Hiring product managers is hard, especially if it’s a job you’ve haven’t done yourself.
Roles and titles can differ by company which makes evaluating experience tricky. Being a great startup PM requires a blend of domain expertise, product expertise, and startup expertise. It’s not easy to find someone with all those traits, so we wanted to write a guide to help founders hire fantastic product managers for their business.
A players attract A players. B players attract C players.
Steve Jobs
Hire for strengths, not lack of weaknesses.
Ben Horowitz
There are a bunch of different ways to define product management. We don’t need to agree on one single definition, but here’s how I see it:
The product manager is responsible for the quality of decisions that the team makes about what to build, how to build it and how to make it successful.
A PM can make every decision for the team, but that’s generally bad product management. They should instead make sure the team understands the business context (e.g. cost base, wider strategy, market conditions) and their users, so they can make decisions together.
These decisions are about what problems to solve, how to solve them, how to test the solution and how you tell customers about it. Some of these tasks will be taken on by other specialisations over time (e.g. product marketing), but generally speaking the PM in a startup is responsible for making sure this system works.
It’s critical to get startup product management right because of the outsized impact a product team can have. If they’re not firing on all cylinders, the opportunity cost can be enormous, so we want to support you in getting these hires right.
Understanding PM job titles is hard for a few reasons. Here, I’ll try to give some clarity about how to assess a candidate’s capabilities, and what title you might therefore use.
The difference between “product owner” and “product manager” is largely stylistic. “Product owner” is more common in the US, and typically means more junior product manager. It also can refer to a specific role within Scrum processes, so “product manager” is more commonly understood.
A “project manager” is someone who will assign work and make sure it’s running on schedule. This is not product management, per our definition above. Project management can be a part of product management, but I would not consider that a project manager would necessarily have product management expertise.
At a large company, the PM ladder might be:
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Above the line are management and below the line are individual contributors (ICs).
Some organisations have “Principal” and “Staff” PM, which typically means they’re very high performing ICs that don’t want to go on a management path.
“Product Lead” is a weird one. Sometimes it means “Senior PM”or it can mean “Head of Product”.
Smaller companies might skip out some levels of seniority. For example a ‘Head of Product’ might be the only PM and therefore an IC. In other companies, the ‘Senior PM’ is really acting as VP.
For simplicity, I generally break it down into four questions:
This will help you to gauge what they have and haven’t done to understand their fit for your needs.
This is a huge area on its own, and is very subjective. Here are the basic things I look for in PMs:
There are other things that they need the capacity to achieve, but don’t need as a starting point to perform well on the job. These are:
It can be hard to identify this blend of skills, especially if you’ve never worked with product managers before. I have some basic, headline questions that I think about when making hiring decisions for a PM role.
When choosing what to work on, will this candidate:
1/ Identify problems that are important to the business and our customers?
2/ Be able to make decisions without having full data or the perfect answer?
3/ Take user and colleague requests as input rather than just a to-do list?
4/ Get to an 80% optimal outcome quickly and optimise for action?
If the answer is “yes” to at least three of those, then you’ve got a candidate that you should deeply consider.
There’s no right answer here. As product people don’t know each other’s salaries, there isn’t really a “market rate”. Otta have a salary calculator that can give you a steer. Ravio is trying to answer this question, but I haven’t used them yet.
Generally I recommend making an internal benchmark, going to market with that, and having the flexibility to negotiate upwards if you need to.
It’s become table stakes for all good product folks to receive share options as part of their package. The amount will depend on the company stage and how much it’s been de-risked. When talking through equity, you should talk in current real terms (e.g. €25k), ownership terms (e.g. 0.1%), and potential returns (e.g. if exit of €1bn, these options will be worth between €X and €Y.).
I personally don’t recommend paying product people bonuses. These kind of incentives can encourage over-optimising for a single metric, at the expense of the business. To give a hyperbolic example, I was once in the room where a team discussed removing the company phone number from the website, to reduce customer contacts.
One of the most important parts of the job advert is the company description. Make the opening sentence and paragraph punchy and exciting. This is often missed.
When it comes to responsibilities, I recommend being straightforward rather than making a very, very long list of everything they might be doing.
I also recommend having a clear picture in your mind of who you’re looking for, but keeping that off the job description. If you say “at least 5 years experience”, you’ll cut off a perfect candidate that has only 4.
With PM roles, you should look for the most exceptional people rather than the most experienced. In early-stage companies I have generally seen low correlation between high-performing product people and years experience. Stronger correlation comes from high agency, passionate people, which are annoyingly harder to see from a CV.
One big question when hiring PMs is whether to optimise for product expertise (i.e. how to build products) or domain (i.e. sector expertise).
A good product manager will need both, and I believe domain expertise is much easier to acquire on the job. You can learn about an industry by exploring it and talking to customers. Product expertise comes only from many years of training.
Almost by definition, people building innovative products won’t have done it before. No one had built Twitter before Twitter. Domain expertise definitely has it’s value, but I don’t generally optimise for it when hiring.
Note that not everyone would agree on my preference for product expertise over domain expertise here. It’s a subjective view, so treat it as such.
It’s best to create a fairly large funnel to hire a great PM. Here is some research done by Lenny Rachitsky (ex-AirBnB PM) and Ashby, the recruitment platform. It shows roughly how much drop-off you can expect at each stage of the product hiring funnel:
HM stands for “Hiring Manager interview”.
Otta is the most popular platform in the UK for tech jobs right now, and is well worth posting on. Their content team will add a bit of a blurb about why your company is great to join, which can help you to stand out.
Others include:
Generally you want to get the word out, so I recommend posting anywhere you can. LinkedIn is probably useful, although many PMs will avoid it and other large jobs sites due to noise. Noise comes from the wide range of company types on there, and “product manager” filters pick up many irrelevant results (e.g. “marketing manager for a beauty product”).
The best product people get hired through their network. As mentioned before, Product Management is over-demanded and under-supplied, so experienced product people generally don’t need to sift through lots of adverts and applications.
Also, as PMing can be so varied at different companies, recommendations are a useful signal.
Utilise your network as much as you can. Ask your PM connections to share your posts on socials, and offer a reward if they bring you the winning candidate.
If your PM network is weak, speak to people in adjacent functions – product design, engineering, user research.
Your network is by far your strongest asset in finding a great PM.
PMs – especially the best ones – are used to having recruiters in their inbox. Recruiters are easy to ignore.
Messages from founders are rarer, more flattering, and harder to ignore. I always recommend taking the time to see if you can bring candidates in yourself.
Make a list of great product companies that you admire. Use LinkedIn to find product people that work there currently, or have done previously. Message them and see if they’ll talk to you about the role.
If you need an intro, you can always say that you’re hiring a PM, and would love their thoughts on the role, and see if they know anyone that might be a good fit. I’ve found PMs happy to help give advice and introduce their friends, even if they’re not receptive to a sales pitch.
Recruiters can be a useful tool here too. I personally haven’t used them much, and I find they don’t understand product as well as they should. But they can bring you a bunch of good candidates.
Few & Far are the best agency that I’ve worked with. They make a big effort to understand product, and are well respected by product folks.
Generally, there’s a few parts to this process.
This needs to be conducted by someone with product experience, or the person currently owning product. You want to understand that they can make prioritisation decisions, know how to talk to customers, can use data, work with design etc.
I like to make sure engineers have an opportunity to be a part of the process, and this is a good time for that.
Some good questions include:
This is to test if they will be able to think and act in accordance with company values. Product is a very important position to get right, and having someone who can play well with others is critical.
I like to involve people from marketing, design or research here, if the company is big enough. Otherwise, fold it into the regular founder interviews.
Some good questions include:
❗ Warning:
Take-home tasks can have a bad reputation. Some companies have used them as a way to get free work in the past, which has everyone’s back up about them. Conversely, they are a very useful way to better understand a candidates thinking.
If you want to minimise friction, I recommend giving at least a week to complete a take-home task, and set clear expectations on the time it should take. If this is more than a few hours, consider paying candidates for their time.
The most important thing here is to be respectful of candidates time, reply promptly, and give them clear feedback on their work.
Ultimately, it’s very, very hard to assess someone’s product ability from a regular interview. Asking them to walk you through a scenario is a useful way to see their ability to do the job, and also how they communicate and persuade. It’s a useful time to put unexpected things to them to see how they react.
I recommend leaving the scenario until last as it’s quite a big ask for both you and them. I normally like to provide the candidate with the scenario ahead of time and make the hiring manager available to answer clarifying questions over email.
A scenario might be a small question “what would you change about our landing page?” or it might be big “what should we change about our product?”.
There are a few different ‘types’ of scenario that you can try.
Hypothetical for your company: A made up challenge that you could realistically face. This would let you understand what they know about your industry and the specific challenges you might face.
Real for your company: Talk through a challenge that you’re actively working on. This lets you see what they’d be like to brainstorm with. Matt Parish points out that if you don’t come from a product background yourself, these tasks are easiest to evaluate.
Hypothetical for another company: Give them a company or ask them to think of one. This can be useful as it is neutral (you know the same amount as them about it).
Totally hypothetical: You can test them on something completely abstract, to see how they handle challenges. I believe that Monzo used to ask designers to design a toaster from scratch to see how they approached problems.
We’re considering launching our product in the United States at some point this year. Talk us through:
We get feedback from customers that the delivery experience isn’t great for them, including customer support. Talk us through:
We’re heavily prioritising growth, but growth has stalled in the last few months.
You want to build a product to help people to find a dentist.
We want to improve conversion in our overall product flow.
It’s important to note that you’re not looking for them to get the right answers. There’s no way they’ll guess those. Instead, you’re looking for:
