00:00 Hey there! If you’re watching this video, it means that you have an interview with me on a product-related role. This video will go through a few useful information that I think you should watch before you the interview, such that you don’t have to go through this during the interview. 00:18 It covers stuff around myself, my company, my department, the role itself, and then some FAQ-style. where a lot of previous candidates have asked these questions. 00:31 Okay, so I’ll start, uh, by introducing myself. I’m Sherban, I’m from Eastern Europe, specifically from Transylvania. and, uh, I’ve been working at Trilogy for five years and a bit. 00:46 Basically, I started, uh, my career modding games, because I was, I still am a gamer, and, uh, that kind of led me to learn computer science. 01:01 In the second year of, uh, my college studies, I actually decided that this is boring, so I also got, uh, into employed on the side, well, as a full-time job, but I was also still doing university. 01:13 And, uh, yeah, I progressed as an engineer, then I became a team lead, an architect, a lead architect. In the past, uh, four years or so, I’ve been primarily a VP of, uh, engineering. 01:28 So right now I’m actually SVP of engineering, uh, here at Trilogy. Maybe a small kind of personal story about remote work, which I find interesting, and I also have it in the other engineering oriented video, is around my initial skepticism about remote work. 01:45 So when I actually interviewed the first time with Crossover and with Trilogy, I was, uh, very skeptical about how remote work would pan out. 01:55 I actually told the interviewer back then that I don’t think this would work, but this was just before COVID, it was actually in 2019. 02:04 And, uh, half a year later, COVID happened, uh, I was forced to work remotely like everybody else, and my company was really bad at it, so the teams weren’t really communicating I suspected most of my colleagues weren’t actually working at all, so it was kind of a mess. 02:24 So, uh, I decided to move, uh, here at Crossover Trilogy, and, uh, learn from the best, basically what I thought was the best in this space, and I actually was right because I think Crossover has a very strong remote culture, so here it actually works. 02:42 One of the few places where it actually works. So that’s, uh, that’s a bit about my background. Now about Crossover and Trilogy itself. 02:52 Basically, Crossover and Trilogy are part of a larger group of companies that are owned by the same person in the U. 02:59 U.S. So they are privately held. They are not on the stock market or anything like that. And these companies include Oriya, Deaf Factory, Trilogy, Crossover, GT School, Alpha School, Learn with F A AI. 03:13 That’s all of these different ventures, Ignitek. All of them are owned by the same person and internally we kind of function like we are a single company. 03:22 But there is some structure to this, uh, group group of companies basically. All of these companies have a business. Like GT school is a after school program. 03:34 Learning FAI is a digital learning experience. Alpha school is the actual physical school in the U.S. Cross over is a hiring platform and so on and so forth. 03:44 And all of them use software development and software engineering services from trilogy. So trilogy is the software development company. Within the group. 03:57 Now, how this, uh, kind of translates is that essentially all the sister companies need to come to us in trilogy for software. 04:08 The development needs. Within trilogy itself, there are multiple engineering departments. One of them is focused on developing new products, and that’s my engineering department. 04:20 And I’ll, briefly describe how my engineering department looks like, and then the problem that actually makes me want to hire product people. 04:29 So, my engineering department right now is somewhere towards 30 engineers. We work on a bu- 10 different products in parallel. 04:37 As I said, we are solely focused on new products, and there are other departments for maintenance and prototyping and so on. 04:44 And, um, yeah, the teams then are very small, right? So, it’s if you have almost 30 people, and then products is like two or three people per product. 04:54 That’s, uh, that’s the extent of the engineering team. But the engines are very strong. So I’ve spent the last two years and a half or so. 05:03 Basically, improving the engineering team at, towards the maximum. I think now we are probably one of the best engineering teams in the world. 05:11 You can count on the engineers to essentially build the MVP in a few weeks. And that MVP to be very, strong from a technical and quality perspective. 05:21 So that’s what we have on the technical side. On the product side, we have had the very small product of, the ownership presence within my department. 05:33 But for the most part, the product leadership was coming from our sister companies. So our customers, our sister companies, each of them would have to have their own product leaders. 05:42 So crossover would have, have its own product leader that would work with us. Umm, alpha school, GT school, learning fair, all of these would have their own product leaders that would essentially feed requirements to us. 05:56 Now, this has two problems. On one hand, sister companies that do not have such a product leadership function within them, do not have a way to work with us, so we are losing opportunities because of this. 06:10 On the other hand, they- Thank you. The existing product leaders from the sister companies usually have a lot of conflicting priorities, and sometimes, extremely frequently, actually, they have evolved into essentially shipping features, like caring about the end-user problems. 06:27 So that’s why a lot of the products that you have built in the past two years haven’t really done much, or they have fallen flat, because we didn’t really care about the end-user problems. 06:38 So we’re- I’m trying to collect that by creating this new role. Okay, so let’s dive more deeply into the role itself. 06:46 Right now, the role is called the lead AI product owner. It’s a hundred dollar an hour roll. It might be that in the future, by the time you’re watching this video, we might also launch a 200 an hour product position. 07:10 So this will also be the career ladder for this role. But for now, we are focused on the 50 an hour position in case we want to scale the hundred dollar an hour people to be able to handle multiple or more products at once, uh, or to focus more on specific things. 18:33 We can, always start hiring these kind of juniors. Well, there will still be senior, uh, product people, but, uh, not the level of leadership that we expect from a hundred dollars an hour, uh, role. 18:46 And d- is will be somewhat, let’s say, managed, well, not really managed, but led by the product leaders, right? I don’t really want to encumber people at the hundred dollars or fifty dollars an hour with management responsibilities. 19:00 Now, the next- position in the chain, so we discussed about the middle one, we discussed one, which is a bit lower, so the one above could appear, right? 19:10 It doesn’t exist yet, but we are thinking of adding it, which would be, uh, two hundred dollars an hour as- bp, uh, product leadership position. 19:19 And this, uh, person would realistically be just one, uh, and would manage all the lead product. So that’s how I envision, uh, the career path and promotion is done based on merit. 19:35 So if we see that from the three or four, however many lead product owners we managed to hire in the next few months. 19:42 If we see that one of them is clearly above and is influencing, or above the rest, influencing the old other people in this group and going above and beyond and constantly increasing their area of responsibility. 19:56 And it has a high, very high degree of ownership exceeding all expectations. We can discuss about the promotion and it could be that we create a small, let’s say, hierarchy within, within this group. 20:08 So that’s how I- You can see career growth. About compensation, I have mentioned this a few times that we have hourly rate. 20:16 This is paid purely based on the amount of hours that you work. Right, so this means that if you take time off, you don’t work hours, so you don’t get paid. 20:25 This is a contractor type position. It’s not an employment position. That means that when you don’t work, you don’t get paid. 20:31 It’s fairly simple. Umm, but it’s also empowering. It’s also- Sorry, like for example, I have a very hard time decoupling my mind from the work, so I take very few vocations, and when I take vocations, I still spend a lot of time working. 20:48 Which is not great. I’m just saying we have a bit of a- work-o- work-o-holism problem in this group. Uh, but I’m not forcing that, right? 20:56 It’s just happening somehow. I’m always telling them when I’m hypocritical, the engineers and the lead engineers that we have to stop working on vocations, but it never happens. 21:03 So, yeah. It’s just the reality. Then, uh, about the work-life balance, these 40 hours you can do however you want. 21:11 If you want to ramble it and do, like, 10 hours a day, you can work for four hours, four days a week, and then you have three days off. 21:18 If you manage to detach. Uhh, the 40 hours are a soft limit, basically. So we expect everybody to kind of be in that ballpark. 21:30 You can work a bit less. And it’s okay if you work more, uhh, the number of hours that we pay you for is capped at 40. 21:38 What we can discuss in specific cases, if it really makes sense for the products, for you to be doing overtime, we can discuss to approve overtime and then you’re capped at 40 increases, right? 21:47 So you can do more than 40 hours and get paid for them. That’s how overtime and hours work. About the composition itself, it gets paid every week. 21:58 So we have a cadence, but with a two-week delay. So you get paid this week on Wednesday for the work that you did two weeks ago, basically. 22:08 That’s, uh, that’s how that works. And about the time-tracking itself, it’s a top- topic that is all over the place on all the forums that you read about crossover. 22:18 Yes, we do use a tracker. Uh, they are very good reasons why we are using a tracker, but basically all the time that your, uh, logging is based on- This tracker, so the tracker is essentially a software that you start, like a media player, right? 22:32 You place play when you start your day, it records the time that you’re, uh, well, working, and then you press stop. 22:41 And then it stops tracking time. All the time in the middle is basically converted into 10 minute, uh, snapshots, let’s say 10 minute intervals that are published in the web. 22:54 That only you and your manager can view, and you can delete stuff from there and so on. So you have complete control over your data. 23:01 Umm. And realistically, apart from fraud detection, we don’t use this data. So. There is a lot of stuff out there about privacy and so on with crossover. 23:13 That’s just not true for the most part that we are invading. Anybody’s privacy. We just care that when you’re billing us, you are actually working. 23:21 That’s the only. And that we have, right? We’ve had situations in the past where people tried outsourcing their work or were not actually working or working for some other, uh, gig, right, and billing us. 23:35 So to avoid that. This is the decision that we took to have this tracker. And the tracker itself takes screenshots of your, uh, of your screen. 23:45 So we can see that you’re actually working for us. And also takes a periodical web. It’s, uh, I will admit it’s a bit ugly, but this is the reality if you operate because we have had a lot of fraud in the past. 24:00 Right? So that’s why we do it. We do not care about your data or anything like that. Umm. Okay. And, uh, what else about job stability? 24:10 So that’s the other complaint that you will see on online forums that people get hired, fired, whatever. Umm. Again, my, in my department, I can only speak about my department. 24:20 My department, this is not the case. We have very stable people. We actually have a guy here that has been here for like seven years or something like that. 24:28 Umm. And it’s p- Like I said, it’s transparent. If somebody is at the bottom of the leaderboard, meaning that he’s struggling for a long period of time, then, and we tried everything we could to help him, then, the only rational thing is to let him go. 24:44 But that’s a that’s very rare that happens extremely rare. Uhm, but it does have to happen, right? I, it’s my responsibility towards the team to not keep people from struggling within the team because that affects the- the team, right? 24:59 You have to compensate for that person. It’s okay to do it for a short time where you are trying to help him get to the level. 25:05 But if that is never happening, then at some point you have to let people go. So that’s the situation where this can happen. 25:13 The other situation is at the beginning, right? Because no hiring process is perfect. And again, I have a strict policy about not keeping low performers in the team. 25:22 If you hire somebody that simply does not do, does not meet our expectations. Which we try to make transparent to them from the beginning, like what our expectations are and what targets he has and so on. 25:33 If that doesn’t happen, then in the first couple of months, we do have some level of churn. That’s just the reality again. 25:39 Being purely transparent, it is how it is. Uh, more, even more rarely, does happen that we lose budget. So, if there is a problem with the U.S. 25:51 economy, for example, or something. And our budget gets massively reduced, then we might have to take tough decisions. But this has not happened in the past five years or so for me, for my teams. 26:05 So, that’s a very small risk. That I don’t really consider. Umm, there is another aspect to this, which is the fire dimension before that our projects are investments, right? 26:17 And, uuuh, uuuh, this possibility that will be in the charge of this lead product owner is to clarify what is our quarterly roadmap quarterly plan. 26:34 for their specific projects products. And this is because we will have to ask every quarter, we have to ask our, uh, the owner of the company, the founder. 26:46 We have to ask him for more money to invest in. The products that, uh, go through this investment cycle. And, uh, yeah, essentially when we do this kind of pitching, let’s say of what we want to build and how much money we want, we need to make it very clear what outcomes we drive. 27:02 How do we want to get there? How do we want to measure? How do we know that we succeed? And so on and so forth. 27:07 Such that the money that we get is justified. So this is, this has happened in the past. The projects were canceled because we didn’t. 27:15 We didn’t do a good job in explaining why we even are asking for the money, right? And you have a few iteration cycles there to get it right. 27:22 But if you can’t get it in a few tries, then at some point our founder just gives up and says, okay, I’m nothing funing for this project. 27:29 Uhh, what happens usually is that when we do this or all the time, actually, when we do this, I take a look at the people that are in this, uh, project and I decide if, uh, we have anybody that is truly a low-performer that caused this. 27:43 Or if it was kind of incidental and the people are reallocating. So that’s how it goes. It’s, again, very rational, merit-based, it’s not random, and I’m very transparent about the wise and how’s and so on about this decision. 27:57 Actually, maybe the last thing that I’ll mention is that decisions are usually taken in my group, at least, very democratically. 28:04 Like, I explain what problems I see, and I try to convince that, These process changes, for example, need to be done with these approach changes, or we have to focus on new things and so on and so forth. 28:19 I rarely do managerial top-down. This, we have to do it because I say so. Uh, type of decisions. That’s very rare. 28:26 It happens, but, extremely, maybe two times in the past three years, I kind of, uh, hit the, with the hammer on the table and said, okay, this is how we are doing it. 28:38 The most part, I’m trying to rule by consensus, right? So that’s the style that you will also see within, uh, within our collaboration. 28:47 Okay. This was a long, single, short video. And I’m tired now. Uh, thank you very much for listening. I hope this was useful. 28:57 Please drop me a line in the email if you have any more questions. And yeah, hope to see you soon at the interview.