The New Hire Test for Success

What would success look like if we had to explain it to a new hire?

When someone new joins the team, they often ask deceptively simple questions.
“How do we know if we’re doing well?”

On the surface, that question is about clarity.
At a deeper level, it’s about coherence.

Having a new team member is a quiet forcing function that you can use to accelerate the team’s coherence. New hires don’t know your history, and they don’t know your internal shorthand. But maybe most importantly here, they don’t know which metrics are sacred and which are ceremonial. 

John Cutler often critiques “success theater”, where vanity metrics or dashboards look like they are creating signal, but actually generate noise. A new team member won’t know the difference right away. They’ll take what we present at face value.

Many teams can list metrics. Fewer can describe what winning actually feels like. And if explaining success requires a 40 slide deck, or a dozen KPIs and OKRs layered together, that’s a signal worth noticing. As Richard Rumelt has written, “Good strategy is simple enough to explain, but disciplined enough to execute.” If you can’t explain success simply, there’s a good chance your strategy is either fragmented or overly abstract.

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STAND-UP EXERCISE

Use the idea of a new team member as a diagnostic lens.

Take a few moments asynchronously to write down how you would explain success of the team to a fictional new hire. Don’t just think about metrics, but also the meaning. What would you have them pay attention to? What matters most?

Then bring those explanations together and look for themes. Did different practice areas have distinct definitions? Did folks with varied lengths of tenure on the team explain it differently?

This exercise isn’t just about onboarding; it is about potential misalignment within the team. The places where definitions diverge are often the places where tension quietly lives. Use this to come together on a shared definition of success for your team and for your product. If success can’t be explained coherently, it can’t be protected intentionally.

Dimensions of Quality

Most product teams care deeply about quality. But when timelines tighten or pressure increases, quality often becomes a vague, emotionally loaded concept. One person worries we’re moving too fast. Another one worries we’re overthinking. Conversations stall because we’re using the same word to mean different things.

Quality isn’t a single standard you either meet or miss. It’s a set of attributes that compete for attention. And different moments in a product’s life put different kinds of quality at risk.

Quality Isn’t One Thing

One of the most useful ways to talk about quality comes from Ami Vora, who describes four distinct dimensions teams are constantly balancing:

• Performance — how fast, responsive, and reliable the product feels

• Bugs — correctness, stability, and freedom from defects

• Completeness — whether the solution actually solves the full problem

• Consistency — coherence across flows, surfaces, and behaviors

Every team makes tradeoffs across these dimensions. That’s not a failure; it’s reality. The problem arises when those tradeoffs are implicit. When no one names what’s most fragile, teams start talking past each other, and quality debates become personal instead of practical.

When quality discussions stay abstract, they tend to escalate quickly. Engineers may feel asked to cut corners. Designers may feel pressure to ship something unfinished. PMs may feel caught between speed and responsibility.

But when a team can say, “This quarter, completeness is the riskiest thing for us,” or “Performance is the edge we can’t afford to dull,” something shifts. The conversation becomes about judgment, not virtue. It frees you up to focus on intent, not blame. Naming risk creates shared context. It gives teams language to explain decisions and empathy for why others feel tension.

Where Quality Risk Shows Up

You can usually spot quality risk by paying attention to where friction accumulates.

• Where are we cutting scope, and what kind of quality does that affect? Are we creating an experience that feels partial or awkward to a user?

• Where are we deferring work, and what assumptions are we making about impact? Are our inconsistencies eroding trust with other teams?

• Where are customer complaints, internal friction, or workarounds starting to cluster? Are there bugs that felt acceptable individually but now feel risky in aggregate?

Each of these points to a different dimension of quality, and recognizing which one matters most at this moment is what enables better decisions. The goal isn’t to eliminate risk. It’s to make it visible. When teams agree on which kind of quality is most fragile, they can protect it more deliberately, communicate tradeoffs more clearly, and move faster with less friction.

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STAND-UP EXERCISE
In your next stand-up, on a shared workspace ask the team to vote on one question:

Which quality dimension feels most at risk right now?
Performance · Bugs · Completeness · Consistency

Notice where there’s alignment, or surprise. Invite people to talk about why they voted the way they did. Listen for patterns across roles or perspectives. Engineers, designers, and PMs often see different risks, and all of them are valid signals.

Going forward for this sprint / quarter / release explicitly name which quality dimension you’re prioritizing, and which one you’re consciously putting at risk.

Tooling (and AI, of course)

The market is overflowing with tools - AI assistants, collaboration platforms, analytics dashboards, niche SaaS products (with AI integrated!) for every imaginable workflow. It’s tempting to try them all. But tooling is not strategy. A good tool accelerates existing strengths; a poor one multiplies inefficiencies.

Some organizations love to collect tools like shiny objects. Every pain point comes with a new platform, subscription, or “quick fix.” And of course AI has entered the landscape by force, as chat but also wizards within other platforms. Some teams are being mandated to be using AI, so that the business is not “left behind”. The problem: tools don’t solve problems. People do. Tools only accelerate (or complicate) the work depending on how they’re introduced and adopted.

Effective teams treat tools as part of their operating model, not as shiny objects. They introduce them intentionally, guided by a few questions:

1. Fit — Does the tool align with the way people already work? If it requires people to constantly context-switch or feels like extra work, adoption will die fast. Tools should dissolve into existing habits, not demand entirely new ones.

2. Friction — Does it remove barriers or add new ones? Does it work for everyone on the team or just a subset of folks?

3. Focus — Is it solving the right problem, or just a problem? Does this distract from what we should be actually working on?

4. Flexibility — What’s the plan if the tool doesn’t work out? Too often, teams get stuck with tools that don’t scale or can’t integrate. Part of “trying something new” should always include the question: If this doesn’t work, how do we exit?
   

Organizations that answer these questions up front could save themselves months of rework and resistance.

Too often, teams focus on what tools to use instead of how to use tools well. A team that doesn’t know how to run effective meetings won’t suddenly become effective with an AI note-taker. A company that avoids tough prioritization decisions won’t magically improve by adding another project management suite.

The tools that truly stick for your team might not be the buzzy ones. FigJam for collaboration. Miro for brainstorming. ContentSquare for understanding behavior. Yes, ChatGPT for drafting and discovery. But sometimes a shared doc and a standing meeting are still the most powerful tools you can have.

The best teams don’t chase every new tool. They learn how to audit, experiment, and fold the right ones into their culture. That’s how tools stop being shiny objects and start being leverage.

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STAND-UP EXERCISE

At your next team stand-up, run a quick tooling audit together:

• List the top 3–5 tools your team uses daily.

• For each tool, ask:

  • How does this fit into our flow of work?

  • What friction does it remove? What friction does it add?

  • Are we using it to solve the right problems?

• Choose one tool to experiment with improving. Compare notes on how each other uses it. Does someone need more training? Are there ways to be using it more effectively? Simplifying? Or a need to sunset it or an overlapping tool?

The goal isn’t to chase the next new platform. It’s to ensure the tools in use are actually serving the team, the process, and the outcomes.

Signaling Decisiveness

As a product leader, you’re often navigating a space where formal authority doesn’t exist. Your influence is built through relationships and the respect you earn from your team, stakeholders, and peers. In this dynamic, how you carry yourself—what Sylvia Ann Hewlett describes as "gravitas" in Executive Presence 2.0—plays a significant role in how others perceive and respond to you.

Hewlett breaks gravitas into four essential components:

1. Projecting intellectual horsepower.

2. Displaying confidence and credibility.

3. Signaling decisiveness.

4. Maintaining grace under fire.

I’ve explored the topic of projecting intellect and expertise before, but we’ll focus on a less-discussed aspect of executive presence: decisiveness.

Decisiveness in Product Management

As product managers, we make decisions daily—about priorities, feature trade-offs, user experiments, and future research. These decisions shape the product’s trajectory and, in turn, the success of the business. To confidently communicate these choices to stakeholders, we must have self-assurance not only in our judgment but also in our ability to make those decisions quickly and effectively.

We’ve all experienced the pitfalls of indecision. When we delay making a choice, the situation often forces a default outcome upon us—typically not the one we’d have chosen. Avoiding this requires mastering the ability to make swift, informed decisions.

Gaining Confidence Through Information

One key to fast, confident decision-making is having access to trusted information that you can quickly digest and apply. Everyone processes information differently, so finding your ideal method for gathering insights is critical.

Some ways to gather the necessary information to confidently decide your product’s next steps:

1. Qualitative User Feedback – Mine your existing user feedback or lean on your UX team’s insights. Understanding the real-life experiences of your users is vital to making informed choices.

2. Internal or Quantitative Data – Build a strong intuition around user behavior by analyzing the numbers. Metrics often reveal truths that anecdotes can’t.

3. Experience with the Product – Use your own product like a customer would. Understanding the user experience firsthand gives you an invaluable perspective.

4. External Market Trends – Keep an eye on competitors, industry shifts, and broader consumer patterns. This will help you predict what’s coming and position your product accordingly.

5. Financial Modeling – Work with your finance or business partners to evaluate how various decisions might impact the bottom line. Long-term success often hinges on understanding the financial ripple effects of today’s choices.

6. Prototyping – Create mockups, sandboxes, or prototypes. Experimenting with different solutions can help you see how they perform in practice and make more informed choices.

While it’s impossible to cover all of these areas for every decision, pulling information from a few can lead to a decision that’s "good enough" to move forward.

The Role of Intuition and Circumstance

Of course, decision-making isn’t purely an intellectual exercise. As product managers, we juggle competing priorities, unpredictable constraints, stakeholder politics, and shifting business goals. Sometimes, our choices are influenced by factors beyond the data—like gut feeling or external pressures.

Even so, when you’re grounded in reliable information, you can navigate those complex variables with greater confidence. Decisiveness becomes less about bold assertions and more about informed, thoughtful action.

Leading with Influence, Not Authority

At the core of product management is the need to lead through influence. You don’t have the luxury of positional power; your authority comes from the expertise and trust you cultivate. Decisiveness is a key part of that influence. When your team and stakeholders see you making informed, timely decisions, it builds confidence in your leadership.

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STAND-UP EXERCISE

Discuss with your team how they typically make decisions, or how they might feel forced to make decisions. Of the methods discussed above, which ones are applicable to their learning style, the product, and the business. What other ways might they collect information to make better informed and quicker decisions?

Bonus: Learn about the framework of one-way door and two-way door decisions. Jeff Bezos explains the philosophy in this video.

Projecting Expertise

In Sylvia Ann Hewlett’s book Executive Presence 2.0, she breaks down EP as an amalgam of qualities that true leaders exude, a presence that telegraphs you're in charge or deserve to be. Through extensive research and interviews with executives, she has determined that the largest component to EP is gravitas. Gravitas is how you act and affects much of how others perceive your intellect. The ability to project intellect is an important skill for product leaders who are looking to gain respect and cultivate influence. Most product managers have extensive expertise, but they might need some coaching or framing to be able to project that within their organization.

There are a couple ways in which product managers especially should be able to project expertise in their product, users, and objectives.

1. Know your stuff cold. You should know the salient details of your product strategy, user journey, stakeholder requirements, etc. by heart, being able to recount them fluently without much filler or stammering.

2. Be able to go 6 questions deep. Be able to answer questions at the root of the issue or topic - have the context necessary.

3. Read the room. That means tuning yourself out for a moment in order to tune in to the needs and wants of others. Then you can course correct on the spot to establish a connection. You want to make your audience comfortable so that when you speak, they hear you. You aren’t compromising your message, you are calibrating it.

Product managers very rarely lead by position, it is most often through influence, which is based on relationships and expertise. To garner the respect necessary to lead without given authority, product managers must be able to project their expertise and intellect to others in a convincing manner. That is a learned skill all product leaders should develop.

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STAND-UP EXERCISE

Product team members may not feel like they are experts, despite their extensive knowledge on a subject. (In fact, the well-documented Dunning-Kruger effect shows a cognitive bias exists where people with limited competence in a particular domain overestimate their abilities, and high performers in the domain tend to underestimate their skills.) Use a stand-up exercise to illustrate to team members that they do have expertise.

Ask team members if they feel like they are an expert in a domain. You’ll likely get a combo of yes and no’s. Then, ask each team member to write down five topics that they could speak on for 10 minutes without any advance preparation. You could have this be open to any topic, or attempt to narrow it to professional topics. This exercise is entertaining to see what topics team members generate (and a good get-to-know-you activity!) but also creates discussion on how easy/hard it was to compile the list. Do they feel like an expert in these domains? Would they be convincing to an audience speaking about these topics?