Where hiring product managers goes wrong….and how to get it right.

A recent article from Hired asked “if product managers were the new software engineers” and called attention to the author’s data on salary growth comparisons.

Once you get passed that visualization of salary growth, you quickly see a pattern in the article: understanding what a good product manager is and how to hire one is still foggy at best, and absent at worst.

This lack of understanding hurts companies’ abilities in the long term because it erodes the one thing that keeps them competitive: the ability to identify and produce valuable product ideas that consumers and businesses love.

So. I couldn’t sit on the bench any longer and witness the confusion. I wrote this post to offer my thoughts on the matter. I’m going to dig into the reasons why hiring a product manager is tough, and a few suggestions for tackling one piece of the hiring process to raise your chances of bringing on board a truly great PM.

Why me?

I’ve evaluated and created hundreds of job descriptions, searched and interviewed hundreds of candidates and hired less than 10% of the people I interviewed. I’ve helped create a digital ‘smart’ tool that gave teams more rigor behind the interview process, and trained those responsible for interviewing. I’ve also been on the other side, being interviewed by C-suite leaders, senior and junior product managers, recruiters and board members who, after all the seeming “boxes were checked”, a new reason for the hire not working out presented itself as a surprise at the last minute. Subjective reasoning is difficult to keep out the process entirely, for sure. But it can be minimized so that the time and money, for both parties, in the process is not wasted with the frequency it is now.

As someone who loves building products, and working with the A-players who devote their brains to building ones that people love, I was compelled to write this post as a response to the HIRED article.

I start with a highly informed hunch, from both sides of the interview table, that the lack of a company’s execution around hiring good product managers is somewhat akin to a person’s new year’s resolution for losing 15 lbs and eating healthier. Intellectually, it’s easy. Doing it is an entirely other matter.

Unfortunately, our brain’s bandwidth is wired primarily for easy.

So I’ll start there….

Show me the MONEYYYY!

Hiring is expensive. But attrition is higher.

Not doing your homework and preparation for bringing on good, talented people is an expensive proposition; both in time and money. That’s why the good majority of time this background work doesn’t happen.

[We’re lazy, remember?]

Companies have lots of great reasons for avoiding the investment of time and money in the process of hiring the most qualified product managers.

• We need to keep shipping! (read: production is more important)
• Our new recruiter doesn’t really know the business that well, so the sourcing and interviewing is tough for them now (read: we didn’t ready them to be successful)
• Our hiring managers and team members don’t have a lot of time to add this [this = learning how to interview, learning what the specific hiring criteria is, learning the business case for this role, learning how to remove bias, etc] to their plates. (read: shipping is more important)

Hiring and then losing a $120,000 salaried employee turns out to be an expensive affair, according to one study. How expensive? About $255,000 expensive for a more senior employee.

That doesn’t even count the costs to the team’s morale, lost productivity, the product’s stall, and any major churn of customers due to poor decision-making. For example, in one company, without a formal head of product role, a major migration of their technology took place because their risk tolerance for customer loss was relatively high. But after a significant percentage of churn post-migration, everyone had second thoughts. Only then did product quality become a priority. In a Series B funded company, with paying customers, I wonder why product quality, and any clearly defined measures of it, were less of a priority such that it could challenge the higher risk tolerance of the fast-moving team.

Our brains are wired for easy. But hiring product managers requires effort.

We have a ton of methods for identifying the skills — programmatic or otherwise — of an engineer for a specific role. Even when we know only 70% of what we think we need for success in the role, we still have a variety of tools for mitigating the risk, or lowering the uncertainty, of hiring a not-so-great engineer. If we guess wrong, then the first few weeks, if that, on the job will provide evidence of our wrong choice.

Guessing plays a much more prominent role in the recruiting, interviewing and selection of product managers. As candidates move through the pipeline, the “guessing” that the company does to decide on their candidate’s fit grows in intensity and frequency, especially if it’s senior level product manager. I’ve witnessed changes to the job role and description even, as far down the interview pipeline as four rounds.

This level of uncertainty and guessing begins with the writing of the job description, and grows at each stage. Team member biases, lack of understanding of the business’s actual need, lack of process rigor and the absence of skill on the part of the interviewers are usually experienced as the candidate moves through the process.

Hiring for product managers should be treated like the customer development process in lean methodology practices. Specifically, spend more time questioning your hypothesis about hiring a certain kind of PM by getting in front of people who are going to be led by this PM. Talk to people who are responsible for realizing specific the business goals (finance, marketing, operations, sales) and ask everyone lots of questions (see below for a few). Like the customer development stage for product development, this will enlighten you as to what requirements and expectations are really needed in a PM, where your assumptions were wrong, how you might craft new PM requirements, and how you need to interview for those. The investment of time and money is appreciably smaller by doing this before you hire someone, so that one can avoid the expensive results of building a shoddy process that results in a bad decision for such a critical role.

Requirement Building

It all starts with asking lots of questions:

• How was the need first communicated that a product manager is needed? Literally, what happened to prompt someone say, “we need a someone to head this product”. Answering that in detail — ask ‘Why?’ for every answer given, at least 5 times — provides the first clues into the thinking, ability and willingness of the company’s leaders around what happens next.
• What kind of process exists for understanding the real needs behind the company’s need for a product manager in that specific role, and how is that mapped to the business’s mission, team dynamics and current company culture?
• How does the company try to mitigate the assumptions and biases that will be present in sourcing, recruiting, interviewing and selection?
• How does the company ensure team members are skilled, at least minimally, in interviewing and then aligning everyone on selection processes and criteria?

From these, many follow up “why” questions will unearth the true understanding of the team, business and product requirements for success — and not just for the next 90 days, but for the next year or more.

How that is all stitched together and communicated to those responsible for finding and hiring the new hire is another post entirely.

So what matters?

This is a very abbreviated list of what matters. Reading anything from Marty Cagan at SVPG, Ken Norton or Ben Thompson on Stratechery will give you a more comprehensive list of things to consider and do.

Product Managers Requirements (generally):

• Multidisciplinary or practiced use of a set of diverse mental models to solve problems: Someone with a background in a variety of careers or disciplines, even experiences, where problem solving or intense inquiry was required. This results in someone well suited to find hidden opportunities or see and mitigate risks faster.
• High EQ: Studies have shown, and a cross-section of job descriptions show, that career success is better explained by how well a person is self aware of, can manage their own emotional states, and be aware of others’ states in order to more effectively develop relationships for a positive outcome.
• Not a people pleaser: When really hard decisions have to be made, especially ones unfavorable to the engineering team or executives or anyone with a high risk-tolerance, your product manager should be ready and skillfully able to say ‘no’.
• Future and strategy oriented (esp at the more senior levels): Read Ben’s Thompson’s thoughts on what happens when products are built to evolve vs those that don’t.
• Continuous learner: The best product managers have demonstrated that, when they are absent a specific skill or mental model that would help them better position their product’s value, they go after it. They waste no time in finding resources to help them learn what’s required to understand humans, businesses, and markets better.
• Driver: Your product lead should be a pacesetter for the team and knows how to motivate and unblock people’s paths to getting work done. This requires a sophisticated set of EQ skills in order influence, and a keen observation skill for spotting opportunities where process optimization is necessary.

These general attributes play a much more significant role in a product manager’s success in a company than whether they have a CS or MBA degree, can code in python, detail the technology required for a new feature in an AI/ML product, or style a website using CSS. Most especially if you are hiring for a senior, director level or higher product leader.

Identifying the need is just the first step. And if it feels like it takes more work than copying and pasting a PM job description off of LinkedIn or Glassdoor, it is. Crafting questions and ‘task assignments’, picking interviewers, ensuring interviewers have the minimal training in their task, and creating a process that minimizes the bias and assumptions, are all follow-on steps necessary for upping the odds of a great PM hire.

The best product managers end up ensuring the products consumers and businesses want and use are immensely valuable. Delighted, happy customers are a really good thing. (Hello, Jeff Bezos)

Over time, the losses due to a company’s focus on the wrong things start to accumulate. Attrition, product quality and value suffer, expenses rise in technological debt, recruiting, onboarding time and success, team morale and productivity, and at some point, just maybe, somebody comes in to refocus the lens on what matters.

But like a new year’s resolution gone south, sometimes the only way to execute on the hard work is after gaining 50 lbs and getting handed an unwelcome diagnosis by your doctor. It’s just the motivation you need to refocus your priorities and get serious about the work at hand.

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Thank you to Maya Bisineer Navya Gupta and Maria Fernandez Guajardo for the time and effort in sharing your thoughtful comments that made this iteration so much better than the first! If you enjoyed it, please consider tapping on the little green heart to share the love.