Product Q&A with Josh Elman

Josh Elman

About: Josh Elman is a Partner at Greylock Partners who invests in entrepreneurs building social networks and platforms, mobile apps, new media, and connected devices.

He joined the team in 2011 and invests in entrepreneurs building new consumer products and services. Josh specializes in designing, building, and scaling consumer products, having been part of multiple companies that have grown to more than 100 million users.

Before joining Greylock, Josh spent 15 years in product and engineering roles at leading companies in social, commerce, and media. Josh was the product lead for growth and relevance at Twitter, growing Twitter’s active user base by nearly 10x. Prior to Twitter, Josh worked on the platform at Facebook and led the launch of Facebook Connect. Josh was an early employee at LinkedIn and helped establish early models for user growth and launched v1 of LinkedIn Jobs. Josh also held roles leading product management for Zazzle, and product and engineering for RealJukebox and RealPlayer at RealNetworks. Continue Reading

Product Q&A with Yardley Ip

Yardley Ip

About: Yardley Ip is the General Manager of Trulia Rentals at Zillow Group where she oversees product management and marketing for the rentals business. She is on the founding team of Women in Product, a new nonprofit organization focused on connecting women product managers throughout the tech industry. Yardley is also a frequent contributor to The Huffington Post where she blogs about work-life balance and how to succeed in the workplace. Yardley is passionate about building marketplaces, growing monetization businesses, and mentoring the next generation of leaders.

A Silicon Valley veteran, Yardley began her career as an Engineer at Apple before changing career paths to focus on product management at companies such as eBay, Yahoo, and Dun & Bradstreet. She has served on the regional board of the Canadian Cancer Society and she is an informal advisor to several startups. Continue Reading

Product Q&A with David Cancel

David Cancel

About: David Cancel is the founder and CEO of Drift, a messaging app that helps sales and customer success teams connect with their customers. Prior to Drift, David was the Chief Product Officer at HubSpot where he hired most of the HubSpot engineering team — growing from 20 to 100 engineers after HubSpot’s acquisition of David’s last company, Performable. As a five-time founder, there’s been one common thread between all of the products David has built: the connection between businesses and their customers.

He’s also the author of an upcoming book called HYPERGROWTH. In HYPERGROWTH, David will share his modern approach for building products and structuring teams that make customer communication a central priority. HYPERGROWTH tells the story of how Cancel’s customer-driven approach started out as a test with a product team (Performable), transformed an entire organization (HubSpot), and sparked a new movement (Drift). Continue Reading

The Product Manager Interview Process at Large Tech Companies

This is a guest post from our PMHQ Advisor, Fernando Delgado.

Context

I worked at Google for 5+ years, where I interviewed over 150 PM candidates. I then worked at Yahoo for 3 years, where I interviewed over 100 PM candidates. At Yahoo, I was a member of the hiring committee for 2 years and co-founded the APM program. So the observations below mainly apply to those 2 companies and the Product Manager role.

When you apply for a job at a tech company, you formally enter their recruiting pipeline. That pipeline has a number of filters that cuts down the number of candidates at every step. At a high level, the process may look like this:

  1. Company receives resume
  2. Recruiter calls candidate
  3. 1 or 2 phone interviews (can be in-person campus interviews for college students)
  4. 3 to 6 in-person interviews
  5. Offer is extended

Note: occasionally, there are exceptions to these steps. For instance, if a candidate has an offer from a competitor with a tight deadline, the company may choose to skip step 3 altogether. Continue Reading

Product Q&A with Ellen Chisa

Ellen Chisa

About:

Ellen Chisa is the VP of Product of Lola. She is also a Product Advisor at Flybridge Capital and an instructor of Product Management and Interface Design at Franklin W. Olin College of Engineering. In her free time she likes to write, read, play pinball, and scuba dive.

About Lola: We’re a new kind of travel company that provides on-demand, personal travel service through a smartphone app. The Lola app instantly connects people to our team of travel consultants who find hotels, research vacation dreams, book flights and anything else our customers need. We also help while they’re on their trips. In short, we take care of our members’ every travel need.

On the web: Continue Reading

Product Q&A with Fernando Delgado

Fernando Delgado

About:

Fernando Delgado started his PM career at Google as an Associate Product Manager. Over the 5 and a half years he spent there, he had the opportunity to contribute to various features and launches of Web Search (google.com), Google Maps, Voice Search, Android and Google+ Local.

Right after Google, he joined Yahoo as a Senior Director of Product Management in the Mobile organization. He put together and led a team that launched Yahoo’s homepage app, which reached the #1 spot in the News category on both Android and iOS and sustained that ranking for ~6 months. He then joined the Yahoo Mail App team and shipped the biggest refresh of the app in years. It reached the #5 spot of all iOS free apps in 2015. Continue Reading