Hiring the Right Product Manager
When you ask product managers to highlight what they need most, you’ll usually hear one answer: More time. The time crunch becomes even more noticeable when you’re trying to hire another product manager — because that means there’s a vacant product manager seat and those roles and responsibilities are being handled by someone else on the team. That someone (maybe it’s you!) probably already has a full plate. There is also one unassailable truth about hiring: It sucks up a lot of time. With a product organization that’s already overstretched and overburdened, the first instinct might be to circumvent the hiring process and try to shoulder tap someone internally to move into the role as soon as possible.
That’s a bad idea.
Hiring an internal candidate isn’t bad, but hiring an internal candidate in a vacuum with no other candidates to compare against is a lost opportunity. Hiring is a great way to infuse new ideas and energy into a product management team. While short-circuiting the hiring helps you find a product manager right now, it doesn’t help you find the right product manager. In order to do that, it’s important to take a few things into consideration:
- Building out a large candidate pool increases the chance of finding a candidate that is the right fit for your team
- Spending time to internalize what a product manager needs to be successful within your team will help draw clarity on what the “right” product manager looks like
- Leveraging your panel to evaluate candidates with wildly different backgrounds or experiences can help unearth valuable insights that you might have overlooked
- Going through the hiring process helps build confidence in your decision and increases the chance of the candidate’s success after being hired
Hiring a product manager is like releasing a new product. Taking the time to go through the proper process and doing the necessary pre-work will always result in a stronger product than skipping steps and moving as fast as possible.
One small note: All of these points aren’t exclusive to hiring for the product management discipline and are practices that could be applied regardless of what role you’re hiring for. However, I want to highlight them through the lense of product management because of one other reason. Within software, the product management discipline is still evolving and maturing. The definition of the role is still so ephemeral that what we’ve defined today may be completely different tomorrow. If you’re going through the proper steps to hire a product manager and are evaluating a varied pool of candidates, you’ll eventually ask yourself, “Well what the hell is a product manager anyway?”
Answering that question will help you define your personal vision of the discipline and where you want to take your organization.
Build out your pipeline
Before you start on anything else in hiring, it’s important to build out your candidate pipeline. This practice isn’t unique to hiring product managers, but it can be an extremely time consuming and frustrating process. That being said, ignoring this can result in an extremely stunted and limited pool of candidates for your panel to interview and cause more problems downstream.
If you have a recruiter, lean hard on them to continually canvass LinkedIn or any other recruiting tools to find more candidates. If you don’t have a recruiter, acknowledge that you’re going to need a lot of time to canvass for candidates on your own and set aside a large amount of time to work on this … even if you have to deprioritizing other work. Liike doing market analysis or presenting wireframes to potential customers, building out a large candidate pool is important pre-work for long-term success. If you don’t feel comfortable asking engineers to build out a feature that you haven’t properly vetted, how can you feel comfortable asking your panel to interview a candidate pool that you haven’t properly groomed?
I recently had to hire a product manager. Here’s a breakdown of the hiring stages and the number of candidates at each stage:
The entire process took about five weeks from start-to-finish. In order to get four candidates in front of the panel, my recruiter and I had to screen about 150 candidates and I phonescreened about 12 of them. As a general rule of thumb, you’ll probably put two to four candidates in front of your panel for every 100 candidates that you screen upfront. The easiest way to assess if you have a large enough pool is to gauge how many candidate you want your panel to interview and work backwards from there. For example, if you want five candidates in front of your panel, you’ll probably want to 125–200 candidates to apply (or reach out to that many passive candidates).
Don’t depend on filling your candidate pool with just candidates that apply through your careers page! Diving into your network or having your recruiter reach out to passive candidates can create a higher quality candidate pool. During my hiring process, 75 candidates applied and we reached out to another 75 other candidates. Of the candidates that made it to panel, one applied and the other three were passive candidates that didn’t even know that the job listing existed.
Know what you’re looking for
As product managers, we interact with many different functions and the measurements of our success really depends on who you’re talking to and what role they have within the organization. Support may be looking at the level of quality of our product, sales might be looking at how easy it is to sell our product, and engineering will be looking at our ability to deliver clear requirements and a motivating vision that lets them build the product with minimal friction. All of these require different skills and approaches to be successful.
Due to the varying scope of responsibilities for the product manager from company to company, the skills and experiences at one place may not translate to automatic success at another. As the hiring manager, you have best grasp on what skills are needed to be successful within your current environment. Listing out these dimensions and noting where a candidate is strong or weak can give you more clarity on what feels like the right subset of attributes for your ideal candidate.
When I last hired a product manager, I was backfilling a vacant role and I had theshort-term need of someone that could work closely with engineering to deliver on a pre-existing roadmap and work with support and sales to navigate incoming escalations. The product management team was also very small, so I had the long-term need of a candidate that was not too similar to the other PMs and could push the organization to grow in interesting ways. Based on those needs, I evaluated candidates across the following dimensions:
- Ability to balance the backlog between escalations and roadmap commitments
- Ability to partner with engineering on what to build
- Ability to communicate clearly with sales and support
- Desire to collaborate with other product managers on new ideas or processes
- Experience with delivering features from start to finish
In hindsight, the dimensions felt a little generic for a software product manager. However, the act of creating the matrix and ranking each candidate across all five dimensions helped me create a ‘heat map’ that showed me where each candidate was strong and where they might be weak. Ultimately, this helped me form an opinion on which attributes were most important for the this specific role on the team (for the purpose of this hire, I leaned towards #1, #3, and #4).
Don’t give the panel cookie cutter candidates
If constructed properly, the interview panel is an incredibly powerful tool for hiring that can give you multiple different perspectives on your candidates that would be impossible to uncover on your own. But even the most seasoned and thoughtful panel can only provide as much value as the candidates that you push through the pipeline.
By this stage, you’ve properly reviewed hundreds of active and passive applicants and spent many hours talking to a variety of different candidates, but it’s important to remember that your panel does not have the benefit of that visibility. Even if you identify what feels like five high-quality candidates, your panel will struggle to provide meaningful insight if the candidates are too similar (or worse, they end up focusing on minor differences or traits that aren’t critical to the candidate’s success as a product manager).
Put another way: If you found five mid-level candidates with a few years of product manager experience in SaaS and started their career as software engineers, then they’re going to implicitly assume that this is the profile that you want. It will limit their ability to think about the types of unique strengths and applications that the candidate can bring into the organization and they’ll focus more on comparing the the differences in each candidates’ tech backgrounds or how many years of experience as PM they have. In other words, you asked your panel which tool might be best for the job and then put five nails in front of them.
Look back to the dimensions you set out when you were screening candidates and make sure the panel interviews candidates with different strengths and backgrounds. For example, have them interview a candidate with a customer-facing background (i.e. from support or services) with strong presentation skills and then immediately follow up with a candidate with a strong technical background and deep knowledge with your product’s architecture. That type of variance can help your panel calibrate throughout the interview process and provide really valuable feedback and insights.
Trust yourself
As you go through the hiring process, you’ll have plenty of opportunities to second-guess yourself. Did you screen enough candidates, or was that perfect candidate the one that you didn’t have time to call? Are you looking for the right attitude and skill set? Even if the candidate is a good fit for right now, will they be a long-term fit? Does it matter that you liked the candidate a lot more than the rest of the panel?
Ultimately, the candidate will work within many different functions and interact with many different roles and individuals. You, as both the hiring manager and as a product manager with context on the organization, intuitively understand what’s really needed to succeed within the current environment and in the future. It’s important that you honor the thoughts and opinions oh those around you, but it’s also important that you honor your own experiences as well — you’ll know when you’ve talked to enough candidates and, with the help of your panel, you’ll know when you found the right candidate.
Trusting yourself means you are taking ownership and accountability for your actions and this has benefits beyond the hiring phase as well. If you depend on your recruiter to tell you when you’ve found enough candidate and if you depend on your panel to make a decision-by-committee on the right candidate, then you are absolving yourself of the responsibility of the candidate’s success or failure if they are hired. Conversely, if you empower yourself to make the final decision (or even if you just strongly agree with the advice from your recruiter and/or panel), then you implicitly know that you’re putting your ass on the line for the candidate and will intuitively do whatever you can to make them successful when they are hired. It’s a subtle difference, but that could be the difference between finding the right product manager and merely a good product manager.
