What is your take on case studies as a part of PM recruitment? Any tips to share?
I went through a bunch of those used by top tier startups in Paris and found anything from "what's your take on our industry" to "please outline a 2-year roadmap". Most of what I came across wasn't best fit (IMHO) to evaluate the PM specific skillsets and rather predictable.
I have used case studies many times and i think they are useful. We don't try to do long term planning, but instead focus on a shorter term problem we are trying to solve as a company and ask the person to prioritize and create their plan for how they'd move a metric, solve a user problem, or something else similar. And we evaluate based on their ability to prioritize, drive teams to success, and other elements like that.
Makes sense. From what you are described, it seems that what you are looking to assess is more how candidates think and how they approach problems instead of "technical" PM skills.
Do you tend to use real case studies that you tackled within the Product team, or a "designed" scenario?
I think in fact this is assessing real PM skills - can you prioritize and come up with a tactical plan to achieve an objective within weeks or months is usually one of the most important skills a PM will possess. The best PMs are not those who are theoretical, but those who actually know how to get shit done. And I find the case study is usually a good way to suss that out.
Have done both designed and real scenarios - often it depends on where we are as a company. In both cases, the scenarios have similar goals and the expectations of the case study are similar.
Thanks for sharing, really liked the insights!
What is your take on case studies as a part of PM recruitment? Any tips to share?
I went through a bunch of those used by top tier startups in Paris and found anything from "what's your take on our industry" to "please outline a 2-year roadmap". Most of what I came across wasn't best fit (IMHO) to evaluate the PM specific skillsets and rather predictable.
I have used case studies many times and i think they are useful. We don't try to do long term planning, but instead focus on a shorter term problem we are trying to solve as a company and ask the person to prioritize and create their plan for how they'd move a metric, solve a user problem, or something else similar. And we evaluate based on their ability to prioritize, drive teams to success, and other elements like that.
Makes sense. From what you are described, it seems that what you are looking to assess is more how candidates think and how they approach problems instead of "technical" PM skills.
Do you tend to use real case studies that you tackled within the Product team, or a "designed" scenario?
I think in fact this is assessing real PM skills - can you prioritize and come up with a tactical plan to achieve an objective within weeks or months is usually one of the most important skills a PM will possess. The best PMs are not those who are theoretical, but those who actually know how to get shit done. And I find the case study is usually a good way to suss that out.
Have done both designed and real scenarios - often it depends on where we are as a company. In both cases, the scenarios have similar goals and the expectations of the case study are similar.
Thanks for the insights. Looking forward to reading more articles ;)