In search of a good Product Manager..

1. Know what this role means in your company

A lot of companies still cannot get their head around what the role of a Product manager actually is. They hear about it and develop their own interpretation which often is some strange hybrid of a Project Manager, Scrum Master, Product Owner and Business Analyst. Sometimes they even post the job description titled Project Manager/Product Owner or Business Analyst/Project Manager. This is really putting good Product Managers off as they see straight away that the company has no common understanding of what those roles actually mean, therefore it will be very hard to set clear and shared expectations.

Don’t hire a product manager because you need to follow the new industry trends. Make sure you understand what this role really means and how your company can benefit from this shift (if at all) - a lot of companies are perfectly efficient with project managers and business analysts.. A good starting point would be reading ‘Inspired’ by Marty Cagan; he explains it really well!

2. Personality Tests?

A lot of my former colleagues and myself came across companies who made us do personality assessments, and even worse; numerical and verbal reasoning tests. This is a major offputting factor. It is questionable what those tests are actually proving in the context of the actual jobs and qualifications. Also, there are so many more relevant tests a company can perform, which will be much more appreciated by good candidates, like a whiteboard collaboration session with the team. You need to remember you are being interviewed as much as you interview them. It needs to be a good fit for both parties.

3. The one filtering question

How many years of experience do you have of jira?

I saw this question pop up so many times.. How does this matter?? Jira is just a tool that can be learned by anyone and in fact it is more of a project management/development tool.. I can probably think of 101 more important things that you should value in a good Product Manager than their knowledge of Jira (no offence to Jira - that’s not the point).

4. Not enough appreciation of quantitative and qualitative data.

This obviously dependents on the product you are developing. If it is internal software in a small company, then obviously it makes it less important to rely on data. However, you need to understand the value of both quantitative and qualitative research and see the relevance to your product. I came across B2C companies who did not see value in any quantitative data. This is a big red flag for any good product manager and frankly those companies should really rethink their priorities and have a closer look at how they make decisions.

User research is always very important as you need to develop a relationship with your customers. However, this is also not a silver bullet, as you need to make sure you ask the right questions, make sure you understand what kind of user testing you are doing, and remember that people don’t always know what they want.

5. Lack of Autonomy

Good Product Managers will be expected to be trusted and will want to have enough autonomy to validate their hypothesis and make decisions. This does not mean they will not provide any visibility, on the contrary, they will be good at managing expectations and should have great communication skills. However, driven and passionate individuals will not want to be micromanaged.