Hire a PM

MEMORANDUM

TO: Rosa Lindqvist, VP of Product FROM: Director of Product, Medvia DATE: October 24, 2023 SUBJECT: Hiring Recommendation: Group PM, Patient Payments

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Rosa,

Following yesterday’s debrief, I have reviewed the scorecards, interview transcripts, and reference notes for our open Group PM role. We are tasked with finding a leader who can set strategy, lift our online payment rate from its current 41%, lead a team of three PMs, and collaborate effectively with Finance and Compliance in a regulated healthcare environment.

The CEO needs our decision by Friday. My recommendation is that we extend an offer to Joy Adeyemi at $230k. We should not hire Dev Malhotra.

Below is the evidence, the associated risks, and the pre-offer checks required to secure Joy.

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1. The Evidence: Why Joy Adeyemi over Dev Malhotra

While the final entered scores (Dev straight 4s; Joy straight 3s) suggest a clear winner, the raw interview notes and hidden dynamics of our debrief tell a different story.

• Product Sense & Problem Solving: Dev is a classic "feature factory" ideator. The Head of Design noted Dev pitched six features in five minutes before asking who pays and why. Conversely, Joy spent her first 15 minutes investigating the root causes of friction—asking who pays and why others don’t—before proposing a targeted, high-leverage solution: text-to-pay tailored to the 58% of patients currently paying via phone. For a critical metric like our 41% online payment rate, we need clinical execution, not a scattershot feature list.
• Analytics & Rigor: The Data Lead’s notes on Dev are a red flag. When pressed on metrics, Dev offered vague marketing speak ("grew massively," "shipped 40+ features") with zero data attribution. Joy provided hard, demonstrable impact: she raised payment completion at her previous company from 33% to 47% over 18 months. Crucially, she also walked through a failed experiment and extracted lessons—proving she understands the complex trade-offs of healthcare payments.
• People Leadership & Culture: Dev speaks entirely in the first person ("I," "my wins") and casually remarked that his last team "struggled to keep up with me." Rosa, you likely noted your contact’s warning that his team suffered high turnover. Joy is the inverse: she coaches struggling reports, promotes talent, and attributes wins directly to her engineers. The VP of Engineering’s pre-debrief notebook literally rated Joy as a "4, strongest leader we've seen," before social pressure in the debrief caused the scores to normalize.
• The "Presence" Bias: The primary knock on Joy during the debrief was a lack of "presence" and a concern about whether she could "command the room with the CFO." This is a subjective trap. We do not need a charismatic showman to present slide decks; we need a strategist who can build bulletproof business cases with Finance and navigate Compliance. Joy’s methodical, customer-first approach is precisely what Finance will trust.

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2. Risks to Manage

• The CFO/Executive Presence Risk: Because the interview panel worried Joy might be quiet in front of executive stakeholders, we must validate her ability to defend her strategy to our CFO and Compliance leads.
• Compensation and Closing: Joy is asking for $230k (right in the middle of our $220k–$250k band), making her a financially sound hire. However, because she is measured and thoughtful, she may take a few days to deliberate. We need to move decisively.

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3. Pre-Offer Checks (To Be Completed by Thursday EOD)

Before we release the offer to Joy, I will execute two final validation steps:

1. Backchannel/Targeted Reference Check: Since our previous reference calls did not explicitly probe her dynamic with Finance or Compliance, I will spend 10 minutes with her former manager specifically asking: “How did Joy handle budget cross-examinations with Finance? How did she partner with Legal/Compliance when building payment flows?”
2. The "CFO Alignment" Test: I’d like to spend 30 minutes with Joy and our current Director of Finance (or you and I) presenting a mock 10-minute briefing on our 41% online payment bottleneck, asking her to walk us through how she would construct the business case for the Q1 roadmap.

Conclusion

Dev is dazzling in a pitch meeting, but his metrics are hollow, his leadership style is toxic to retention, and his instinct is to build before understanding. Joy is rigorous, customer-obsessed, metrics-driven, and a multiplier for her team and cross-functional partners.

Let’s trust the substance over the theater. I am ready to initiate the final check and prepare the $230k offer for Friday morning.

To: Rosa Lindqvist, VP Product From: Director of Product Re: Group PM, Patient Payments: hiring recommendation

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Recommendation

Hire Joy Adeyemi, subject to two reference checks I can finish before Friday. If those checks go badly, I'd reopen the search rather than default to Dev.

The debrief scores (Dev 4/4/4/4, Joy 3/3/3/3) point the other way, so I'll explain why I'm not following them.

The scores don't reflect the evidence

All scores were entered after the group discussion, and the Head of Design spoke first. The clearest sign of how much the discussion moved people: the VP Engineering's notebook, written before the debrief, says "Joy: 4, strongest leader we've seen." They entered a 3 afterwards. We are looking at a consensus, not five independent assessments.

So I went back to the interview notes and scored them against the scorecard we agreed before interviews began.

Evidence against the scorecard

Execution and influence (35%) - Joy: She raised payment completion at her last company from 33% to 47% over 18 months. That is the exact problem this role exists to solve, since our online rate is 41%. - Dev: Asked twice what metric he moved, he answered "we grew the payments platform massively," then "the team shipped 40+ features." Shipping volume is output, not outcome. - Gap: On influence specifically, we have no direct evidence for either candidate on working with a CFO or Compliance. I come back to this under risks.

Product sense (25%) - Dev: He produced six feature ideas in five minutes before asking who pays or why. That is creative, but it is solution-first. - Joy: She spent 15 minutes on who pays and why they don't pay online. She then proposed one change, text-to-pay for the 58% who pay by phone, and laid out its trade-offs. That is the more relevant skill for setting a payments strategy. - I'd call this at least even, and arguably Joy's. It does not support Dev 4, Joy 3.

Analytics (20%) - Joy: She gave a quantified result and walked through a failed experiment and what she learned from it. - Dev: He gave no number when pressed. - Our Data lead wrote "Strong" for Dev, but the notes underneath don't support it. This is Joy's dimension clearly.

People leadership (20%) - Joy: She coached a struggling PM into a better-fitting role, promoted another, and credited her engineers by name. - Dev: Every story was told in the first person. He said his last team "struggled to keep up with me." Rosa's contact at his previous company reports that "his team turned over a lot." - This role leads three PMs. This is the dimension where the gap is widest, and the VP Engineering's independent view agreed.

Summary: On the evidence, Joy is ahead on analytics and leadership, at least even on product sense, and ahead on demonstrated execution. Dev's advantages are presentation and room presence. Those are real, but they aren't what we weighted.

Risks

Hiring Joy - Executive presence. The debrief concern, "not sure she'd command the room with the CFO," is legitimate for a role that depends on Finance and Compliance. It is also an impression, not evidence. Nobody has asked her references about it, and nobody observed her with a finance stakeholder. - Pace. "Slower" could mean considered or could mean slow to decide. Her 18-month track record suggests sustained progress, but I want to confirm it. - Verification. The 33% to 47% figure is self-reported.

Hiring Dev (for completeness) - No evidence he moves outcomes. We have no number, only output. - Team retention. The turnover signal comes from one secondhand source, so it's not conclusive. It does match his own interview language, and three PMs would report to him. - Weak references. Both of his references currently report to him, which limits how candid they can be. - Cost. He is asking $245k, near the top of the $220k–$250k band, against Joy's $230k. This is minor next to the other points.

Hiring neither - The role stays open while the online payment rate sits at 41%. I'd only choose this if Joy's checks fail.

What I'd check before making the offer (by Thursday)

1. Call Joy's former manager and peer again with targeted questions. - How did she handle a CFO or finance leader who disagreed with her? - Can you give an example of her winning an argument with a senior executive? - Can you confirm the 33% to 47% completion figure, and how much of it was her doing? 2. Add a reference who saw her work with Finance or Compliance, ideally someone from a finance function at her last company. 3. Optional, if timing allows: a 30-minute conversation between Joy and our CFO or a senior Finance partner, framed as mutual fit. This tests the presence concern directly instead of debating it.

Decision rule: If the references describe someone who holds her ground with finance leadership and confirm the result, I'd offer at or near her $230k ask. If they confirm the presence concern, I'd recommend we reopen the search. Dev's leadership and outcome gaps are more serious for this role than a presence gap. If you want Dev kept live as a fallback, I'd first need a reference from a former peer or manager, not a current report, and a concrete metric he owned.

Process note for future loops

We should have interviewers submit scores before the debrief, and rotate who speaks first. The VP Engineering's notebook shows we lost an independent signal this time, and it was the one that mattered most.

Happy to walk through this before Friday.

To: Rosa Lindqvist, VP Product From: Director of Product Subject: Group PM, Patient Payments — recommend Joy, subject to targeted checks

Rosa,

I recommend hiring Joy Adeyemi, contingent on validating Finance/Compliance influence and her reported results before Friday. She has the stronger evidence against our agreed scorecard, particularly for improving payment outcomes and leading three PMs. Dev’s presentation strength is real, but the record does not substantiate his uniformly high scores.

Evidence for the recommendation

Our scorecard weights execution and influence at 35%, product sense at 25%, analytics at 20%, and people leadership at 20%. We should judge the underlying evidence against those criteria—not the quality of the deck or who spoke first in the debrief.

Joy’s prior payment-completion metric is not necessarily equivalent to our 41% online payment rate. We should not assume her result transfers directly. Still, it is substantially better evidence of outcome orientation than feature volume.

Why I would not use the final scores as the deciding evidence

Dev’s straight 4s and Joy’s straight 3s conflict with the interview notes. Most clearly, VP Engineering recorded Joy as “4, strongest leader we’ve seen” before the debrief, then entered a 3 afterward. With scores entered after discussion and Design speaking first, there is a credible risk of anchoring and presentation halo—not proof of anyone’s intent.

I would ask interviewers to independently reconcile their ratings with specific scorecard evidence before another group discussion. “Presence” and “commanding the room” need to translate into observable behaviors: handling disagreement, making a defensible recommendation, and winning commitment. They should not become an unannounced fifth criterion.

Risks and checks before an offer

1. Finance and Compliance influence is unproven. Run a short, structured session with Finance and Compliance. Ask Joy to defend a patient-payments strategy when the CFO challenges its economics and Compliance challenges its outreach approach. Assess whether she understands the objections, makes trade-offs, and secures a workable decision—not how forcefully she speaks.

2. Her impact and leadership examples need verification. With her consent, follow up with her former manager and peer on: - Her personal contribution to the 33%–47% improvement, measurement definitions, and other factors affecting the result. - A specific disagreement with Finance or a CFO and how it was resolved. - Her coaching examples and ability to lead several PMs while delegating effectively.

3. One promising feature is not yet a portfolio strategy. Ask her to outline a first-90-day approach: diagnose the 41% baseline, validate the phone-payment segment, prioritize opportunities, and define outcome and guardrail metrics. Text-to-pay should be treated as a hypothesis, not our predetermined roadmap.

Dev’s references are both current direct reports, so they provide a limited perspective. If we reconsider him, we need former-manager or peer evidence on measurable outcomes and team turnover; executive polish alone should not resolve those concerns.

Decision and timing

Complete these checks before Friday and make the decision then. If they substantiate Joy’s impact and cross-functional leadership, proceed with an offer. If a material gap emerges, hire neither rather than defaulting to Dev.

Both candidates’ requests are within band. Joy’s $230k request makes an offer feasible, but the $15k difference should not drive selection. My recommendation rests on her stronger evidence of patient-payment outcomes, disciplined product judgment, and PM leadership.