3 Product Manager job spec requirements that need to go — aka Moneyball for Hiring Product Managers
When I talk to founders, other Product leaders and recruiters about hiring Product Managers, the consistent conclusion is: It’s hard. Typically the reasons given are
- that there are just not a lot of them, and
- that it seems to be difficult to find the right fit.
As I am teaching Product Management courses and also coach a few Product Managers, I often get approached with job specs and people ask me if I know anyone suitable. To debunk the first myth: There are plenty of great Product Managers available — at any point in time, I know at least 5 or 6 in Sydney that have their eyes open for new roles (if you’re hiring, ping me).
However, I also know plenty of people who are or would make amazing Product Managers , but somehow they get filtered out in the process because recruiters and hiring managers deem them unsuitable — not always, but often for the wrong reasons. So, while there is plenty of supply and demand, the “marketplace” of Product Management is somewhat dysfunctional.
What’s going wrong?
When I talk to recruiters and CEOs, they seem to think about Product Managers as one category of people and have a list of boxes in mind that a candidate needs to tick — in 90% of cases, those boxes seem to be “someone who is technical, understands the industry and has some actual PM experience”. The assumption behind those boxes is that this is what enables them to make good Product decisions, but in reality that just drowns out a whole lot of suitable candidates.
What this represents to me is an imperfect understanding of what will make a Product Manager successful in their role. The whole situation reminds me a little of “Moneyball”. To paraphrase: Your goal shouldn’t be to hire Product Managers, your goal should be to hire someone that helps your team ship value at a higher rate. And in order to do that, you need to someone who is complementary and compatible with your existing team and with the game you are playing as a company, at the stage your product is at. That is what enables the team to make better decisions as a collective.
Instead of seeing Product Management as a singular type of role, successful Product Managers sit somewhere on sliding scales of traits that make them a strong fit for some Product situations and less of a fit in other cases. Companies, you can categorise them into different categories of Product Managers. To name a few common ones:
- Growth PMs (great for driving small, iterative improvements on a key metric);
- Design Thinking PMs (great for major overhauls or launching new products);
- Platform PMs (great for projects where every decision has deep implications for years to come).
There are various other ways to slice and dice the population of successful Product Managers — the point here is that these types of categories will help you cut across all of the “requirements” discussed before, so finding ‘the right fit’ becomes easier.
Here are 3 Product Manager job spec requirements that are common today, and alternative ways of thinking about what to look for. A guide to Moneyball for Hiring Product Managers.
1) Requirement: Industry experience
Let’s say you’re running a startup in the real estate industry (or any other industry, really). You and your co-founder know the industry well, it’s what got you to build a product that is successful in the market. Now your initial hunches have paid off and it’s time to scale up the team. As the leadership team gets busy fundraising, hiring, developing partnerships and expanding into new regions, they want to stack the Product team with more people like themselves to take over the product and expand your offering for your target market.
However, getting (more) industry experts in at this point can lead to more problems than benefits:
- Your company is likely at the forefront of revolutionising an industry, so finding modern, forward-thinking Product Managers with lots of experience in that space can be a big challenge in the first place.
- If you do happen to find someone who is passionate about the space, she or he is likely to have slightly different views about how the product should evolve, so you are likely to spend a lot of time arguing about the direction of the product.
- Also, in many cases the founders will still want to stay in charge of the vision and strategic direction of the product, so having someone who can (and probably wants to) steer the product autonomously falls into the category of ‘scaling up pre-maturely’.
You will see a lot of later-stage startups and larger companies playing the game of poaching employees from their competitors to get specific insights and experience, but in many cases you will just double-up on what you already have.
Instead of an industry expert, this type of company is often much better off with someone who
- turns an impulse-driven development process into a repeatable process that can deliver results time after time;
- brings a lot of Product experience from having seen a various different business models; and
- can assist with growth, retention, monetization (think CLTV — Customer Life Time Value).
That is what is going to get the company to its next level of success — when additional investment into a broader offering pays off just as well as the initial product. The level of “industry expertise” that a Product Manager needs in the short term can be built up within weeks through customer interviews. And in the long run, running through the build-measure-learn cycle faster will be more valuable than if you keep making decisions on a relatively static body of knowledge, no matter how big it is.
The only way to win is to learn faster than anyone else.
2) Requirement: Technical background
Many organisations require Product Managers to have a technical background, because after all they need to work with engineers. However, they also need to work with design, marketing and various other functions, you rarely you will see job specs that require Product Managers to have experience in either of those — or all of them. So why is that?
Let’s be clear, there are some projects where it is helpful to be technical. If you are on an infrastructure project at Amazon, dealing with rocket-science type problems for platforms for consumption by other developers, you might benefit from an understanding of the subject matter and language. However, the vast majority of projects — anything consumer facing, most B2B applications and many other platform projects — are not like that.
What I found is that leaders who feel uncomfortable with technology and engineers often demand a Product Manager with a technical background. The story here is that they often felt inadequate in discussions with developers and see it as one of their big weaknesses that they never know if the developers are right or even tell the truth. So like a tourist in a foreign country, they are looking for a guide who helps them circumvent cultural differences and speaks the language of the locals. The thinking is that for proper long-term success of the company, this weakness of not being technical is a risk that needs to be mitigated.
Now, trying to mitigate risks and compensate weaknesses is good thinking, but many leaders focus on the wrong problem: The weakness is not a lack of technical competency in the team (that’s what the engineers bring to the table), but rather the ability to connect the dots between business requirements and technical needs. Making a technical background a requirement alienates heaps of Product Managers who excel at this — despite not having a technical background. Because what’s needed to do this job well is not superior technical knowledge, but rather empathy, communication skills and abstract thinking in general.
If you hire someone who still thinks like an engineer and is just finding their feet in thinking about business strategy and design, this can backfire very quickly. To come back to our tourist analogy, a great guide does not have to be a local, some guides are great because they discovered a place for themselves once, but they also know the locals and their language well by now.
Few Product Managers would deny that being technical is advantageous in certain situations and projects, but more often than not — and I say this as a Product leader with a technical background — it either does not matter or can even be a hindrance. I cannot count the number of times where I thought a certain feature would be a lot cheaper to build than it turned out to be — not despite being technical, but because I allowed myself the freedom to make assumptions about how it would be built. The great, non-technical Product Managers are less likely to make that mistake and will always ask engineers how much effort something is, and will involve engineers in the solution finding process. Those are habits I had to pick up along the way.
If, as a non-technical leader you have managed to build a successful product with a technical team, remember this: What made your efforts successful is likely because you were able to compensate a lack of technical skills with strong organisation and communication skills — something that not all technical people are good at. If you now take this strength out of your product development team, it might fall apart.
So instead of filtering people with a non-technical background out, what I would look for is someone who
- has previously worked with engineers in some capacity (e.g. as a Product Manager, founder or in a sales role that worked closely with engineers), and
- has a diplomatic approach to dissolving conflicts (e.g. by exploring the root causes of conflicts, by talking about problems and priorities over solutions, and by talking about underlying motivations rather than actions).
Last but not least, think about this: Atlassian, a company that started out building software for software development teams, has many non-technical PMs. In fact, the Principal Product Manager for JIRA Software does not have a technical background. Why does this work?
Consider the Venn diagram of Product Management:
Every Product Manager starts out in one of these bubbles and is therefore stronger in some aspects of Product Management than others. But also every product-building organisation is biased more towards one of these bubbles than the others. Atlassian is a very developer-led organisation, so doubling up on that thinking is unnecessary and would in some cases disturb the balance needed to make great Product decisions. So what the PMs need to add to those teams is strong strategic and business thinking. That’s how PMs and engineers have each others’ blind spots. Some engineers become great strategic and business thinkers, but for every skill they build up, they sacrifice another. It can take a lifetime to master business, design and engineering, so being an expert in all 3 is at best unlikely, but most probably unnecessary if you are a team player.
So instead of assuming that your next Product Manager needs to have a technical background, ask yourself: What’s a skillset, mindset or experience that your team does not already have?
3) Requirement: PM experience
When your Product process is in its infancy, then someone who has seen Product development processes at larger tech companies can add much-needed expertise — something you will pay a premium for. However, I do wonder where people think PMs come from when almost every single PM job spec seems to require 3+ years of Product Management experience — even some Associate Product Manager roles!
I have worked with various organisations to define what their Product development processes should look like — and where the lines between Product, Engineering, Design and Marketing or Sales should be drawn. If this job is already done, like in many scale-ups and mature organisations that have an experienced Head of Product, then not every Product Manager in the organisation needs years of experience in a Product Manager role. In fact, chances are it’s going to be much easier and faster (read: saving you time and money in the short and medium term) to ‘shape’ some junior people who have all the right skills and habits — if the Head of Product is capable and willing to develop the people in their team.
On the other side of the equation, I have trained up dozens of people in Product thinking, handed over the PM processes to them in companies that engaged me and even though these people carry the “Product Manager” title for the first time, they have done a superb job. Instead of a recruiting process that takes months and leads to someone who is asking for (here in Sydney) $120–180k, you can promote someone from your team or find a graduate — get them trained up (e.g. with a week-long Product Management course General Assembly). By giving the role to an internal team member, you are likely going to add much more bang for the buck, at least in the short term — because they already know the strategy, processes and should glue relatively well with most people in the team.
Also, hiring people who had the title “Product Manager” or “Product Owner” is no guarantee that they know how to do a good job in your organisation. I get many students who held those titles for years, but never received any formal training and have huge gaps in their thinking and habits. Great Product Managers have emerged from Business Analyst, QA and Customer Support roles, while many Designers and Engineers with an interest in business strategy can quickly grow into junior Product roles as well.
Have a look inside your organisation — the right fit is likely someone who
- gets on well with the engineers (shows empathy and analytical skills);
- wants the best for the users (and while that person might not be an artist, she or he likely has the eye of a designer and is never shy to get visual on whiteboards or paper); and
- glues seamlessly with most people.
What you should be looking for
Instead of hard skills and job titles, which only make it easy to filter a wave of CVs, we should be looking for the things that correlate much more with the success of a Product Manager. As Product Managers often play more the role of facilitators rather than directly contributing to the output to the Product Team, they will need to complement the team in terms of skills, mindset or experience, while being compatible with the individuals around them.
Finding KPIs for Product Managers is a whole different can of worms I will not open here, but chances are you need someone who glues well with internal stakeholders and is focused on shipping value to customers and to the organisation.
The 3 key traits I look for in every Product Manager:
- Empathy (for customers, but also the various different individuals and mindsets in a product development team);
- Analytical thinking (to avoid following hunches but instead ask the right questions and focus on finding facts and numbers to support a case);
- Communication skills (to bridge the gaps between mindsets, and to inspire a team).
Most of these you can see in the way the CV is written (is it very elaborate or concise? Do they focus on numbers and results or tasks? Do they show interest in many different areas or are they more of a specialist in one area?), but a very targeted interview or cover letter can help you find gold where others don’t look.
Last but not least, I believe Product Managers need to be passionate about what they are working on. It’s what makes them want to ship value every single day, which should be their single biggest focus area each day. It’s what makes them want to connect to customers and what makes them think about their long-term impact on the market with the product they are managing. If a Product Manager candidate ticks all the boxes but does not seem to truly connect with what your organisation is doing, you are likely going to get more out of a candidate who is less qualified but brings the right amount of passion with them.
By the way, if you are looking for a Product Manager right now, feel free to ping me or even to drop a call into my calendar. I’m always happy to give a second opinion on Product Manager / Head of Product job specs and help with finding the perfect match — from APM to Director of Product Management and VP of Product.
Do you agree or disagree with my approach to hiring Product Managers? Leave a comment so we can have a discussion and advance both of our thinking. :)
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You can also find this post on Product Rise.
PS: Thank you to Ivan Teong, Jason Seam and Tina Tran for helping me with drafts of this article.
