Hari Srinivasan
Hari Srinivasan is VP of Product at LinkedIn Talent Solutions, where he oversees LinkedIn Recruiter, LinkedIn Jobs, and LinkedIn Learning. He’s also a frequent guest lecturer at Stanford University. Previously, he served as the CEO and founder of We Created It, which was acquired by LinkedIn in 2014. Hari has a passion for building products, with experience ranging from creating the first U.S. hybrid SUV to developing a No. 1 app and writing a beloved children’s book.
Career Skills
When pivoting roles, leverage deep industry knowledge to differentiate yourself from candidates with more functional experience.
"I'd really start zoning in on roles where you might see if you don't have the functional experience, the industry experience. I think that would go a long way as how to help you differentiate from yes..."
Communication Skills
Drastically shortening review meetings forces teams to reach clarity faster or identify gaps immediately.
"I'm trying this thing... could we get to 15-minute reviews basically instead of an hour and see if that alleviates some of this? I'm very curious to see if this is going to be a different kind of syst..."
Growth Skills
Focus on building sustainable product loops that provide the 'fuel' for continuous growth rather than one-off features.
"Damian, who leads our growth team... starts talking a lot about thinking in loops. How do you make sure that when you're building something you can have the fuel in order to cascade and grow?"
Hiring & Teams Skills
Shift from title-based hiring to skills-based evaluation to broaden the talent pool and find non-obvious candidates.
"We made a pretty big push in something we call skills-first hiring. This was the idea that we could translate people's experiences into a set of skills, and by that we could help them really start bal..."
Evaluate candidates based on their ability to navigate complexity and their capacity to simplify difficult concepts.
"I do like to ask people what the most complex thing they ever built was. I just love to understand mostly, what do they gravitate to? Is there something you gravitate to? And two, are they able to sim..."
Leadership Skills
Use structured frameworks like RAPID to clarify roles and prevent bottlenecks in complex organizations.
"We've put in things like we have something called RAPID, which is a really easy way to know who the decision-maker is... The R is for who's recommending it. The A, who has to agree. The I is for other..."
The guest repeatedly emphasizes the importance of managing 'complex ecosystems' and understanding 'second, third, and fourth-order effects' as a distinct skill from standard product management.
"I do think that the skillsets that you think through and you try to manage in a complicated ecosystem are quite different."
Product Management Skills
A clear, high-level North Star simplifies decision-making across complex, interconnected product ecosystems.
"Everything at LinkedIn is a very connected ecosystem... how you make decisions based on the very complicated ecosystem is actually not very difficult because we're all here to help people connect to e..."
Translate abstract visions into tangible output metrics like successful matches or time spent learning.
"We think a lot about number of hires, converting hires. How many people did we match? Which is a real tangible way of looking at opportunity. And then number of people who learned a skill, which is us..."
Use a 'big rocks' approach to set top-down priorities before allowing teams to conduct bottom-up planning.
"We started this thing where just basically we call it orange and red priorities... We said, these are the big rocks we got to get done. We're going to get those things done first. We're going to be up..."
Validate product ideas by distinguishing between intense, 'acute' pain points and those affecting a broad audience.
"How you can prioritize a list of ideas against a pain point... how to look through what's an acute pain point and what's a wide range of people use, how we'd expect data in order to be used in order t..."