How to hire for hustle
It’s hard. “Why?” you ask, because in most cases we cant even seem to define hustle. This is my definition
“The innate ability within a person to make things happen” Things is used very loosely here, they could be big or small, personal or professional, it doesn’t really matter. They key trait that I have noticed in hustlers is that they are outcome focussed, they are relentless and in many cases when they stop, they stop, mainly because they think doing a certain task or achieving a certain goal isn’t worth their time and effort.
Let’s go back to why is hustle needed, especially for a product manager. Product Managers work in extremely unorganised settings most of the times. They are expected to work on high level goals and OKRs.
Let’s take an example. Imagine a company goal of “Increase revenue by 10%”.
This OKR can be interpreted in various ways by a PM
- Increase customer acquisition by x%
- Increase engagement by x% resulting in an increase in CLTV by y%
- Reduce churn from x% to y%
- Expand revenue portfolio by x% giving more opportunities to your customers to generate revenue
Now for a product manager hustle is needed every step of the way because typically they have such blue sky goals. They need hustle to define strategies, identify features, conduct customer interviews, engage with stakeholders, brainstorm with partners and finally measure the impact. None of this is a straight line ever. Hence you need hustle to
- find your way without a predefined set of items to complete
- power through roadblocks because if anything is guaranteed, its roadblocks
- motivate your team to focus on the outcome
So coming back, how do you hire for hustle? or identify it when interviewing product management candidates.
I used to do an interview round mainly dedicated to one question.
“You are a product manager of a shopping cart based product, your finance team reaches out to you reporting significantly low week over week conversions. What do you do?”
There are some obvious ways to answer this question, in fact most PM interview books or blogs help you answer such situational questions. The hustlers that I have interviewed immediately or later in the interview point out that they are surprised on how the finance team in this case is reporting an issue, as a PM they will have the checks and alarms in place for themselves. That is an excellent sign in my opinion of someone who takes end to end ownership.
You can also notice how your interview candidate is approaching the question, are they following one of the popular pre-defined situation-outcome frameworks. If yes, challenge them by providing some counter assumptions. You can observe how far are they willing to go. You should probably not do it for more than 20–30 minutes, depending on the level of discussion that follows because beyond that it becomes a pointless exercise of proposition and counter assumption. You want to detect for hustle, not irritate the person you are interviewing.
I do want to point out that hustlers do not mean highly arrogant or stubborn people. You can hire for both hustle and culture, again each organization have a different value set that define their specific culture.
For me personally, I want to make sure that as a hustler you are open to feedback, both giving and receiving. Some topics that I touch are following
- “What is the most interesting feedback you have received about yourself?”
- “What was the last piece of critical feedback you received from one of your stakeholders?”
- “What feedback do you have for me or the interview process?”
Lastly, in the nature vs nurture debate, I strongly believe that hustle can be nurtured given the right situation. Most people who are great at it, got it because of difficult personal or professional situations. I do think hustle can be nurtured either yourself or by the help of your support system.