you know, we have them pods, and they have. They have fruits or vegetable names. And then we have the seniors either report to the VP of product or the director of product and junior or associate to report to seniors or to mid level pms. And we also try to cluster people based on how they’re working together at clients in in the direct report line so that they don’t talk about completely different things and they can help each other and give each other feedback. That’s also meaningful to what they work with every day.

Randy Silver: 31:13

Well, I think we’ve got time for one last question, and we’ve painted a picture of everyone being really good at their job and being ready for the next level and getting promoted, or being hungry for promotion, things like that. There are times, though, when people aren’t performing at the level that you expect them to or hope them to, or they’re not ready for promotion. I don’t want to ask you anything specific about product people in this one. This is more, much more general. This you guys are based in Berlin. It’s a German contract. Employment law can be complicated, and this is really a much more general question. How do you work with people who are not necessarily living up to the level that you’re expecting them to?

Mirela Mus: 31:54

I can also share some observations we’ve seen on the market. There’s indeed in Germany this large cutoff at six months, to the point that recruiters sometimes with unfairly screen out CVs that have less than a year tenure. Somewhere, and especially at the six months mark, it’s sometimes considered a very flag which we don’t abide by. At product people we also look at the application in a broader sense. But to kind of understand the stigma, let’s say around that we did notice that in general fit. So there’s one thing let’s say you hire someone and they’re not a fit, or the other option can be that the company has someone as their employee for a while and at some point in time the performance is is not there anymore or they’ve changed and what once worked, it didn’t work anymore. Right, that’s mostly the cases for the new hires. It’s more of a figuring out the mutual fit as soon as possible. I’ve seen different ways of doing that. The product people only one is quite hands on in the first three of first one month, three months, six months, because we also want people to understand if if they see themselves doing this, as it’s quite a harder job and it’s a bit different than being an in house PM. So having this conversation, gathering this 360 feedback, not only from the client but also internally and from the person themselves, seeing how they do that. I’ve seen the complete opposite approach at the company at Taiwan name, where the director of products said that in their first two months they completely ignore the new hire, like no one on one no talking with them, no giving tasks. They pretend this hire hasn’t joined it. It has a really interesting effect that at the end of these two months they sit them down and see what this person has been up to. The ones that make it past, that are the ones who found an initiative or found like something that was broken, jumped on it, and they have other people that were already on board there to give them tasks or to loop them into the projects or initiatives they were working on. So it’s basically the person carved their own reason to be within that department and the ones that didn’t are just managed out. And that’s also a long enough timeframe until the six months cut off in Germany. But it felt like a very counter-intuitive example and also I guess everyone has their reasons. I feel it’s slightly difficult for a new hire to be put in on this position rather than be told like things to improve. But we did saw that sometimes people don’t like to be told about areas of improvement, so I understand why the easier way out that this other person has taken for new direct reports can also be an option. So that is, let’s say, for the new hires. Of course. It’s, of course, very complex and many times we also go back and review what would we have done if we would have done things differently? Is there something we can improve in the recruiting process and so on. But what I’ve learned from a friend of mine who was recruiting at Amazon is that sometimes you can just accept that there’s a limited amount of information you can get from people during these few hours you spend during the interview process, and it is what it is. You can’t know everything about them and understand their background and how they will react in totally new situation, and that’s also made me more relaxed for the cases where we had things that weren’t a good fit many times on both ends. Then, on the managing out of people, I think for that part, probably I picked this up in the culture book from Netflix, where they look at the team as is and see, okay, if we were hiring. Would we hire these people? Would we hire the same people for the same role? Not only to wait for underperformers, but also try to understand what this company or this department or this team going to be six months from now. And do the people here have the skills for it? Can they be moved somewhere? Can they be coached up, or should we bring in someone new? So having this part. Of course, the book by Netflix also questions against finding other things for someone to do that, so relocating them to another job, family or another location. But I did notice that in many companies this is a good practice and they’re happy with it. So it seems to be more of a company specific type of approach. And in consultancies and in mostly professional services companies, there’s also this concept of council to leave, meaning that someone is not terminated immediately but not staffed for further and helped with introductions and other means to move on by themselves. And in many cases, thanks to the brands that the consultancy helps acquire and generally people being a bit better than average, then these people will exit on their own. Of course, that is, let’s say, a fortunate setup of these roles. I know not every startup will have the luxury to counsel people to leave. They will just send them the notice right, because probably in these cases the founders are already very stretched or they don’t have a network within a certain domain to help their departing team members.

Lily Smith : 37:50

Yeah, I was remembering about the Netflix culture deck the other day. Reminiscing about it felt very revolutionary at the time when it came out and now I think probably lots of businesses have adopted some of the principles that were in that deck. Potentially. So, who knows, maybe we’ll be adopting the principle of hire a PM and then don’t talk to them for two months and see what happens.

Mirela Mus: 38:17

Yeah, that’s not from Netflix it’s from our company, I can disclose it, but yeah, that also seems rather radical.

Lily Smith : 38:25

Mirella, it’s been so great hearing all about your experience managing lots of PMs and about your business, which sounds really fascinating. I’m sure lots of people will be super interested to know if you are hiring.

Mirela Mus: 38:40

Yes, we are hiring. I’ve shared also a link. So we generally hire at all levels, depending also when how people transition or promote. So based on that, check out our pages. Maybe we’re not hiring a senior now or we’re not hiring an associate now, but we may be hiring. Let’s say, if a certain proportion of our associates promotes into product manager, so then we will need other associates to support as backup buddies for the other missions. So that’s because sometimes people ask me oh, you had this job ad, now it’s gone, and so on. It’s like, yes, because we hire people. We had this amount of people to hire, now we just need to figure out how demand in the market and our internal staffing looks until we respond something back.

Lily Smith : 39:31

Awesome. Well, we will put some links in the show notes, so if anyone is interested, then do reach out to Morella, and thank you so much for joining us on the podcast.

Mirela Mus: 39:40

Thank you for having me. It was a pleasure.

Lily Smith : 39:52

The product experience is the first.

Randy Silver: 39:54

And the best.

Lily Smith : 39:56

Podcast from Mind the Product. Our hosts are me, Lily Smith.

Randy Silver: 40:01

And me, Randy Silver.

Lily Smith : 40:03

Lu Run Pratt is our producer and Luke Smith is our editor.

Randy Silver: 40:07

Our theme music is from Humberg-based band POW. That’s PAU. Thanks to Arnie Kittler, who curates both product tank and MTP Engage in Humberg and who also plays bass in the band, for letting us use their music. You can connect with your local product community via product tank regular free meetups in over 200 cities worldwide.

Lily Smith : 40:28

If there’s not one near you, maybe you should think about starting one. To find out more, go to mindtheproductcom. Or go to mindtheproductcom.