
How Braze Hires Product Managers - brazeepd
https://www.braze.com/perspectives/article/building-braze-hiring-product-managers
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badasstronaut
Having used Braze's services, I would not recommend taking advice from this
company. Their API is pitiful and only exposes a limited subset of the
service's functionality, and they don't even use token-based authentication
(it's a UUID API key)

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leshokunin
Honestly this process needs improving. It’s quite fine as an overall
principle: it wants to make sure the PM understands product, as well as has a
sense of the trifecta of design, technology and business thinking. It’s
roughly based on the process Facebook has, which is nice. That’s the basics of
the job, and they’re covered here.

That said, it also implies that the ownership of design is entirely on the
design side, and engineering on the engineering side. That’s fine from the a
decision making and accountability perspective, because it does empower
experts to make their decisions. But the description of the process here is
that it’s a silo. There is no expectation that the PM has coding skills, or
design skills. There is no expectation of dialogue, only that they are a
stakeholder that the teams will be happy to work with. Without empowering the
PM (as well as the designers) to have a say on the engineering (and
inversely), you’re going to end up with decisions that are made in silos. You
just get a local maximum from your teams.

Similarly, none of the questions seem to be about metrics. Can the PM figure
out where users will come from? How they will convert? What’s a good
expectation? What are things to monitor? How would you translate those goals
in a pitch for a feature? How would problems with metrics turn into items in
the backlog?

The process as described paints the PM as a kind of super stakeholder, but
doesn’t actually empower them with any sort of business, design or engineering
weight. It could be that those items are covered in the interview, but the
fact that they’re not articulated in the article does raise questions.

~~~
opportune
I would argue that a good PM doesn't need to be directly empowered, because by
defining and communicating requirements clearly to stakeholder teams, the
right path forward becomes self-evident. I do think you need domain knowledge
to be able to fully figure out what your requirements are, how realistic
certain paths are over others, but I disagree that you need to be directly
empowered to overrule engineering or design decisions.

Example of a bad pm who needs to directly invoke their power to make
decisions: "This portion of the page is loading too slowly. Cache the
thumbnails and make the autoscaling for its microservice more sensitive to
fluctuations. I'll talk to the design team and have them lower the resolution
of the images."

Example of a good pm who does not need to directly invoke their power to make
decisions: "Page loading speed is a pretty big concern for our customers and I
don't think this part of the page is loading fast enough. What options do we
have to make this load faster? What specifically is preventing it from loading
quickly in its current state?"

PMs do not need to figure out the "how to do", they need to figure out the
"what to do" weighted by importance and feasibility. The other stakeholders
are the ones that figure out how. Or at least that's the way I think it should
be. Also I really agree with what you said about data driven decision making

~~~
leshokunin
That's the prevalent opinion about PM, and I used to adhere to it. I don't
think it works in practice. Design informs technology. Business informs
design. All those things affect each other to make a good product. You can't
do that if teams can't just say no to each other. It's important that they
can. Having a say in things doesn't mean that teams need to fight each other
and undermine decision making. It means they can convey what they think would
be neat, and try to think outside the box to meet each other's needs.

Think about it in practice: you want to make a good camera. The engineers say
they will approach things a certain way, the designers say they will produce a
certain design, the PM says ok that sounds good, here is the roadmap and the
strategy for this. You end up with a product that simply doesn't push the
envelope, and has no cohesion. It's basically the equivalent of silos churning
through their backlog. I think it's an underwhelming, underachieving view of
product development, where no one grows.

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sho
One of these newly-hired Product Managers should take a couple minutes out of
their no doubt busy day to look at what I can only assume is their main
product, the web site:

\- the site took 23 seconds (!) to load

\- all content is hidden below the fold, with just some kind of animation
visible. I assumed for a long time that the page was not loading. Nope - it's
just not visible until (if) the reader scrolls down

\- after a couple of refreshes, the user is treated to a modal imploring them
to sign up for a newsletter: "You love us. You really love us!" no I don't

\- there is also an email form at the bottom begging for subscriptions. There
is a JS dismiss button that doesn't work

Actually, considering the above, I am not sure anyone should take Braze's
advice about hiring product managers.

~~~
polote
In most of companies the marketing website is run by the marketing team.

Also in most of those companies the marketing team doesn't talk with the
product team, as a result the marketing content has nothing to do with the
actual product

~~~
jedberg
That's still not a company I'd been keen to work for. I'd rather work for a
company where the Product Managers at least create the content for the website
if not actually run it.

~~~
jaderobbins1
Eh, as a Product Manger I have more important things to worry about and you
most likely are not the customer I would be targeting if I worked for a
company like Braze.

Looks like they do direct sales which makes things like loading the website
and "below the fold" significantly less important. Their focus is on lead
generation so they can get sales folks talking directly to whoever the buyer
persona at the company.

Source: I'm a PM at mid-size enterprise software company with 6 1/2 years
experience.

~~~
jaclaz
Well, I don't know what other people do, but personally I do check the
company's website before (preferably) or after the visit of a salesman from
that company.

The way the site is made, if it feels like "just marketing hype", it does
contribute (I agree with not-so-much-relevance) to the opinion I form on the
company and/or the product (not unlike as it was the case once for the
business card, from the way it is printed, the material, the titles given to
the person before you, etc. you can derive some indicators).

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polote
Nice to get some articles on product management on HN.

Biggest issue I've seen in different companies with hiring pm is not really
about choosing them but more about empowering and trusting them when they
start working.

If you assess them on being a product manager, and then ask them to do project
management stuff it is a lost of time

~~~
kwang88
(Author here)

Regarding empowerment/trust: those factors are definitely critical to PMs'
success, but I'd also argue that finding folks who can thrive with this
independence is itself important. We've had success with defining clear areas
of ownership within our product, within which PMs have substantial autonomy.

Regarding project management: I couldn't agree more. But at the same time
project management does need to get done, and PMs are often well positioned to
help. I generally feel that PMs should be accountable to making sure that
effective project management is in place for the teams they work with, whether
by partnering with designers/engineers to set up efficient processes or
hiring/designating dedicated project managers (but not necessarily directly
project managing themselves).

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awillen
This is all very reasonable, but I'd love to see more detail. I certainly
agree a T-shaped profile is ideal for PMs, but I'd love to know in which of
the listed skills a PM needs to show depth of expertise. Presumably product
sense, but that's a pretty vague term that encompasses things like design and
business strategy.

Similarly, the questions that each interviewer is being asked to dig into are
good, but many of them are fairly self-evident. Of course the design team
wants to ensure the PM can work well with designers, but what I love to learn
from other companies is how they assess that. Some teams do homework, others
do design exercises during the interview and others have the candidate talk
through what's well- and poorly-designed about an app they use.

I'd definitely be interested in a follow up that gets further into how
interviewers assess the relevant questions.

I'll throw in a mildly shameless (but relevant) plug for a book I just
finished about interviewing for PM jobs:
[https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07TCRCG69](https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07TCRCG69).
It's focused on how a candidate can succeed, but it goes through the interview
process and some detailed questions that I have seen as a candidate and asked
as an interviewer.

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opportune
Cached link while website is down:
[https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:vXVH6J...](https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:vXVH6J9rUWoJ:https://www.braze.com/perspectives/article/building-
braze-hiring-product-managers+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us)

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dlojudice
interesting. but I found it odd to have no sort of evaluation regarding to
decision-making based on metrics / data. this is something I would strongly
recommend

~~~
kwang88
(Author here)

Agreed on your point. I didn't go into a ton of depth about the details of the
interview, but fwiw this is always addressed in depth during the course of the
product case, and touched upon during phone screens.

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ticmasta
I couldn't figure out what they actually do, but it apparently involves AI, so
take my money, please.

~~~
devonkim
They’re an enterprise multi-channel marketing company (e-mail, SMS). They’re
one of the biggest in the industry. Formerly known as AppBoy.

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fastball
Website down for maintenance?

~~~
diziet
Or down for HN Load

~~~
nestorherre
This.

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Rch_East
I see run-of-the-mill Product Manager jobs getting 100+ applications on
LinkedIn. Is this mostly garbage (autoapplies from India etc.) or is
competition really that fierce?

~~~
leshokunin
Both. The problem with PM jobs is that there’s a lot of variance in quality,
as well as difference between the responsibilities across companies.
Furthermore, since a lot of the job is often just management, it’s hard to
filters for people who know to say the right things (Eg regurgitate a book or
article) and those who’d do the right thing in dev.

