Product Manager

We’re very excited you’re considering a role at Visor. This guide will provide information to make your candidate experience seamless.

We’re all-in on PLG. We believe it provides a superior experience for customers. To guide our strategy, we have developed a unique set of principles, outlined below:

We believe that the most user-friendly products are the ones that don’t require a huge decision. Instead, they’re the products that are easy to adopt and investment is gradual according to your value. To learn more about our philosophy, check out this blog post:

Visor operates in a highly-competitive, very crowded market. Here are some of the other companies in our market.

While many of the products in our class offer similar-looking products, we built Visor with a unique formula to match the unmet demand we saw in the market: people looking to collaborate more easily with data locked in their SaaS apps.

Here are the three main reasons Visor’s better:

It's more flexible

Our users are frustrated that the tools they use are rigid and limited, forcing them to do their work elsewhere. Visor can grow with its users as their use cases change and expand. Visor adapts to how they want to work; it doesn't force them to adapt to Visor.

It's more trustworthy

Many products that promise integrations don't deliver reliably on that promise. Visor offers a refreshingly seamless and trustworthy integration experience. It makes it easier to work with integrated data, it improves the likelihood things will sync, and it provides helpful guidance when things are done.

It's more shareable

Nobody operates in a vacuum — everything done in Visor is likely meant to be shared. Visor helps users share their information and create rich collaboration experiences around it so that they can keep people informed and draw upon the feedback of their entire brain trust.

Our philosophy around product management blends quantitative analysis with strategic direction. We use data to inform our decisions, but we ultimately make the decisions that we believe match all of the complex factors.

Our goal is to focus on what makes Visor unique, not just build what other products have. We have a strong vision for what is uniquely Visor (and what’s not), and we are comfortable saying “no” to ideas that don’t fit our strategy.

Crucially, we have 2 axes of product development: (1) the features in our core platform, like the different view types and (2) the number of integrations we offer. Within the axis, the incremental value is exponential. And then, combining the axes also multiplies the value. Therefore, we believe our value function to customers generally follows the format:

$CustomerValue=PlatformFeatures^2*NumberOfIntegrations^2$

Using this model, we constantly weigh and balance the impact of adding new platform features (that are valuable across all integrations) with adding more integrations (that will be impacted by the value of the platform features).

When we receive anything that could constitute qualitative data, such as a user support ticket or notes from a customer success call, we log it to a Feedback database in Salesforce. From there, our product team is responsible for periodically reviewing these items of Feedback and categorizing them.

That includes linking the feedback items to broad themes, on which we are collecting information. It also includes linking the feedback items to any open or planned roadmap items. This allows us to trace a product project back to the voice of the customer. During development of our PRDs and designs, we can use this feedback database and even activate it by connecting live with the impacted customers. And when customers are awaiting certain features under development, we can use this system to ensure they’re informed.

Our team reviews the roadmap 2x per week, including smaller items and large initiatives. Approximately 1x per quarter, we run a more thorough review.

We use a home-grown goal-setting framework, called VTIP. Read more here.

We align all our projects to initiatives, which have associated metrics and goals. By doing this, we’re able to understand what metrics each project is intended to influence. This also allows our team to identify how our work is aligned with that of others on other teams. And it shows how our projects connect back to the company vision.

Because we believe in a product-led growth approach to building our business, product and marketing teams work closely together. That’s why you may find it valuable to understand our marketing strategy and stack.

Visor’s marketing stack consists of a combination of custom-built solutions and off-the-shelf products. You’ll likely find that Visor’s marketing stack is skewed more heavily to custom-built or tightly-integrated products, since we have engineering resources dedicated entirely to growth & marketing projects.

We use Salesforce as our main CRM with HubSpot primarily for marketing automation. They sync bidirectionally.

In Salesforce, we track all of our users, including special engagement data. For any given user, there are Salesforce fields to determine whether they’ve taken certain actions we care about, such as integrating Visor with another app or inviting a colleague. We also use advanced formulas to score users and keep track of their health over time.

This information syncs to HubSpot, where we maintain a number of workflow automation campaigns to guide user activity. Our email automation runs on different tracks, depending on whether users have reached certain milestones. For example, the new user email sequence will send different emails based on if the customer has integrated Visor with another app, sent invites, or reached certain health scores. We also run automation to boost activation & retention.

To learn more about our marketing automation, check out this blog post:

We use a number of tools to understand how customers are using our product. They range from a custom-built analytics system (which stores millions of records per day in our data warehouse) to off-the-shelf products like FullStory, GA, and Heap.

We currently use Webflow for our website, Ghost for our blog, and Super.so + Notion for some other properties (like our support page).

We consider the following to be core parts of the Visor marketing ecosystem:

We’re also planning to add the following components to our ecosystem in the future:

The following outlines Visor’s initial screening process for candidates.

These calls are helpful for information gathering. We’re looking for your honesty and want to ensure that you’ll happy with the role, and that we’ll feel that you may be a good fit for it based on your interest and experience.

On these screening calls, please be ready to talk about your past experience with product management as well as your future ambitions. Be ready to talk about past experiences where you engaged with customers.

In this part of our interview process, we’re looking to understand how well your capabilities match our needs for the position. We’re looking for product managers who can:

Our interviews will feature questions about your past accomplishments and career experiences. Please come ready to talk about specific examples from your past. We’ll also ask you to role play in certain business scenarios. And in certain cases, we may conduct a basic skills assessment live on the call.

We don’t expect any one candidate to be perfect. Rather, each person has a unique set of strengths and areas to be developed further. Our goal is to determine your unique combination and see how well that fits the role we have.

Please bring your authentic self to the meeting; be the “self” you plan to bring to work every day. We’re looking to learn about you in a personal capacity, too. What are your passions and interests? What drives you? Show us how Visor can be the right place to further your career.

We’ll conduct the interview over Zoom. To facilitate a free and flowing conversation, we’ll ask that you be situated somewhere in a quiet room, by yourself, with a strong internet connection so that we can both take the meeting with our cameras on and remain unmuted. For parts of our interview process where skills are being assessed, it’s important that we maintain the integrity of this being an individual assessment. We will record the call for review by additional Visor team members.

Round 1 (60 minutes): Your knowledge and philosophy

The first interview focuses on what you’ve accomplished and what you already know. During this interview, your interviewer will ask you to describe times from your past professional experiences. We’ll also ask you questions to confirm your understanding of certain product management skills and tactics. Be ready to talk about big-picture ideas pertinent to product management. Also be ready to share knowledge about key terms.

Round 2 (60 minutes): Hands-on exercises

Your second interview will be oriented around how well you can complete some of the day-to-day responsibilities of a product manager. Be ready to receive and analyze data. Also be ready to demonstrate your empathy and product intuition.

We believe the most effective way to determine how well we’d work together is to actually try it. That’s why we’ve included a collaborative take-home project as part of our interview process for all positions.

We value your time and have built in a compensation component to all our projects to show you that we mean it. All take-home projects are structured as consulting projects with a $175 flat-rate compensation attached to them. In order to be eligible for this compensation, you’ll be asked to sign Visor’s standard consulting agreement before you begin work. The general time estimate for Visor take-home projects ranges from 5 to 10 hours.

The take-home project consists of two meetings: a 30-minute kickoff and a 30-minute presentation (followed by a Q&A). You’ll do your work on the project between these two meetings. Typically we like to give all candidates about one calendar week to work on the project, but we can be flexible based on your schedule — planning on less or more time.

During the kickoff meeting, you will receive a set of instructions about a project that is specific to your role. You’ll review these instructions live on a video call with your interviewer. In the most productive of these kickoff calls, the candidates begin some planning work together with the interviewer. Please use this as an opportunity to ask questions you need to help you complete the project (you are also encouraged to follow up with additional questions during the course of your project work). At the end of this kickoff, we’ll schedule the presentation meeting.

The principle behind the take-home project is to see how well we work together. As such, you are expected to check in about your progress during the time between the kickoff and the presentation. Candidates who succeed during these projects are typically the ones that engage in the most conversation with the Visor team during their work.

During the presentation, be prepared to walk through your work and how you met the expectations of the assignment. Your interviewer will ask you follow-up questions to explain your work. Please deliver your project in a way that can be shared after this meeting with other members of the Visor team.

The take-home project is helpful in determining your ability to execute in a real-world scenario akin to those we experience at Visor. We will gauge how well you understand the core requirements of the problem statement, assumptions you make in the process, and your ability to explain how the deliverable may fit into the larger product strategy.

The project for roles on the product management team will attempt to let you demonstrate skills across the following areas: data analysis, critical thinking, communication, and planning.

Our team will conduct a 90-minute interview with you. Our goal is to get to know how you interact with various team members that you’ll work with cross-functionally. We’ll chat about all facets of the Visor product, ecosystem, organization, and culture.

At the end of the day, we’re a team comprised of very real people who come from different backgrounds with a shared purpose of collaborating together in the hopes of building something of value for lots of people. We all approach each other with honesty, openness, curiosity, and support. We ask that you approach this conversation from a place of honesty and vulnerability. We’re aiming to build a rapport, and to find out how you can become a culture add to our team. We’re looking for signs of your passion, drive, and commitment to our cultural values. You’ll earn bonus points if you demonstrate you’ve read this by mentioning “EPIC Drive,” our cultural values, during the part of the team meeting when everyone is together.

Here’s more information about how to ace the Visor product management interview.

We’re looking to hire PMs that raise the IQ of our entire team. Of course you should know the basics and the vocabulary. But we’re really looking for you to show us how you apply that knowledge cleverly. What are the things you know about product strategy & development that can’t be learned in a classroom or blog post? Be prepared to demonstrate how smart you are about product management and how you’d bring that to our team.

Building a company is all about figuring out solutions to hard, new problems. As a result, we’re looking to hire team members who can go way beyond just doing the types of work they already know well. We’re looking for bright people who think outside the box. Tell us more about your academic achievements that demonstrate your cognitive abilities. Or show us your intelligence by communicating very clearly as you’re solving the problems in our interviews.

At this stage of our company, we need to hire people that get things done. It’s not enough to just have the right ideas. Execution is everything. So beyond just knowing the right things to say, we want to know that you know how to roll up your sleeves and get it done. Show us examples of your work. Let your passion for products shine through; do you have any side projects you’ve worked on that demonstrate a passion for building products outside of your day job?

We believe that product management is equal parts art and science. It can be very hard to make sense of data that’s not always perfectly collected. It can also be tricky knowing how to make the most of all the data we do have. To excel in our interview, be ready to crunch some numbers and talk about what they mean.

On the other hand, product management is an intrinsically human-centered endeavor. That’s why we’re looking for PMs who think empathetically about our customers and develop authentic relationships with them at scale. While we want to know that you can crunch the numbers, we’ll also expect you to show us how building products is fundamentally about helping people.