How to hire Product Managers
Recruiting, selecting and finally hiring product managers is not an easy task.
Recruiting, selecting and finally hiring product managers is not an easy task. In addition to the natural difficulty of evaluating someone, the job itself is different in different companies. Someone who has been a product manager for 5 years at company X will not necessarily be a good product manager at company Y. Also, attracting candidates is a big problem, as there aren’t that many people with experience, as PM is a relatively new profession. Not to mention that the market is very hot, with many companies “throwing money” at the problem.
All these challenges motivated a conversation about recruiting and selecting PMs among Alexandre Spengler (Product Director @ Hotmart), Gustavo Mendes (Product Manager @ Wise), Raphael Farinazzo (Product Director @ Xerpay), Tiago Resmini (Product Manager @ OLX Brazil), Raphael Abreu (Product & Engineering @ Afya Digital) and I, Sergio Schüler.
This is what I learned from chatting with these product beasts:
Hire for the superpower, not the absence of weaknesses
It’s quite common in a selection process to have that feeling of “I don’t see any reason not to hire this person”. But this is the wrong way to make the selection. You should hire for “superpowers”, what that person is above average.
No one is perfect, we all have strengths and weaknesses, but hiring for the absence of weaknesses will lead you to hire average PMs who don’t stand out at all. These people in turn will hire even less impressive people and then the death spiral begins.
This brings us to:
Raise the bar, even if you keep the chair empty
Great people want to work with other great people. Never settle for “good enough”. In my experience, it’s always better to have no one than to have the wrong person. If you don’t have anyone, you know what the problem is and try to solve it. If you have the wrong person, you’re going to spend a lot of time trying to make the person perform well (without success).
Optimize to reduce false positives even as you increase false negatives
When in doubt, the default answer should be “no”. Once you hire someone, you’ll want to keep the person and work hard to make them perform. But if you’re the wrong candidate, a lot of time will be wasted for nothing. Besides, it’s super bad to take someone out of a place just to fire them right after.
“I’d rather interview 50 people and not hire anyone than hire the wrong person” — Jeff Bezos
Interview with your best people
Not just to raise the bar, but because even if you approve the person in the selection process, it doesn’t mean they will accept. If you put your A-team to interview, there is much more chance that they will impress the candidate. This increases the chances of a “yes” on the part of the respondent.
This leads to the next tip:
Be careful when using junior to interview senior
The most senior person can provide answers far beyond the junior professional, which he might interpret as a bad answer. Also, the question from the junior may be considered “less important” in the situation at hand, reducing the candidate’s engagement in the company.
Prioritize well what is non-negotiable and what is trainable
Certain skills are difficult to train while others are easier. Don’t waste too much time looking for someone good at something the organization can easily train. For example, at the time we all were at RD Station, the organization was very good at training in digital marketing skills everyone who joined. So PMs who understood marketing weren’t necessarily what we were looking for (it was just a nice to have).
As with user interviews, candidate interviews should talk about the concrete past
If the person reads the right content, it’s easy to get tricked by answers about the future or generalizations, such as “what would you do if X?” or “what do you think about Y”.
It is much more difficult to talk about concrete situations from the past, to explain what the person did and what happened. No wonder companies like Amazon use this type of interview to evaluate candidates.
Ask questions where the person should demonstrate the skill you want, but don’t ask specifically for it. For example, if you want to know if the candidate knows how to handle conflict, ask something like “Tell me a situation where you had to deal with someone who was asking for something you didn’t agree with.” Then you must guide the candidate to answer at least 3 things: what was the situation, what did they do and what was the result.
Content is a differentiator when it comes to attracting talent
More than one person on the call mentioned that they applied for a PM position at RD because the product content they created there was above average at the time. Unfortunately, most companies don’t think much about creating this type of content. In RD it was different because teaching was part of the company’s values.
Search for top PM “factories”
There are organizations with great product practices. So much that we know that anyone who has been there has a great chance of being good. Generally, these companies are not giants — because most of the time companies that grow too large have many organizational subcultures and it is difficult to generalize product practices. Rather, they are often growing companies with their 100–500 employees.
In addition to companies, it can also be a good proxy for candidate quality to have gone through certain leaders that you know hire and coach well.
If you hire the wrong person, fix it fast
The best recruiter in the world will get it right 2/3 of the time. Don’t punish hiring managers for wrong hires, but make sure they take action quickly if performance doesn’t improve. Nothing is more demotivating for good professionals than working with someone who is below expectations. If you don’t fix the mistake quickly, you could very well end up with the half-ass professional and lose the good person.