Kate is a consultant who advises organisations how to build Product teams and practices. She is also the author of "Hiring Product Managers: Using Product EQ to go beyond culture and skills", a book that aims to help hire effective Product leaders in the first place, or develop Product leaders that are struggling to make an impact.
We talk about a lot, including:
- How her experience hiring Product leaders helped her write a book about it, and how hard it was to keep it succinct
- How hot shot VPs / Heads of Product can fail if they rely too much on technical skills, and how as an industry we focus too much on hiring for them
- How long to stick with Product leaders before having that difficult conversation about their next move
- How new leaders often aren't set up for success through lack of coaching, and just left to get on with it
- The importance of a shared understanding of what the job role entails, and not just copying and pasting job descriptions from Google
- The problem with "Cultural Fit" and how you need different puzzle pieces and not a stack of the same
- How neurodiversity fits into a high EQ world and how to adapt hiring processes to cater for different ways of thinking
- What progress we've made with advancing women in Product Management, and what hasn't changed at all
And much more!