Top 10 Must-Have's When Hiring a Product Manager

Hire the Right Product Manager: Skills and Experience to Look for Beyond a Job Description or Resumé

A smart man asked me last week, "What do you look for when hiring a product manager?". A great question, and one I'm not sure I answered fully at the time because there's so much to consider, and so much at stake. An average product manager vs. a great product manager can make such a huge difference in a product and its market success, it can translate to hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars difference in revenue. How could a company ignore putting a product manager through the interview wringer?

Product management is the science of distilling a real, immediate customer problem into a solution those people will pay for (in time or money). In the world of technology, where I live, that means specifying the target market, target buyer, features, functions and customer experience for software, hardware and/or internet sites. The Must Have traits are crucial for making that happen and getting a timely result that resonates with the buyer. Most are personality or behavioral traits, rather than specific skills, and therefore are much overlooked during interviews which tend to focus on skills and domain.

Here are the top things that, after 16 years of interviewing hundreds and working dozens with product marketers and product managers, that I've come to look for when making a hiring decision. The product management interview is much more like an hour with a psychiatrist (you) - finding out what makes them tick and how they work with and relate to people. Being able to uncover these traits during an interview process is exceedingly difficult, so in upcoming posts, I'll be talking about the different ways I've found to evaluate these attributes.

Top 10 Things to Look For When Hiring A Product Manager
(ordered from least to most important)

10. Domain Knowledge
9. Verbal and Written Communication Skills
8. Organization
7. Goal-Driven Motivation
6. Analytical Thinking
5. Ability to Make a Decision with Limited Information
4. Selflessness / Lack of Ego
3. Problem Solving Skills
2. Social Skills
1. Empathy

10. Domain Knowledge
Understanding your market is something that will help any product manager when starting out at your company, but too many hiring managers put far too much emphasis on this. They say
nobody can just learn my industry". Of course if a product manager (PM) "gets" the market and the customer, their ramp speed and usefulness will come much faster. But, having experience within a market doesn't make a great product manager. In many cases, someone who thinks they understand everything about a user or a market becomes closed-minded, stops listening, and creates a barrier to developing good products. Or, applies the same "knowledge" to every problem.

In many cases, someone with strong PM traits and a solid understanding of the product lifecycle process can make a bigger impact with a new product because they're listening 100% to the user - they have no choice. I've seen so many companies hire a product manager - even at a VP level - because they come from a competitor or from 'the industry', and so many times that person fails to make a difference. So, when interviewing for a product manager, weight domain knowledge the least important of all attributes. A great product manager can start making an impact in 1-2 months in any domain (as long as its not super-super-technical).

9. Verbal and Written Communication Skills
Product managers are the evangelists for a customers, potential customers, and for the company. They must be able to quickly and clearly articulate plans, goals and processes to many different personality types, all the time. Many times they'll be in sales situations directly interfacing with prospects or customers. They take executive feedback to the engineering team, and take engineering feedback to the marketing team, and customer insight and data to all teams. They've got to be able to speak well, create excellent, readable and influential Powerpoints and product specifications. They represent the company to the press, to industry analysts and to everyone at tradeshows.
A great product manager is a great communicator and naturally becomes a central hub of information flow about a product. A superlative product manager takes this one step farther, and creates an automated hub of information about a product that removes him from the day to day as much as possible. The superlative product manager understands the importance of communication as well as the fact that he's only one person, so intranets and portals, or at least document shares, are critical for keeping communications moving without personal involvement.

8. Organization
Product managers must juggle dozens, hundreds or thousands of moving parts - feature lists, schedules, names, faces, data, specs, customers, developers, sales people, special customer requests, bugs and fires and more. A product manager must be able to triage issues and move quickly through the items (bullets) that other constituents send (fire) at him every day - so he can tackle the things that are actually on his own To-Do list. The product manager must be constantly classifying and organizing things for immediate projects and also for reference and for future projects. Not everything is immediate, so having an an excellent storage system / scheme (and excellent memory) is critical. If a product manager isn't organized and can't move through the hundred emails they get before 10am, they'll never have time to make an impact and will get put into 'reactive' mode very quickly. They become pawns of the organization, rather than leading the organization to new revenue opportunities.

7. Goal-Driven Motivation

A goal-driven product manager is a self-motivated person, and most of the time a very competitive person - they like to win. They see and understand what the end result needs to look like, what it needs to achieve, and they have the mental fortitude to motivate themselves and others to reach that goal, step by step. Goal-driven product managers can persevere and do the many things along the way they need to hit goals, going above and beyond any job description. These are not 9 to 5ers, these are people with the dedication and focus to get to the prize, the launch, the release, or whatever the goal is. Goal-driven product managers work independently with little day to day oversight and naturally feel a sense of responsibility and a sense of urgency that they pass onto others. Goal-driven PM's also understand that aligning a team or organization around a goal is the best way to get everyone working in the same direction. Starting with the end in mind is the only way to ensure the team focuses on what matters, and acts as a filter against everything that inevitably pops up on the way.

6. Analytical Thinking
Product managers must be able to acquire, organize and analyze data and come up with solid conclusions. Like any science, there are theories and there are controlled experiments to test those theories. Theories can be created from customer feedback, market feedback or ideas from executive meetings, but having the ability to run a multi-variate test or experiment to prove or disprove the theory is the difference between a market leading product and a dud. Great products are developed according to data - qualitative and quantitative - from multiple sources. There are budgets, there are feature priorities, there are time constraints. Good math and the ability to extrapolate, work back, and identify the big wins is simply critical.

5. Ability to Make a Decision with Limited Information

Almost as a caveat to #6, a product manager can't be overly analytical or completely reliant on data. There is always the risk of analysis paralysis, and often the data isn't available, isn't available for a reasonable price, or something just needs to get done without the time for good analysis (yes, it happens!). Product managers must think on their feet and make good, decisive and quick actions based on the data at hand. Product managers are not bean counters, not statisticians - they're going with what they've got and are comfortable with that.

4. Selflessness / Lack of Ego

You can't listen to customer problems if your opinion gets in the way. Period. Product managers must have ideas, of course, but can never let their personal opinions take the place of real buyer / customer feedback and data. I like to compare product managers to CSI investigators - they have to know where to look and why, they've got the training and understanding of good processes, but the evidence they uncover must be irrefutable and speak for itself. If an ego gets in the way, this objectivity flies out the window and the data is no longer unbiased, the decision to go or not go is unsound. A product manager with an ego is not doing anyone at the company a service, they are merely guessing - and even someone in the mailroom can do that. There are a few things that I love about Pragmatic Marketing, and this quote is one of them: "Your opinion, although interesting, is irrelevant." It's true.

3. Problem Solving Skills

This is a talent that can get you through school, but you just can't learn in school (or even an MBA program). This is "street smarts" - using your experience and common sense to overcome a challenge or obstacle. You can be a 4.0 student, a Harvard MBA, and not have any of this. I've seen them out there, and there's almost nothing more frustrating.
Problem solving is critical - finding a solution from the data and resources you have at hand. Figuring out what features to cut if the deadline slips. Determining if priorities need to be juggled. Handling 100 requests at the same time. It's all in a days' work. Product managers must be able to solve problems that are 'outside the book' without running to their boss for help. Much of this is natural or 'nurtured' intelligence but a lot of it is being able to see the big picture, envision multiple scenarios, then frame each in context - 'what will be the most effective way to reach my goal?'. Problem solvers get things done without burdening other staff, complaining, or delaying projects.
Problem solving is also critical when dealing with a customer problem. A product manager has to come up with one on more ideas on how to solve the problem they identify. They have to be able to envision software before its built, screens and interfaces before they're designed. They've got to be able to solve the customer's problem FOR them. Even the best customer /user / buyer will never be able to describe the best way to solve a problem, that's the key to what the product manager does.

2. Social Skills

Product managers that make a difference can communicate internally with just about every department within the company. To define an ideal customer experience, they have to work with everyone. A technical, geeky product manager might be able to write a great spec and put it in front of the development team, but making things happen in an organization, calling in favors to get work and work product from people that you don't directly manage, is a social art. Much like a salesperson, the product manager must be able to get along with multiple personality types, to work on the level that those people like to work on. PM's are chameleons and can talk at a high level to execs and 4 minutes later be in the engineering department translating the same message at a low level. They have an ability to "change gears" instantly depending on their audience. I don't want to say product managers must be friends with everyone - that is rare; but if they are friendly and get along well with different groups, they tend to be much more effective at getting the organization to change (for the better).

1. Empathy

Empathy is the most important product management trait. Without empathy, the ability to put oneself in a potential customer's shoes and find a solution for their problem, a product manager is superficial. A deep understanding of the problem, and the ability to say 'if i had that problem how would I fix it?' are the essence of the product management function. An empathetic product manager can walk through a problem with a customer, uncover sources of frustration or inefficiency, and really identify with the problem. Empathy is extremely difficult to learn - some people are born with it, some aren't. This is probably the biggest constraint on salespeople. Most are thick skinned - they get No quite a bit and are naturally insensitive to this. Empathetic salespeople have a much harder time with No, but make much bigger sales. They solve problems for their customer because they take the time, and have the skill to understand the motivations and the drivers involved.

So, that's my Top Ten list. I'm sure there's more, and related items, but you can only look for so many behavioral or personality traits during an interview. The thing that's not on this list is execution - has a PM successfully done this before. That's a leading indicator that they can do it again, regardless of domain.

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Tom Kuhr

Tom has opinions.

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