If you are here reading this, it probably means that you have been presented with the unique opportunity to grow your part of the product organization. Congratulations! It is an incredibly exciting stage. It is, unfortunately, also a stage that takes you on a path mired in mistakes. I would know because I have made a considerable number of those mistakes. From the first product hires in an early post-product-market-fit company to doubling the product organization in hyper-growth, I have had the good fortune to experience a good distance on that path.
There are a few seminal documents written on the topic by giants before me, like this article by Ken Norton and this one by SVPG. They served as guideposts for me when I started and I am thankful for them. The model I present here sometimes casts aside some of their ideas, but mostly builds upon them.
As a product leader, you have two simple things to do — one, exceed the product outcomes you promise, and two, develop your team. Both functions are highly dependent on the quality of your decision-making when hiring. That makes hiring Product Managers an extremely high-leverage exercise. Treat it as such and design your hiring process with intent.
In this article, I talk about the F+OSDEL model that I use and how it could reduce your root mean square error in hiring and evaluating Product Managers.
Dimensions — Stage, Resources, and Team dynamics
First things first. You already know this — the kind of product people you need is very much dependent on the stage of your company.
Every successful company goes through the same milestones — Fit exploration, Product-Market fit, Growth, and Expansion. Depending on the stage that you are in, you need different skill profiles from your product hires. The same milestones are applicable at the product level, but building a new product at Microsoft is closer to the expansion stage at TikTok in terms of skills profile (whether this should be the case is another matter entirely), so in my opinion company stages provide a better input than product stages. Growing 2x every month? You need people who can pour gasoline on that fire and who care less about being wrong. Growth tapering out with high churn? You need strategists who can diagnose and experiment fast with customers and data equally. In a tough regulated market and want to control costs? Hire late-stage experienced PMs who can productize your cost areas. Trying to figure out product-market fit? You need zero PMs, go out and talk to customers.
Then comes resources. If you find yourself with less than desired resources, you would be better off creating an arbitrage by looking for fundamental product traits in cheaper-to-hire candidates and investing in developing them.
And lastly, team dynamics. This applies when you have a team that is strong in certain fundamental areas but lacking in others. Hire for diversity (ideas, backgrounds, experiences) in the team and you will get better outcomes.
These three dimensions — stage, resources, and team dynamics — will help you figure out the skill profile you need in the team. Defining this and aligning everyone involved in hiring is important to make sure that all the interviewers evaluate from the same assumptions.
Once all the interviewers are aligned on the same skill profile, it is time to bring in a standard evaluation model to score candidates. This is where the F+OSDEL model comes in.
What is F+OSDEL?
F+OSDEL is short for Fundamentals + Outcomes, Strategy, Design & Execution, and Leadership. Fundamentals form the base layer, the foundation. Strategy, Design & Execution, and Leadership are the pillars built on top of the foundation and Outcomes are the final result.
When hiring:
Use F (Fundamentals) to evaluate folks with zero or low demonstrable product management experience
Use OSDEL (Outcomes, Strategy, Design & Execution, Leadership) for all others, adjusting what is acceptable for each of the areas based on the position level
When evaluating performance:
Use OSDEL (Outcomes, Strategy, Design & Execution, Leadership) to define what success means for the product person and measure against it continuously.
F / Fundamentals
Fundamentals are what you can use to hire your product folks when they have very little prior experience in product management. They might be coming from a different career entirely. In such a case, you are heavily reliant on your judgment, and increasing the hit rate here will take a bit of experience.
A word before jumping into the traits, I have intentionally left out general intelligence from fundamentals as that seems to be a given these days in tech. With a lot of respect for Ken Norton, I disagree with the notion of raw intellectual horsepower as an indicator of the success of a product manager. Instead what I have found to be a better indicator is the combined strength in 4 key areas, collated as the fundamentals.
These are the 4 key fundamental traits:
Empathy. Empathy makes a person great at understanding and appreciating the needs and perspectives of others. Product managers with empathy can create products that truly meet the needs of the users and in my opinion, have a better intuition for what their users need, making this a Product Management superpower when coupled with the next trait.
An itch to solve problems. This is the mandatory flipside of the empathy coin — the follow-through with action. This itch drives great Product managers to simplify complex problems into experiences that make their users smile. This usually is the combination of insights and analytical thinking matched with the persistence to see things through.
Sense for Quality. Quality refers to the overall level of excellence or superiority of something — an experience, an interaction, a product, etc. It can encompass a wide range of factors, including user experience, aesthetics, functionality, reliability, usability, and performance. A great PM should be able to distinguish between a good product and a bad one. And should be able to tell you what makes a good product good. Someone who is attuned to quality usually sets high standards for the products they create, and for their work.
Growth mindset. Product management is hard, there are no two ways about it. Individuals with a growth mindset tend to be more open to new challenges and are more likely to take on difficult ambiguous problems and persevere through setbacks. They are also more likely to embrace feedback and see it as an opportunity for growth.
These 4 traits combined, in my opinion, serve as a good indicator of success as a product manager. These will not guarantee that someone will succeed, but they form a solid ground upon which a new entrant can build on top of.
Questions that can be used to infer these traits are
Tell me about a time when you went out of your way to solve a problem. What made you pick this problem and how did you go about solving it?
Tell me about a product that you consider the epitome of quality.
What is something new you learned in the last 2 years?
Or you could use the forward-looking approach.
Are you familiar with X-company products? What makes their product better than others?
Imagine you are a Product Manager at X-company. Which products/problems would you be most excited to be a part of?
If you are hired to be the PM for A at the company X-area but they move you to B-area 6 months down. In that suboptimal position, what part of your personality would you consider to be your greatest advantage?
In this section, we covered how we could use Fundamentals to hire. Time to dive into the second part of the F+OSDEL — the OSDEL criteria for hiring candidates with experience in product and evaluating your team.
OSDEL / Outcomes, Strategy, Design & Execution, and Leadership
OSDEL captures essentially the core performance dimensions for product management — the achieved outcomes and what lead to those outcomes.
OSDEL is restricted to just four dimensions because simple is better than complex and it is broad enough to capture the full performance view in a scalable format from associate to the VP level.
Outcomes. The most important performance metric for a Product Manager is the outcomes they drive for the company. This is hands down the ultimate reason why you are here. For example, if the goal of a product is to increase the volume of primary engagement, then the outcome that the Product Manager is driving for should be ultimately measured by the increased outcome in that number.
Strategy. Strategy is an often overlooked part of the product manager’s role and one that most folks misunderstand. Strategy is about building a deep understanding of the business and its customers, and using that proprietary knowledge to create an advantage for your team. It is about creating guiding principles for a path that achieves outsized outcomes.
Design & Execution. Design in this context does not refer to aesthetics. Rather it refers to the design of the actions — how a strategy is transformed into a chain of leveraged actions. Execution refers to the hard and soft skills that help drive the team on that path, using tools such as clear roadmaps, concise product requirements, etc. Excelling here means getting to your outcomes sustainably with high velocity and efficiency.
Leadership. Lastly, a measure of all the soft skills that a great Product Manager used to drive the outcomes. At the end of the day, does the team respect the Product Manager? Did they take ownership where it mattered? Was the development process sustainable? This includes ownership, collaboration, executive communication, negotiation, etc.
Some of the questions that can be used to infer these traits are
Tell me about the most successful product that you built. What made it successful?
Why was the strategy at your last company? Did you agree with it and why?
Have you ever had to change the direction of a team? How did you go about the change?
Tell me about a time when an initiative you were working on failed.
Or the forward-looking approach.
Are you familiar with X-company products? What makes their product better than others?
How do you think X-company should approach an adjacent product? eg How should Google react to ChatGPT?
Imagine a customer for Z-product coming to you with negative feedback. How would you approach this problem?
Operationalizing hiring with the F+OSDEL model
What I suggest are three key rounds that deep dives into two Fundamental or OSDEL criteria at a time. This is very much like the Amazon interview model where each round (loop) deep-dives into 1 or 2 leadership principles. An example would be
Round 1: With product peers from the company, evaluating Outcomes and Strategy
Round 2: With key stakeholders in engineering, design, or sales, to evaluate Design & Execution and Leadership
Round 3: With the hiring manager, evaluating Outcomes and Leadership
Align all the hiring interviewers beforehand on the level of expertise expected for the level and use standard scoring with at least 3 points — below expectations, on expectations, and exceeding expectations. On top of the scorecard, bring it together with just one single decision from each of the interviewers — No, Yes, or Strong Yes.
Once the rounds are done, the hiring committee comes together to decide on the candidate. A decision to hire can be made if everyone on the committee said Yes, or if there is at least one domain expert who would passionately advocate for the candidate. If there is even one No, and there is no high-intensity advocation for the candidate from anyone, the decision defaults to a no.
Evaluate Product Managers with the F+OSDEL model
For evaluating Product Managers in your team, forget the fundamentals and focus on the OSDEL.
Outcomes are the most important performance metric available. How much has the needle moved on the aligned goals?
Now, the needle might not have moved despite the Product Manager’s actions. Or the needle moved a lot but it was simply a rising tide that happened to raise this boat. This is where the action components of Strategy, Design & Execution, and Leadership come in. These dimensions are more qualitative than the Outcomes and should capture the depth of actions on the Product Manager’s part.
Use 1–1s to align on what the expected OSDEL is for a particular level and write them down in bullet points. An effective evaluation cannot be conducted if the expectations are not aligned first and continuously communicated.
I use a 1–5 rating for each of the components, with 3 being the “met expectations” score. A 1 score indicates that there are large gaps in the performance vs expectations and gives the Product Manager clear areas to improve on. A 5 indicates that the Product Manager is exceeding the expectations compared to the company benchmark for the level and is a clear indication of readiness to move to the next level. In my 1–1s, I work with the Product Managers to get all the component scores to 3 as a start and when they are ready to level up, work to get to 5 for at least one area (doubling down on strengths is a good approach for this).
On a side note, the OSDEL model applies to all general executive performance evaluations as much as it does to product management. This is not a coincidence, rather it simply is a reflection of the inherent business leadership role of product management in a company.
Once the scoring is done, use coaching levers to focus attention on the improvement areas.
There are 8 coaching levers that I use. Half the levers focus on understanding the customer, business, positioning, and financials which is crucial to developing the insights needed for an effective strategy. The rest half focuses on the execution and leadership skills necessary to see the strategy through.
Diving deeper into the coaching levers is beyond the scope of this article. It is a subject that is too important to be just a section and is one of the biggest problem areas for growing product teams.
70% of the product folks that I talked to quote the main driver for leaving their company/manager as the lack of clear frameworks to improve from and the lack of coaching. If you make the effort to hire great people, please build a good enough evaluation and coaching model in place to not waste their talents. Never forget that one of the two pillars of your success is developing your team.
Summary
The F+OSDEL model is a framework for hiring and evaluating Product Managers. The model covers the key responsibilities of a Product Manager, including driving successful outcomes, understanding the market, developing and executing a plan, and effectively leading the product.
F+OSDEL is simply a mental model and nothing more. Models do not substitute for your effectiveness as a leader and how deeply you understand the subjects involved. But hopefully, it can help guide the way in your journey.
Wishing you great outcomes!
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