When we talk about something as broad as how to be a really great product manager,
it's easy to get lost in platitudes and generalities that
aren't going to be very actionable for you as a product manager.
In the videos and in the resources that you'll find in the course here,
I've used specific examples and even some templates in some cases to really help you
anchor into the practice of
these specific techniques and concepts that we're going through.
To that end, I have a fictional company
that I'm going to use in a number of the videos called Enable Quiz.
Let's take a look at the positioning statement.
Their basic idea is that for hiring managers,
they are going to provide this lightweight quizzing solution to assess the skills
of candidates that come in and interview for engineering jobs that they have.
And it isn't something that is going to give
people formal certifications or even be relevant once they get hired.
But it's just a very lightweight means to make
quick initial assessments on where they are for a given skill set.
Let's take a look at the storyboard.
Our major actors here are Helen, the HR Manager,
who is in charge of getting candidates in and doing some initial screening,
Frank or Francine, the Functional Manager,
who is the actual, let's say,
development lead or a development manager.
And the way they interact is that when Frank or Francine needs to hire somebody,
they give a job description to Helen or Hank,
and in regarding Enable Quiz,
he or she then takes this and makes a little quiz with and quiz may have several topics.
So for instance, let's say they're hiring a full stack web developer.
They might want a quiz for,
let's say, they use Ruby,
JavaScript and maybe even some stuff within Ext JS,
JavaScript framework, and this may be what's on the quiz.
And they give this to Ross the Recruit who is coming in to interview and the
outcome that they want to see for
their customer is that they're getting better hiring outcomes.
That's probably the most important thing we hypothesize at this company,
and before that, that they're able to do this
efficiently and spend less time in the recruiting process.
If we look at the specific problem area that they're approaching,
what problem are they trying to solve,
what job are they doing for the customer?
It's that these firms typically are needing to hire a lot of technical talent,
and they don't have a systematic way to assess the skill levels of the candidates across
these different applications or
different technologies that they may need to use in their job.
And that may be important for people that are coming in that are
not yet employees that are interviewing.
And they may find that there is a different modality that it's useful also
inside the company if they're going to set up some skills development programs,
maybe they want to kind of baseline where different people are so they can just put
more relevant programs in front of them that are
more relevant to where they want to go with their career.
And the alternatives that these customers use, we think,
are just checking references and maybe having to ask
a few kind of annoying probing technical questions during the interviews.
And we hypothesize that they'd like to do less of that and just talk to the candidates.
And then if they had a sort of systematic way to assess
the candidates that they would like that.
They would like to get this basic skills assessment out of the way.
So that is some information about what this company is,
what their core hypotheses are about what they're going to do that's valuable.
And I just think this will be helpful context for you as we
apply some of these methods to Enable Quiz and see how they might approach them.
