Lessons from one of the world’s top executive recruiters | Lauren Ipsen (Daversa Partners, GC)

Regardless of whether or not you're hiring, you should always be keeping a pulse on the market. That is the most important thing, and I think that should be the case for both candidates and (laughs) , you know, folks that are hiring. Like, you never want to put yourself in a position where you have no idea what good looks like, whether that's from a company standpoint or from a candidate standpoint. So both parties should always be having a good understanding of which companies are thriving, which individuals are building great things and are well-known commodities in their organizations, and get great references. Oftentimes, I, you know, encourage founders to simply chat with what good looks like and get a really good sense of kind of what benchmark candidate profiles could be. And who knows where that person will be in a year or what have you, but staying really, really close to really great people and using them from an advising capacity or getting them ingrained in some type of involvement in the product prior to actually having that specific need, I think, is really important.

(instrumental music) Welcome to Lenny's Podcast. I'm Lenny, and my goal here is to help you get better at the craft of building and growing products. Today my guest is Lauren Ibsen. One of the most important skills for founders and senior product leaders to develop is the ability to hire great people. You won't be able to build the best company or the best product if you can't hire the best people, and Lauren is one of the most experienced and successful people in the world when it comes to hiring product leaders. She's placed over 80 senior product leaders across tech companies and has worked with some of the biggest companies out there. When I asked a bunch of really smart product leaders who their favorite product recruiter was, Lauren's name came up a ton. In our conversation, we get super tactical about what founders need to do to find the best product talent, what product managers should be doing during their career to give themselves the most opportunity, and we also touch on what recruiters themselves often get wrong when trying to attract great talent. This episode is rich with actionable advice for basically everyone, and I'm really excited to bring it to you. With that, I bring you Lauren Ibsen. Who has an opinion on internal tools? Internal tools are something you probably don't think about until you have to, or it probably didn't even occur to you to think about them. But if you work at a big company, you probably have a bunch of one-off custom apps or dashboards that are laser-focused on just one job to be done for one specific team or just one role, and they're always such a huge pain to build and maintain. And that's why I'm such a big fan of Retool and why I think Retool is so popular. Retool allows teams as small as just one person to build a suite of custom internal apps in a fraction of the time that you think it takes. The productivity gains of custom apps is now within reach, not just for large enterprises but for small teams as well. And as you scale your company, Retool scales with you. Snowflake saves about 26 hours a week of manual spreadsheet work with custom internal apps built on Retool. Amazon uses Retool to handle GDPR requests. Thousands of teams at companies like Coinbase, DoorDash, and NBC collaborate around custom-built Retool apps to operate with greater efficiency. Maybe you've thought about using Retool before but just haven't, and I'm here to tell you that now teams of up to five can build unlimited Retool apps for free. Get started today at retool.com/lenny. Today's episode is brought to you by Miro. Creating a product, especially one that your users can't live without, is damn hard, but it's made easier by working closely with your colleagues to capture ideas, get feedback, and being able to iterate quickly. That's where Miro comes in. Miro is an online visual whiteboard that's designed specifically for teams like yours. I actually used Miro to come up with the plan for this very ad. With Miro, you can build out your product strategy by brainstorming with sticky notes, comments, live reactions, voting tools, even a timer to keep your team on track. You can also bring your whole distributed team together around wireframes where anyone can draw their own ideas with the pen tool or put their own images or mockups right into the Miro board. And with one of Miro's ready-made templates, you can go from discovering research to product roadmaps to customer journey flows to final mocks. Want to see how I use Miro? Head on over to my Miro board at miro.com/lenny to see my most popular podcast episodes, my favorite Miro templates. You can also leave feedback on this podcast episode and more. That's M-I-R-o.com/lenny. Lauren, thank you for being here. Welcome to the podcast.