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Question Inspiration

I’ve included the Question Template. In addition to the work format, I’ve used to prepare for this interview. Almost every good candidate does this, but I don’t think it gets discussed enough. So, to me, it’s far less about showcasing the work and, hopefully, more about useful customer feedback for you on how applicants think and operate. On how to frame questions

I sometimes prefer that instead of asking, “Tell me about a time when questions occurred,” I ask, “Using your experience if x and y occurred at Hatch, how would you solve/think about that?” As they say, past performance isn’t indicative of future performance. It also takes people away from the security of a formed answer and back to first principles. It also shows how they would integrate the cultures and values of Hatch in the workplace.

How to use this document

First refer to

Hiring Processes⁠

that covers off the stages in the interview process at Hatch.

⁠

How to Interview [⭐️ Updated 22/3]⁠

covers the things that we focus on and try to determine when interviewing. It’s a mixture of going deep, understanding that person motivations and going through that person background to discover how their experiences could help them grow hatch and hatch them.

Pick 2-3 questions from this list that could help you get to those conclusions.

Q&A (JD)

Q&A (JD)

Topic

Question

Answer

What are they looking for? // Example

Why Hatch?

• Hatch is solving a problem I have deeply resonated with for a long time. It’s more prevalent in GenZ or Millennials, but it’s something I’ve even seen growing up with my parents, who spent decades figuring out what they enjoyed and loved to do.

• I love talking to people about their careers; I’m helping several friends and students right now with job hunting and career changes. Even mentoring startups and their early employees. Seeing those first hires was special for me when working with accelerators and incubators. I’ve also seen enough cycles to see how these people have grown from these choices. I can go to networking events and have someone go “I appreciated that advice you gave x years ago”

• I’ve probably written 100 custom CVs and cover letters in my career but none of them have had direct influence in landing any of my roles. It was the hustle to reach out to the right people and show the value I can deliver.

• When I look at company culture, it’s pretty hard to judge from the outside. So I look at things like whether they have promoted people internally or convinced other people they have worked with to start the leap on the journey and see people like Jade & Chaz. How long have people been with the company and? I see people like Sam, so these are significant indicators.

• I don’t have a traditional background by any means and I struggled land or pivot my career being someone that went straight into generalist roles at startups from early on. I generally define myself as someone that can go into a situation with a passion to get things done, rally a team and execute from first principles. At the intersection where storytelling and building meets data and process. • I grew up as an athlete from a very young age training with Olympians since I was about 12 years old for over a decade and I always thought the most ambitious people played sport. When your young you have blinders on, not knowing what’s outside your walled garden and where your skills or how tending those initial crops you develop can be applied. Really the problem Hatch is trying to solve. I found myself studying nano-fabrication in South Korea where I got offered to take a free entrepreneurship course and that opportunity opened my world to more ambitious people who started companies. • It wasn’t until I got the chance to combine some of my habits outside of sport, one of which was gaming we built some of the largest communities on Facebook back in the day, many of the original community managers took that experience and the partnerships we grew and now they work for Riot, Redbull, SXSW. Those are the moments you discover and remember. • Since then I’ve worked across M&A in renewables, launched compliance and fraud teams for the UK at Europe’s fastest growing digital bank in Berlin where I hired several people. I’ve ran GTM, design, product, events and community at Australia’s largest venture investment platformi. • I found myself in San Francisco working with one of the co-founders of Applovin a $20b ad-tech company on his new venture studio. Where daily I would help bring in young engineers, sometimes they literally just gotten off the plane and help them build companies and find employees. • I love working in high growth companies and under pressure. At N26 we were onboarding 10,000 users a day, 60 new employees every 2 weeks. At TEN13 we built an entire platform and grew to $4m in revenue in 2 years. But to me those won’t be the moments I remember most in a decade. It’s the people we gave their first bank accounts too, the founders we funded, it’s the force multiple of the people they helped and the employees we worked with to make that happen.

How did you overcome an obstacle to succeed?

Nugget (Results): I was working in Berlin at a Neobank and we we’re under the pump to get our compliance reporting and auditing under control after launching quickly in the UK. We ended up doing this by bringing in part-time customer service staff and I trained them to be fraud analysts while we gathered data to develop a longer term product-led risk engine solution. Action: We ended up coming to the conclusion after speaking to the product team that we needed to manually solve our problem first. Then after speaking to the recruitment team realised we needed to bring in talent internally as there was no capacity to be bring in the specialists we needed. Task: So we went out to the CS team and asked for 15 staff to help with our reporting problems, also being constrained we ended up with 10. We wrote the a basic onboarding and SOP handbook and got the problem under control. Result: So we solved the growing backlog of requests from incumbent banks and the FCA in the UK. But now we established and trained a team. So we advocated to just keep them instead of hiring externally. Giving the opportunity to those custom service staff and seeing there faces when they now had the security of FT employment that aligned with their skills, that’s the moment I’ll never forget working in Berlin. Also it allowed us to take the time to explore the problem deeper; reporting, customer experience, metrics and system efficiency when we handed our learnings to the product team.

Tell me about a time you’ve been in a challenging or highly ambiguous situation, and how you navigated that ambiguity.

Nugget (Results): I was the first employee at TEN13 and my first day at work was the day of Lockdowns for Covid. It was a new investment product that needed to grow in uncertain economical times. So we picked up the phone talked to our small set of existing customers. Then I ran webinars to talk to our prospective customers. In ambiguous situations you have to reduce feedback loops as much as possible and put even more empathises on inputs and leading indicators. Action: We ended up funnelling every investor that signed up and all our marketing effort into webinars. Offering people the opportunity to hop on a call with us for lunch and we would pay for your meal with uber eats giftcards. This allowed us the opportunity to talk to our first 100 customers personally, understand their motivations, if this was the right product and let them talk to our existing customers. Result: The result was for $750 lunch we gained valuable feedback but also got some of the greatest buy-in from our initial customers. We did calls every week for probably our first 6 months and they almost exclusively were the top of funnel for our first $1m in revenue.

“This is a big one for me because, at the end of the day, the PM job is really ambiguous. It’s really hard to describe on a piece of paper all the things that you’re going to encounter. So I ask a lot of behavioral questions around that. I look for people who look for structure and a way forward through the ambiguity. Also, I look for people who seek help, seek inputs, versus ‘This is the way.’ ” —

Jiaona Zhang (JZ)

⁠

, head of product at Linktree, ex-SVP of product at Webflow

Describe a time when you were part of a controversial decision, and what you did. // What’s the most stressful or difficult situation you’ve faced at your previous job? How did you handle it? // Describe a time when you had to convince your manager to try a different approach to solve a problem.

Nugget: There was a time where we wanted to run a campaign that involved a lot stakeholders that simply wasn’t high on our priority list and would take a lot effort, it didn’t work towards our OKR’s that quarter. But it was something they ran previously in the past and wanted to bring back. I eventually had to make the decision that it’s not we should pursue but I didn’t make it lightly because it was coming from my manager. Action: I started by talking to our the potential stakeholders involved and the past stakeholders from the previous campaign as well as the data we had on conversions. Asking them if they valued it, did they have time if we made it a priority and how strongly would you feel if we didn’t do this again. Result: I got some really good insights no one was really strongly for running it again apart from the Manager and the data didn’t have a lagging indicator of success now it had been a couple of years. So I presented this information and we decided not to pursue it and instead brings aspects of it into an existing campaign. Reflecting back on that decision though, I could have done things better. Instead of talking to the stakeholders individually it would probably have been better to get them in a room at once to discuss it to get all the perspectives. To identify the exact problem everyone thought it solved and if their was alternative compromise on the solution.

“It’s really revealing, because if they can explain this conflict and understand why this problem was really important—and represent both sides such that you can understand why that conflict existed in the first place—and they can do it in this even-keeled way, where you realize that they can take on these different perspectives, you start to learn a lot about that person.” —

Yuhki Yamashita

⁠

, CPO of Figma

What’s something that everyone takes for granted that you think is hogwash? // What important truth you believe in that very few people agree with you on?

Over relying on good Pattern Recognition skills is a negative signal, despite many companies testing early career hiring and success on it. It stops you from questioning Why a certain thing is the way is. In extremes it’s the antithesis of thinking from first principles or going deeper into the problem space.

“I’m always looking for people to break this sort of interview mindset. Everyone always prepares for interviews, and then their entire conversation is predicting what you think you want me to say. As a result, you can have high-quality people that you dismiss because they weren’t genuine. There’s no way to answer that question without being genuinely opinionated. Because it starts with ‘What is the thing that you think...?’ When I break that wall, I’m testing: is this person authentic? Because sometimes I’m dismissing them because they told me nothing new. But I don’t want the interview process to penalize them, and this was my ‘save’ question. Sometimes I’ll ask a manager, ‘Look, you’ve managed hundreds of people in your career. What’s conventional wisdom that you bet against, that you have found is actually inaccurate?’ You could do that for ‘What do people think about AI that’s inaccurate, that everyone believes?’ You could do that for domains. You can do all kinds of things.” —

Nikhyl Singhal

⁠

, VP of product at Meta

What’s an unfair secret you’ve learned to improve a team’s velocity and energy level? // Tell me about a time you had to engage an audience or inspire fellow employees?

When trying to build a team culture whether it be sporting or business we like to focus on the “we” often. You want to encourage collaboration and team work. It’s also important to highlight individual contribution and support that as well. Even better if you can relate that person heroic moment to the outcome to direct customer achievement. Which ties everything into the ultimate goal of the company.

“When I say ‘unfair’ or ‘secret,’ I mean not something that you read on Medium. I’m looking for what you learned, how you learned it, how it works, and how you apply it.” —

Noah Weiss

⁠

, CPO at Slack

Give me an example of a time you made a process more efficient. How did you do it?

Our mission at TEN13 was to create best and most informed investment platform for Australian Investors to deploy capital in global companies. We drove over half of our revenue via text message. Situation: Initial we did this how most companies do via email. But I quickly realised it wasn’t the best media to reach our customers, who were money rich but time poor. Action: So I created a mobile experience. We are a startup and moving fast so text message was the first MVP of this. Result: This allowed people to allocate initially by filling in a mobile optimised form. Which meant faster allocations and more hype around deal launches. But we also wanted to keep them informed so it also included this like a link to the memo and their allocation if it was a follow-on round.

“I noticed our data entry process was redundant, so I automated certain steps, saving the team several hours per week.”

Have you ever missed a deadline? What happened? What would you do differently next time? // How do you prioritize work when there are multiple projects going on at the same time?

I try pretty hard not to miss deadlines and have burnt myself out pulling all nighters sometimes to avoid that. But what I learned is often these things can be prevented by running a better OKR process. Making sure that your Key Results are being tracked and progress measured weekly and importantly all the relevant stake holders understand the importance of being in that weekly meeting to set initiatives and talk to Key Result progress every week. If your falling behind you have to come into the meeting with a solution or information to help people solve that problem. Also making sure the initiatives you create are things that are 99% possible to achieve. If it’s work that sits outside OKRs they over communicating where things are sitting, rank stacking priorities and if all fails renegotiating targets (Don’t make excuses. Set milestones so you can show progress. Then be data driven.) are frameworks I’ve used.

What’s our mission?

Our goal is to help people find work that brings them meaning; we are not satisfied with short term commercial outcomes, we want long term human outcomes

If hired, how would you want to grow within the company? How do you think you’d do it?

I see myself being able to supercharge yourself and the exec team. But also help create a structured approach to help everyone that works here do work that brings them meaning. Maybe it’s continuing running the people and culture function. But there’s also something pulling me to work with more technical teams and be closer to the customer in product based roles. Whether it be directly in product or product ops or marketing.

What’s your Weakness

Sometimes I like to silently following how something is progressing, which may come across as micromanaging. But often it’s just me being curious on how something works and wanting to learn more. It’s something I identified and made sure to communicate with the person directly accountable to that task if it’s happening. They know how something runs way better than I do so I want to make sure I can understand and empathise with their work.

How would you describe yourself in 5 words?

Trusting, Honest, curious, realistic, dependable

Describe a time you had to share bad news with your team or have a difficult conversation with a coworker.

While my highlight working in Berlin was hiring customer service staff to be full time employees we didn’t bring everyone over and offer them employment. For some people it was about having a discussion on whether this was work they were actually passionate about doing, for another it was more serious conversation around conduct.

Imagine you have submitted a piece of work that you thought was finished, but a colleague returns it to you with multiple corrections and comments that would take you hours to address. What would you do?

Over communication is key. When handing over work be clear what stage something is at when you hand it over and exactly what you want feedback on. This saves the person that’s reviewing it time to focus on the important inputs. It also leads with what actually has the ability to be addressed in the time period you need. If that still is happening maybe there needs to be a reflection on when and how work gets submitted in the future and planning around timelines for proposals.

How do you find inspiration to produce a piece of work?

Go back to first principles on why we are doing the task. From a culture perspective often bringing along a coworker to also work on the mundane task together with.

If I asked you to tell me one new idea we can implement into our product/website/services, what would you tell me?

permissionless (network effects)

Do you usually make better decisions alone or with a group? Why? When do you ask for help?

Early in my career I use to do it alone to take accountability and have a bias for action. However I’ve realised this isn’t that is often best for the team. Firstly communicating your doing something regardless if your doing it alone is important. You may realise someone else is already doing it, or have an insight that would lead to an easier solution. Some things however is better to have stakeholders involved from the start to give feedback and communicate when and where help could be needed so they have also prioritise with their workloads.

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Q&A (JD) 2

Q&A (JD) 2

Name

Topics

Question

Answer

What are some examples of people that you have hired that reflect on the mission of what you are building at hatch? and what has made them so successful? I saw Jade and David took here skills understanding retail to to lead operations teams that served customer at the Iconic. I saw Sam take this skills as a engineer to lead product management.

What do you think about building trust for your product? What would you define as your most important factors? Brand Strength? Quality of applicants? Quality of Roles? A number of each? What do you think we need to prioritise?

What do you think about retention for your job seekers (though you probably don’t want to call them that because it already buckets it)? Often, the first touch point in a job application is always the funnel approach, or are you considering leveraging that data and profile in other ways? There one source profile → 1 source portfolio. Well, a portfolio is only something people update occasionally. So maybe for finding alignment, it becomes more of a career strategy coach as well (telling you to update things, asking you questions, micro-lessons). Then, it also benefits the recruiters on the platform, not only increasing the quality of candidates but also the quality of employees. Cross-functionally, this also sells to organisations and individual employees. It’s a small model trained on your values, work, employer, feedback, and career plan.

If I were to go to Chaz, Jade, Simon, Sean what would they say I could do to most help you?

What important truth you believe in that very few people agree with you on? // What’s something that everyone takes for granted that you think is hogwash?

Over relying on good Pattern Recognition skills is a negative signal, despite many companies testing early career hiring and success on it. It stops you from questioning Why a certain thing is the way is. Makes you think in buckets, not customers and In extremes it’s the antithesis of thinking from first principles or going deeper into the problem space.

What do you care most about that the person in this role will accomplish?

I think the talent, people and culture function at hatch is even more important than at most other companies because it’s a direct link and ability to dog food your product internally. I saw you previously had Sophie on as a Head of People, Culture and Learning and she’s still an advisor. But for the immediate future that person will be the chief of staff which to me is really exciting. But I’m wondering how you came to that decision, to put it under the chief of staff mandate than have it as its own function. What that through constraints or prioritisation?

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