Ep. 223 - Kate Leto, Author of Hiring Product Managers Using Product EQ to Go Beyond Culture and Skills

On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Kate Leto, Author of Hiring Product Managers Using Product EQ to Go Beyond Culture and Skills. Kate and I talk about some of the trends and tactics needed for hiring the best product managers and why there needs to be more of a balance between technical and human skills in the process. Let's get started. 

Inside Outside Innovation is the podcast that brings you the best and the brightest in the world of startups and innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger founder of Insideoutside.io, a provider of research events and consultant services that help innovators and entrepreneurs build better products, launch new ideas, and compete in a world of change and disruption. Each week, we'll give you you're a front row seat to the latest thinking tools, tactics, and trends in collaborative innovation. Let's get started. 

Interview Transcript with Kate Leto

Brian Ardinger:  Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger. And as always, we have another amazing guest. Today with me we have Kate Leto. She's the author of Hiring Product Managers Using Product EQ to go Beyond Culture and Skills. Welcome to the show Kate. 

Kate Leto: Thank you, Brian. It's great to be here. 

Brian Ardinger: I'm excited to have you on the show. Our mutual friend Jeff Gothelf suggested we talk, and you're based in the UK. Is that correct? 

Kate Leto: I am. Yeah, just outside of London. 

Brian Ardinger: I wanted to talk more about all this concept of product managers and some of the new things that you're seeing out there. Tell us a little bit about that. How you got involved in product management at the very first 

Kate Leto: Probably like the majority of product managers, I didn't intend to get into product management. Didn't even know what it was. When I started out over 20 years ago, it was still very much a new and developing area and profession. And I fell into it really just before I joined Yahoo, but I was actually working in Chicago at the time at a startup. Back in the late nineties. 

And actually, fell into product management, I was doing marketing, which led to product marketing, which led to product management. And went to grad school at Northwestern University and ended up at Yahoo directly after that, again, working with product marketing and slowly made this transition into product management. So, it was trial and error and it was by accident just as it is with many of us in product management. 

Brian Ardinger: So, let's talk a little bit about some of the changes that you've seen over the last 20 years in product management. And, you know, it seems to actually have become quote unquote profession now, and people actually know what that means, but maybe what are some of the big highlights that you've seen over the years that have really changed how people think about product? 

Kate Leto: Number one is product has more credibility and a bit more clarity around what it is. I think a lot of that's come from the different communities that have sprung up around the product world over the last 10 plus years. Groups like mind the product have been really powerful globally and encouraging, creating a space for product people to come together and talk about what is product management?

What is it? How do we do it? How do we do it? Well, like many product people. Still within my friends and family group, people have no idea what product management is. My partner just tells everybody that I'm a spy because he doesn't quite understand it. So, we just roll with that. I think one of the best things that I've seen over the last 20 plus years within product, is amongst ourselves more clarity around what it is that we do. And to create a support system, really in a support structure to help us have a place to go to learn, to vent, to talk about what's challenging us what our tensions are and how to do that in a different way. 

And one of the things that I really latched on to I'd say over the last five plus years is the movement of product management from just being something that's about what I call technical skills, which are the things that we focus quite a bit on, you know, the fundamentals of product management, how to build a roadmap, maybe how to do a strategy statement or a vision statement for our team or a product or an organization, how to put in KPIs or OKRs and while all those are essential and those are things that we've really talked about quite a bit as a community over the last five, 10, 15, 20 years, I've noticed this trend within product that we are starting to talk more outside of that set into more kind of a human aspect of being a product manager, because we are people, right?

Products are built by people for people. For the most part, bringing the concept of what I call human skills into the product management space is something that I've noticed a big trend in the last five, six, seven years. And I'm happy to say that's something that I'm involved in and I'm happy. I'm really enjoying talking to people about things like self-awareness and resilience and adaptability and all of these great things that are just as essential to how we build a product as a roadmap structure or building OKR out for our organization.

Brian Ardinger: Absolutely. So, you mentioned that most people tend to think about the technical side of product management and product development. Your new book called Hiring Product Managers tries to talk about the move from the focus on technical to this balance between technical and human skills. Tell us a little bit about the book and how it came to be and what it's all about.

Kate Leto: The book Hiring Product Managers using Product EQ to go Beyond Culture and Skills just started to come about probably five, six, seven years ago, as I started to look outside of the technical side of product management. So outside of the skills that we talk about, and I was coaching a lot of people on and working with organizations on things like how to have a better road mapping process or how to actually introduce OKR as into our organization or how to run design sprints, and integrate that into our product development processes.

And to be honest, I kind of got tired of thinking and just talking about those things. And I took a coaching course, something to help me help people I was working with beyond just these technical skills, because it was very interesting. I'd go into conversations with teams or with leaders about specific mastery of technical skills, and suddenly it would drop a bit further into an area of personal need.

I don't think my team likes me or why can't I get a promotion or why does this stakeholder, will they not have a meeting with me? Can I not get anywhere with them? I started to really focus on this area of what I now call product EQ, which is bringing in human skills into the conversation and helping people feel like they have the confidence to talk, talk about things like self-awareness and resilience and leadership and collaboration, and even how to deal with conflict. And giving them some words and tools to do that. 

So, from that over the past 10, 20 years, I've done a lot of hiring within product management. And it seems like a very natural evolution to how can we actually build better teams and bett...