Product managers (PMs) lead digital product development from vision to launch by working alongside engineers, designers, and other key stakeholders obsessed with building compelling products. PMs are required to juggle business strategy, user needs, and market know-how in a seamless way to deliver customers’ their most desired products. PM role requires vast spectrum of skills that vary from industry to industry:
With such broad skill spectrum it is not surprising that finding the right product manager for the job is daunting task. Internally, it will take some time to develop from your current pool of talent within your. It is even harder to recruit product manager from the market, especially if your company is considering to hire the first product manager. What makes it more complicated that there is no consistent baseline for a product manager role across industries, and requirements for the role can vary tremendously in the market.
Here is quick guide to help you with this daunting task from my experience working as product manager and hiring them.
1. Define PM role (Job Description)
Good place to start is defining the PM role before you create a job description in case you are hiring your first product manager. You can involve whole team /company to list all the expectations that you have for the role. This way you would crowd-source input from everybody and get their buy in for the new role. One way to do it is to fill up Role Canvas one-pager presented below:
Purpose: answer in one sentence WHY do you need this role & where it will be placed in organisation. Domain: list all the deliverables the role will be responsible for & what he/she would have responsibility in the company, e.g. backlog, roadmap, marketing, etc.
Objectives & KPIs: these are expected outcomes & goals for the role in connection to your product, e.g. time to market, % conversion rate, product revenue — depending on your current product goals. Bear in mind that this canvas will change together with the maturity of your product or expansion of the feature set.
Responsibilities: what role will be doing on the daily / weekly / monthly / quarterly / yearly basis. Here it is important to be descriptive to capture all main activities that you want product manager to perform.
Inputs: whom will be the source of product information (user data, requirements, etc. ) for the role. One could prioritise and/or group those sources clarifying product manager where to fous.
Roles’ customers: these are role deliverables for the main customer groups or so called outputs. Whereas objectives focus on the output of PM role, most important that it actually creates outcomes expected by your product customers.
When you’ve completed your PM role canvas, you can move on to the job description if you plan to hire outside of your company.
2. Job description
Inform about your product vision & challenge(s)
It is very important for your next PM wether s/he will be working on the new or matured product. Let people know about your product vision for coming years and how measure success. The more you tell about your product, the more suited candidates will apply for the job. If you have already written product documentation and roadmap, you can link them in the job description. If you do quick PM job search on Linkedin and skim through the job posts, just 20% or less will have product vision mentioned in the job description. We believe the best way to attract best talent is by sharing with your product vision up front and not talking this discussion with your pre-screen candidates. This way you should attract more relevant candidates interested with the problem you are trying to solve.
State what are NOT role responsibilities
In your role canvas you have already listed all the major PM responsibilities. You can refine the list by adding things that PM is not expected to do. This will make life easier for your candidates reading the job description. As you have already read, PM role is very broad and adding the NOT responsible list of items (e.g. writing technical requirements, deciding technical infrastructure) clear up your expectations for the candidates.
Present top strategic activities to spend majority of time on
Your product should dictate where PM should spend most of his time. Here are top 6 activities identified by PMs from Product Plan 2020 survey:
This is hint what you could focus on. If your product is new, focus on understanding market size and getting customer validation. If your product is mature, then PM should focus on further product development and managing product roadmap.
MoSCoW prioritised skillset
The Moscow method is a prioritization technique used in software development to reach a common understanding with stakeholders on the importance they place on the delivery of each requirement. I suggest to use it for organising skills for your new PM in 3 groups: must-have, should-have and could-have. Instead just listing all core skills required as most recruiters do, you can instantly showcase what you value most and what is just nice-to have in the easier to read grid mode.
NB: Any errors that slipped throughout to production are solely the responsibility of the publisher, who offers his regrets.
