issue 22 - week of january 29, 2024

Editor’s Note

Hey HCPM Fam!

January may have been the fastest month of my life. It feels like XMAS was like two weeks ago.

In this issue you’ll have:

• An Ultimate character hiring guide for program managers - with sample questions!

• Effective communication frameworks for executives.

• An entire MBA in a book (saves you 200k LOL).

I’ve spent the last month noodling on hiring. I like where I’ve landed for this issue in terms of some things you can’t learn on the job and that only come with experience.

I appreciate all of you on this journey with me.

Don’t forget to share any recommendations you have for this community by replying to this email.

Until next Wednesday,

Phedra, Founder at HCPM

this week’s picks

recs for your delivery goals - uncommon sources with nuggets of wisdom

1. 📺 Watching: This training on effective communication for executives. Hear me out. Once upon a time, someone gave me feedback that I should try to make my communication crisp and more structured. I still talk too much, LOL. However, I recently watched this training and it was exactly the right amount of helpful information to help me work on this. #stillaworkinprogress

2. 🎧 Listening: Companies are still planning a million organizational changes this year with not enough staff to help roll it all out. It’s OK. This podcast discusses strategies to deal with not having enough people to execute your change management plan. #communityrec

3. 📚 Reading: I’ve given up on going to business school. There’s just too much going on. With these precious babies, the days may be long, but the years are short. So instead, I’m going to read my way through. Where I’m starting is here: The Personal MBA.

4. Trying out: AI headshots?!! Are you serious? Umm guilty. Y’all professional headshots are expensive. For all of $20, I got a few usable options. As a black woman, the technology isn’t always quite right when it comes to AI generation. There’s a few out there on the market, so have fun. I used Try It on AI.

Have a recommendation? Send it to: [email protected].

feature: does hiring ever get easier?

The first person I ever hired quit 2 weeks later.

Yikes. Talk about getting it wrong. 🤦‍♀️

This was my shot and I felt like I blew it.

All these years later - it’s still hard to find the right people.

What are the qualities that make a great program manager?

How do you assess for those qualities in a way that’s equitable but also provides room for growth?

With my experience in finance, energy, media, and civic tech - there isn’t a one size fits all approach.

Here are the key areas of assessment that at this point in my career are non-negotiable when hiring.

Fosters a healthy culture. Program managers communicate openly and honestly. They treat every team member with respect and are ethical. They encourage collaboration, not competition. A healthy culture is crucial for team motivation, collaboration, and overall well-being. It sets the tone for how employees interact and how the team handles challenges. If you can’t seem to figure out why you can’t get a program back on track, 9 times out of 10, it’s because the culture is crappy. People are in CYA mode, and no one wants to get blamed for failure. (Btw failure is good and an opportunity to learn/grow).

• Sample Question: You just inherited a new program with a 30% attrition rate. After a few initial 1:1s, you see a few signs of an unhealthy culture including CYA behaviors, a lack of open and transparent communication, and lots of pointing fingers every time something doesn’t go as planned. What are your top 3 moves?

Doesn’t speak in buzzwords. Collectively, many industries are tired of the word salads made popular by management consultants. Can you get the work over the finish line or not? This is all your leadership team cares about. What’s the approach in plain language? Can you explain the technical strategy, the problem, and the opportunity to fifth graders? This is also in the vein of clear communication. Our job is to create clarity and ensure that clarity is distributed often throughout the program. If you can’t simplify what we’re trying to do here, go watch the Princess and the Frog and dig a little deeper.

• You’ve been invited to show and tell day at a local elementary school. Explain your favorite project, service, or product you’ve brought to market. Discuss the problem you were solving, the user base, and the outcome.

Structured frameworks for decision-making & prioritization. Yes, not only product managers have to make prioritization decisions. Utilizing structured frameworks for decision-making and prioritization ensures that program managers can effectively evaluate options, make informed choices, and allocate resources to maximize project outcomes. It’s also important program teams understand how decisions are made, so they can use that as a lens as you empower them to make their own decisions.

• Sample Question: We can’t seem to be able to decide if we should build an MVP in 30 days or focus on fully staffing a new contract. You will be unable to do both <give some background on why this is a hard & important choice>. How should we think about this trade-off?

Creates alignment and can drive an ecosystem forward. Cultural competency is a big theme here. Regardless of background, experience, ability, and motivations, can you get people on the same page and move a diverse group of people and perspectives in the same direction? Can you get people bought into common goals?

• Sample Question: Right now our BD team and Hiring team are not very aligned on pricing for Data Scientists on a new proposal [insert whatever you want]. What questions would you ask me to better understand the situation and how would you propose we get better aligned?

Personal Growth. You need people who are self-aware and who are willing to be on a journey outside of work. They should know their strengths and weaknesses and actively work to either improve their weaknesses or double down on the strengths without you having to tell them. Continuous personal growth ensures that a program manager remains adaptable, innovative, and capable of meeting evolving challenges

• Sample Question: Can you share a recent skill you've developed and how it's impacted your management style?

Execution & Adaptability. It’s all about follow-through. There are program managers who spend their time farming out tasks. And then there are program managers who roll up their sleeves and get into the trenches. I’ve written product specs, tested API endpoints, done QA testing, organized happy hours, planned on-sites, and also been a therapist, mentor, or whatever was needed for my teams. If someone thinks they can’t have a Jira ticket assigned to them, they’re probably not the right person to lead.

• Sample Question: You’ve prioritized tasks in a project with tight deadlines and multiple dependencies. Your lead tester had a death in the family, will be out on international travel for 2 weeks, and there’s no one to backfill. If you guys don’t meet your sprint goals, you will negatively impact 3 team’s roadmaps and the client will look bad in front of Congress. What do you do?

Mindset. Negativity is toxic in a program. It’s deeply personal and shaped by individual experiences, making it a challenging attribute to develop through conventional training. Is someone gonna kill the entire vibe because they don’t like the strategic direction? Or they don’t like the tech lead? Or whatever? Just know when attrition starts, it’s coming from a source of negativity.

• Sample Question: You’ve recently joined a mature program. The product manager and the client used to work together at a previous company and have a great relationship. In client-facing meetings, the product manager often challenges you and recently informed you that all program decisions need to through him. How can you turn this challenging situation into an opportunity?

Discovery vs Execution. This balance requires a blend of creativity and practicality that is often innate and difficult to develop purely through on-the-job training. Discovery is work. Capacity should be allocated. Experiments should happen before features are committed. There should be insights from users or even customer support if appropriate. There are too many program managers who just want a finite scope, a list of features, and milestones. This is NOT the way.

• Sample Question: Your client wants to find a way to include user research and design sprints into the delivery framework. To date, the program has only operated using the SAFe agile. How do you create mechanisms for both continuous discovery and continuous delivery without slowing down velocity?

Inspirational. Can you put people on a mission? The ability to inspire and motivate others is often a combination of charisma, empathy, and confidence, qualities that are challenging to develop artificially. You kinda need QUEEN or KING energy. Y’all I’m still working on myself - sometimes I’m tired. But you gotta keep that energy even if your 2 year old had a 104 temp yesterday and you only got 2 hours of sleep. Your team will match your energy.

• Sample Question: How do you inspire your team to adopt new ideas or changes?

Operational Efficiency. It’s not all meetings. What is onboarding like? Does your team need to report time? What are the financial mechanics? How do status reports get distributed? How is risk management happening? How do you ensure the optimal allocation of resources? How does planning happen and how often? How do you improve processes on the team and program?

• Sample Question: How do you manage resource allocation for multiple concurrent projects?

Stress Management. Can you make good decisions under pressure? Do you know how to ensure you don’t pass stress down to your teams? Can you keep your calm if someone is literally in your face yelling at you? When the team has to be called in over the weekend, can you keep a positive vibe and make the best of the situation?

• Sample Question: Your team has been grinding through changing requirements, a terrible DevOps vendor, a demanding client, and a looming hard deadline for Open Enrollment. People are calling out sick. Cameras are off on Zoom. The vibes have been killed and you know people are updating their resumes. How do you reduce the stress on your team?

People Management & High EQ. These skills enable program managers to understand, empathize, and effectively interact with team members and stakeholders, fostering a positive and productive work environment. Folks will not report to you. There will be personnel challenges. Sometimes, it will feel like you’re sending toddlers to timeout LOL. If you’ve got someone who lives for drama, this may not be the role for them.

• Sample Question: A mid-level engineer schedules a 1:1 with you. This engineer has had a few mishaps since they started, including causing a production outage, missing an on-call page (“my phone was off”), and rarely appears on camera during meetings. A few people have suggested they are over-employed or quiet quitting. You’re actually happy this person proactively reached out to you. You’re hoping it’s an opportunity for you to give them some feedback and maybe a little tough love. To your dismay, this person joins the call late and then starts complaining about your performance and that you’re not doing your job as program manager. How do you handle this situation?

Curiosity. A curious mindset drives continuous learning, innovation, and the ability to adapt to new technologies and methodologies.

• Sample Question: Your experience to date has been in building consumer-facing mobile apps. Your boss has decided to enter a new market of building APIs, machine learning, and data engineering. She’s decided there’s a great untapped market with the rise of LLMs. This is totally out of your comfort zone, but she has a ton of faith in you and knows you’re the right program manager for the job. How do you go about getting domain expertise?

Resilience. This is often a combination of personal experience, mindset, and coping strategies, making it a complex trait to develop on the job. You gotta be able to bounce make GRACEFULLY. Or sometimes you have an impossible deadline. You have to be able to get the team to race towards it with everything you have, even though every day may suck for a while. Can you still show up with smile and motivate others? Can you keep the vibes immaculate?

• Sample Question: Can you share an example of a major setback in a project and how you overcame it?

   

As they answer these questions, most candidates will tend to not directly answer the question but instead say something like “Well, when I was at Stripe, we faced a similar situation, and here’s what we did”.

That’s ok but steer them away from that.

As soon as they start down this path, tell them that you’d instead like to focus on the specific problem at your company. And this is HARD. I’m not a great thinker on my feet. (I’m stretching myself in Business Development because of this).

People aren’t trying to be evasive, but a good signal as to whether or not this person may be a great candidate is their willingness to ask additional questions.

Focus more time on real problem-solving that mimics the actual job this person will perform.

Lastly, here’s a list of things that can be learned on the job:

• Agile frameworks

• Critical Path + Dependency Mapping

• Your favorite pm software tool

• Financial Management

• Change Management

• Project/Program Metrics Reporting

• And probably most things you think a program manager should be able to do LOL.

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