Job Hunting During COVID: Insight from Two Product Leaders

Back to all stories

Shifting to an entirely remote work environment over the last few months has been tough on all of us. But searching and interviewing for a new product job during COVID? Well that presents a whole new set of challenges.  

So how can you stand out in a larger pool of candidates, now that geography is no longer a factor?  How can you make a strong impression when interviewing from your living room? When you do land a job, what is it like to be onboarded entirely via Zoom? And how can you be a productive PM on your new, fully distributed team? 

To help you navigate this uncharted territory, we asked two product leaders about their approach to hiring and organizing product teams remotely. First, we connected with Alicia Hurst, a Group Product Manager who leads playback products at JW Player to hear how she decided to bring a west coast employee onto her NYC team. Then, we talked with Vibhor Chhabra, the VP of Product at TaxJar, about his experience hiring and onboarding employees at a company that has been entirely remote since its inception.   

Find out below how Covid has altered their approach to team building and managing, what product skills they find most valuable right now, and how they recommend you embark on own interview journey. 

Q&A with Alicia Hurst, Group PM at JW Player

Can you tell me a little bit about how your teams functioned pre versus post COVID? What has changed since you’ve had to transition to remote work? Are there new tools or processes that you’re finding more relevant and necessary these days?

So far things are functioning much the same as before, with a heightened level of dependency on Slack and Zoom. It’s more what’s absent, which is all the interpersonal stuff, like sitting next to someone at a company update and catching up; running into people in the kitchen; getting lunch together; what you talk about before/after a meeting gets started; the snacks people used to bring in to share; I regularly commuted home with work friends. So many things we used to take for granted that built rapport and were energizing.

I don’t get to see people’s personalities nearly as much over Zoom, where it’s also easy to not share your camera or to not speak in meetings, and I also have nearly no way of getting to know new team members who have joined since March. I find Confluence to be more valuable and much improved, and I’m super into written documentation and self-serving information.

You recently hired someone based in CA for your NYC team.  How did you arrive at that decision? 

In the first few weeks after opening the role, through a combination of factors like a majority of the applicants still being NYC-based and who was qualified to advance, I was able to hold on to the idea of hiring someone locally or someone who wanted to relocate. After talking to more candidates and getting a better sense of what we were looking for, our VP of Product asked if I had considered expanding my search. At first I was resistant, thinking eventually we’d get back to the office and that I wasn’t hiring someone for just the next year or so. But the permissiveness stuck with me, and the next thing I knew, I just wasn’t looking at the address on the resume at all. That was aided by other internal conversations around whether we’d continue to have a permanent office with our own desks, and knowing how many people were trying to move out of the area and continue to be fully remote. I was willing to question the status quo there and just do it.

During your search for a new team member, what hard and soft skills had you reprioritized as important (and maybe as less important) to the success of your teams since COVID?  

I think these are always important, but we definitely did hone in on writing skills, presentation skills, and autonomy. To test for these skills, we introduced a take-home written exercise, and I looked for evidence that they did more than execute on a roadmap; did they also create it by talking to customers? What happens when they don't know how to do something?

We’ve also deprioritized “culture fit,” recognizing that it's anti-diversity. Instead, I focused solely on where they'd provide value right away and where and whether I felt they could grow. For example, we want to strengthen our PM culture after years of weakness there. So the "culture fit" hire could be someone who is outspoken and opinionated like me. But the better fit may be someone who is clearly passionate about product management and wishes to grow into a product leader, but might not have everything they need to do that in their own way today- and someone who complements my strengths, rather than duplicates them.

What questions did you ask during your most recent interview process that you had never needed to ask before? 

This was more in reaction to George Floyd’s murder, but a few times during my hiring manager phone screens, I asked if it was still a good time to talk, and I meant it, that I’d reschedule if it wasn’t, no questions asked.

We have used the same process for the PM “onsite” day for at least three or four years. During the pandemic, we’ve changed and iterated on parts of it in big ways. I suspect we all used to rely heavily on intuition and energy from meeting in person, so it made sense for us to get more objective and add in parts that allowed candidates to better demonstrate their hard skills. As a result, we’ve also had to do more follow up conversations after the main interview day to continue to get to know candidates better, which was rare when we were in the office. 

How can a product manager make themselves stand out to someone looking to hire a remote employee? 

Interviewing skills are as important as ever. It’s harder to form connections with strangers over Zoom, so bringing your full energy and passion is a way to stand out, as well as showing you’re prepared with anecdotes to answer questions with. Unfortunately, Zoom also makes it a lot easier to tune out and disengage, so being able to hold people’s attention is key. Asking good questions of the right interviewers also seems to be valued more lately.

Have you started onboarding your newest hire yet? If so, what has that process been like from afar? And do you have any advice for PMs who are adjusting to new jobs remotely? If not, are there any parts of the process you are feeling apprehensive about?  

Yes, I have! My manager is a very verbal person, so I remember how heavily I relied on talking to him at the office to learn everything. But because we were all remote, I made a new set of onboarding docs that is more of a written curriculum and is self-directed. 

What worries me is how little face time we have with each other so far to build trust and rapport, and how the informal interactions seem to have fallen mostly by the wayside. Before, people would get to know each other sitting at lunch, dropping by each others’ desks, getting coffee, hanging after work, and that’s all gone. Now it’s all scheduled meetings and planned interactions. I haven’t spoken to my direct report as often (which is around the level I speak to my manager at now, but we have worked together for years), and I already feel guilty about that and whether I’m doing enough.

Unfortunately during this time I think you need to be intentional about creating the interactions – reach out over Slack, put time on their calendars. If you don’t do it, who will?

What are the benefits of working on a remote team? Are you eager to get back to “normal,” or do you welcome distributed teams as your new normal? 

It’s hard to say because this is an exceptional time. Being remote used to mean you could work from a coffee shop or in a park. For the most part, we’re all shut in our homes most of the day which we never mentally prepared for. 

I’d welcome a new normal where there’s flexibility in how often you come to the office and where you can work from. Before, it was rare to travel and work from there, especially across time zones – PTO was encouraged instead. That’s probably one perk! Many people are missing the social aspect though, so that’s also something we’ll have to navigate at that time. 

———

Q&A with Vibhor Chhabra, VP of Product at TaxJar

TaxJar has been proudly remote since its inception. Has COVID disrupted the way your teams function at all, or is it all business as usual? 

One of the founding principles of TaxJar was to hire teammates who do their best work from anywhere they want. We don’t even have an office! So, in that sense COVID-19 did not change anything. However, COVID-19 has upended everyone's personal lives - be it our customers or employees. It has also resulted in high growth for us since a lot of brick and mortar businesses have an urgent need to set up their business online and need Sales Tax compliance. So, we have definitely balanced supporting our employees who may need to take care of family, and supporting customers who may need immediate assistance.

How can a product manager or product leader who is currently looking for a new job market themselves as a strong remote hire? Are there qualities or soft skills that are particularly important to working on a fully distributed team? 

First of all, a 100% remote team is like a 100% co-located team. This is because there is no headquarters, or no default timezone. So, teammates have empathy and respect for each other’s schedule and availability. 

Now, for a Product Manager who is looking for a new job in this market I’d recommend finding a few products that genuinely excite you, spend time understanding those products, come up with idea(s) that you think can improve the product (tangible benefit to the customer) that you would implement if you were a Product Manager. This works 100% time because it shows you are actually serious about this role, and it also showcases your product management skills via the homework you have done.

What tools or processes do you credit to a highly functioning remote team?

Besides the usual product management skills (customer empathy, stakeholder management, prioritization, communication) the one skill that is extremely important in a remote environment is asynchronous written communication. It takes time to write well but it is worth it because:

1. It forces the author to think a few levels deeper and brings clarity to the why/what/how

2. It cuts down on unnecessary meetings, and makes collaboration easier and faster. The benefit of a good written document is that a lot of discussion/resolution happens via asynchronous commenting. That leaves only a few unresolved discussion topics for a meeting or sometimes alleviates the need for a meeting altogether.

What kinds of questions should a candidate ask their interviewer to find out more about how their remote team will function? Are there any red flags a product manager should look out for when interviewing for a distributed team? 

When we hire someone we go through a final hiring step called Mutual Assessment. This is immensely important since it allows a prospective teammate to collaborate on a real life project with their team. It allows them to understand what working on a 100% remote team feels like. 
While every remote company may not offer a similar benefit, I would try to understand:

1. How do the sprint team members collaborate with each other, how do they build relationships which are key to the success of a sprint team?

2. How does the PM, the product designer, and the engineering designate collaborate on product discoveries?

3. How would you as a Product Manager partner with other internal teams like Marketing, Sales, Customer Success?

4. Is there openness to asynchronous communications or are you going to spend your entire week in meetings with little to no time for actually thinking or writing?

5. How do you build informal relationships so it doesn’t feel transactional?

What is the onboarding process like for a new team member at TaxJar? How does TaxJar combat the potential awkwardness of Zoom, particularly for a new employee? 

TaxJar has a 2 part onboarding process:

a) TaxJar Way- you spend the first 2-3 days understanding the TaxJar Way, which is about how we do things here, the culture, the history. By the time you are done reading and watching this, you feel like you are part of this team and Zooms are not awkward.

b) Functional Team onboarding- Every team handles this differently. It’s a mix of reading, and meeting teammates from your own team and across the company.

Oh and we also encourage new employees to sing on the weekly company call. That’s when you discover this team has so much talent outside of what they do at TaxJar.

TaxJar credits its employees’ strong work/life balance to being a fully distributed company. But a lot of people in COVID-caused remote work situations are struggling with drawing that line, now that there is no office to leave at the end of the day.  How does TaxJar help employees set those healthy boundaries?

With COVID, life has become complicated - parents are managing kids at home, non-parents have other challenges. So, support really starts with how a fully remote team respects each other’s availability and schedules so we can do our job as a team but also have flexibility at an individual level. 
Some things that help:

• Mark your calendars for when you will accept meetings so you have overlap with your teams but also have flexibility to finish your work at your own schedule.

• If possible, delineate your working space from your non-working space. So, when you leave your home office you have a mental shift and are no longer thinking about work.

• Create rituals - when you finish work you go for a run and listen to music/ podcast/ book so mentally your mind transitions away from work.

Give the social butterflies some hope during these crazy work-from-home times- what do you love about being a fully distributed team?

I personally love the accountability that comes with delivering the results I need to in order for the team (and myself) to be successful while having the flexibility to take care of my family. For example, in the heat of COVID I took meetings from early morning until 2:00pm, and then stopped working so I could take care of my daughter. This allowed me to collaborate with others and be present for meetings while also prioritizing my daughter. Then I’d work at night to finish all the work I had to do on my own whether it was writing, reviewing, planning, etc.