How I prep for interviews

When I prep for hiring manager interviews, I’m looking for context and subtext.

First, I do all the basic stuff: closely read the job description, research the product, use it myself, look up their LinkedIn profile.

I also look on YouTube to see if there are videos of them speaking at a conference or on a podcast.¹ I see what others have said about the company, who their competitors are, and how they stack up.

If it’s a public company, I’ll read the company’s latest earnings report and listen to the earnings call.

All of that is good context. And then I look for subtext.

What I mean is, what can I deduce about the company culture?² What are the pressing problems the company is trying to solve (and, specifically, hiring this role to solve)? Do they realize what the problems are or is part of the job going to be helping them see the problem before fixing it? Based on their recent releases, what do I think their company strategy and product strategy are? Do I agree with that strategy?³

I was researching a public company recently: their stock price was in decline, in part driven by missed Q1 earnings due to poor execution and in part driven by industry wide impact of AI. And when I was listening to the CEO answer questions on the quarterly earnings call, though he never came out and said it, it became clear to me that they were hiring a CPO because they didn’t know how to innovate out of their current situation. And I say that with no judgment: that’s often why companies decide to hire a CPO, and I love solving those problems.

My point is this: knowing the context and subtext gives me an advantage in interviewing because it allows me to better frame my experience as I answer interview questions. In this example, I highlighted how I’ve done 0 —> 1 a few times, how I’ve transformed teams from feature teams to strategic product-led teams, and how I’ve helped teams move faster by fitting their discovery activities to be proportional to the risk of being wrong.

If I’m right, the hiring manager leaves the interview thinking “that’s exactly the kind of leader we need right now”.

The Workshop

This is a newsletter-only section where I share a half-baked idea in hopes that y’all who are smarter than me can work it out with me.

A couple days ago, I was approached by a Series A startup that makes B2B SaaS field service management software for small businesses in a particular vertical - the kind of software that those small businesses would use to track and manage their customers, dispatch technicians, invoicing and billing, etc.

It’s the kind of opportunity that solves a real problem but brings up questions of market size and if the advantages of being vertical specific are meaningful enough to compete against larger, horizontal players.

In a surprising and exciting twist, while on the call, I learned that the startup was thinking about building and launching a B2B marketplace, to live alongside their SaaS solution. The marketplace would connect their small business customers with the suppliers who sell the materials and equipment those businesses use (and need to replenish) every day.

This is now the second or third time I’ve heard about an idea like this, in completely different verticals, and I think this is really interesting.

Normally, I’m skeptical about a strategy where a company is trying to be a platform and an aggregator at the same time. But that’s really only a problem when the platform customers are the supply side of the demand being aggregated (because now the platform customers have reason to feel the aggregator is competing with them for traffic).

But in this model, the platform customers are the demand side being aggregated. And that seems to aligned really nicely, at least on first glance.

I’d love your help in thinking it through. Do any of you know of companies that have tried to be both a B2B SaaS solution and offered a marketplace? What are your thoughts on a model like this?

1  Looking up videos and podcasts is underrated. There’s so much richness in hearing the hiring manager talk, even if the video was published before they started in their current role. What’s their communication style? Are they framework- / process-driven or more about hustle and grit? (Not that those are mutually exclusive.) Do they reveal anything about how they think about product or business?

2  In particular, can I sniff out anything about their product culture? Are they hypothesis driven? How comfortable with risk and failure do they seem to be? Are they feeling optimistic about their future prospects or is the company feeling a bit scared right now?

3  This is a really great exercise I recommend people practice. Take any company, spend some time researching it, and then ask yourself what you think their strategy should be. Public companies can be good examples to choose, because their quarterly earnings reports / calls will often reveal what they think the answer is, so you can use that to check your work (or, notice when you think they are wrong.) It’ll help you grow your pattern matching muscles. “Ah, this company is [this] kind of business, and they are struggling because their churn is high, probably due to poor PMF. Probably a sales-led company who saw some early success and are now surprised when later adopters aren’t as easily satisfied.”