Hiring Product Managers

Jackie Bavaro, Head of Product Management, Asana

Jackie walks you through how to identify what kind of PM you want, which skills are easier vs. hard to teach, how to structure an interview process, and how to create a great candidate experience.

Merci Victoria Grace, Director of Product, Slack

Merci goes through an end-to-end process for hiring PMs, which includes a phone screen, an in-person interview with the hiring manager, interviews with PMs and/or designers, a take-home, and a group presentation.

Ken Norton, Partner, GV, Google

This is a classic article on hiring product managers from 2005. Because product management was so new at the time, the article provides an introduction on product management and the backgrounds of candidates that may be a fit for it.

John Cutler, Senior Product Manager, Zendesk

John provides a list of 20 possible (and sometimes controversial) goals of a product manager, and asks you to force-rank them in order to develop a job profile for the product manager you want to hire.

Brent Tworetzky, SVP Product, InVision

Brent provides suggestions for interview questions mapped to product manager skills, including: • Evaluating Will: “Tell me what the job is you’re applying for, and why it’s a great fit for your career.” • Evaluating Skill: “Walk me through a successful major project you were heavily involved in, and tell me about your role throughout the project.” • Evaluating Conflict: “How do you make decisions when disagreeing with exec team members or key stakeholders? How do you manage conflict in these situations?”

Radhika Dutt, Director of Product Management, Symbotic

Radhika begins by explaining the flaws with asking questions that focus on hypotheticals around popular apps. Then, she explains how asking about product strategy and prioritization related to products the candidate has worked on gives you a more accurate view of their abilities. Her questions include: 1. What was the product vision for your team? 2. How would you describe your product strategy? 3. How did you validate your assumptions and separate your biases as you were figuring out what to build? 4. How did you prioritize features? 5. In hindsight what was a product mistake and what did you learn from it? What would you do differently?

Juan Ignacio Bassino, Chief Product & Technology Officer, Best Day Travel Group

Juan breaks down questions you can ask to assess data literacy for product managers across 3 categories: 1. Ability to resolve data-driven questions 2. Ability to access data 3. Ability to solve complex data problems 4. Ability to share & communicate data-driven insights

Erin Boyle, (Previously) Senior Product Manager, Patreon

Erin argues that it's really, really, really hard to evaluate a PM candidate based on a take-home. She provides a framework for how to make one if you really want to make one, but recommends that reviewing past work is more important than a take-home.

Jens-Fabian Goetzmann, Head of Product, 8fit

Jens-Fabian covers: • The drawbacks of take-home assignments • The benefits of take-home assignments • Alternatives and mitigation • What we ended up deciding at RevenueCat