How to Hire a Great Product Manager in the Tightest Labour Market in History

I’m going to show you what I’d do if I were hiring one of my first few product leaders. This post started on LinkedIn - please join the LinkedIn thread and see the comments.

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You can also download my e-book all about hiring your first product manager.

Checklist - how to hire a great product manager

Get clear on the specific problem you want your new hire to solve
Find analogous companies and people who have solved this problem
Build a lead list using LinkedIn
Go personally through the lead list, contacting each one
Take the first interview yourself

Step #1: Define the problem

Many founders don’t know why they’re hiring a product manager.

Here are some good reasons to hire a PM:

To find product-market fit
To scale into new regions
To build a team of product managers

And here are some bad reasons:

To build projects the founder wants building
To fix delivery problems
To take the weight off QA

Step #2: Find analogous companies and product people

Now you know what the problem you want your new hire to solve is, the next step is to find people who have solved that problem.

For example, if you’re a B2C app with 1000 users and your next goal is to find product-market fit, find all of the companies that have gone from a handful of users to PMF in the last 12 months.

On the other hand, if you are a product-leader founder and you’ve get to product-market fit and now you need a product manager to scale into new markets, find a PM who’s scaled into new markets.

You can use tools like Crunchbase, Angel List, Product Hunt and LinkedIn to do this research.

Once you have your list of companies, use LinkedIn to find the product managers who worked there. It is absolutely worth investing in LinkedIn Sales Navigator to do this work.

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Can I get HR to help?

Yes, you can. But I recommend that the founders(s) do a first pass of creating your list. Every company and industry has its quirks and it’s unlikely you’ll perfectly define your criteria the first time round.

Why preference recent achievements?

I have learnt through several painful mis-hires to preference recent achievements over past ones. There are lots of potential causes for this, but since I started doing this, my hiring success rate has shot up.

Why don’t I want a product manager with broader experience?

As the VP product at Neflix, Gibson Biddle puts its, you’re either a starter, a builder or a scaler. Even within those categories, if you try and find a PM with broad experience and succeed in finding one, they’ll come with an extraordinarily high price tag.

Step #3: Build a lead list on LinkedIn

If you have invested in Sales Navigator, this is as easy as going through all of your analog companies, finding people who look like they contributed to the success of the product and then saving them to a lead list. If you don’t have Sales Navigator, use a spreadsheet to save the LinkedIn profiles.

When you interview your product manager you’re going to drill into their experience solving your next big problem. So if you need to find product-market fit, looks for product managers at your analogues who are likely to have done one of the following:

Lead the initiative - usually a head of product or the first product hire
Participated in the initiative - a second or third hire who’s working for a founder or a head of product

A candidate who has led the initiative is far more likely to have the transformative effect you’re looking for than a participant. So focus first on the candidates who look like they might have led the initiative, then on those who might have participated closely, and try to stay away from passives and people who joined after the initiative was completed.

Step #4: Contact your leads

Go personally through your lead list and contact each one. If you have 50 leads you can do this in a few hours. If you have 100 or more, look at automation tools like DuxSoup and PhantomAlerts (there are 100s of similar tools).

But make sure your outreach is genuinely personal. Some ways to do this:

Read the candidates profile and highlight relevant content when you outreach
Ask mutual contacts for intros
Ask questions to your candidates - they are experts, so invite them to share their expertise

Can I get HR to help?

Yes, you can. But make sure the candidate feels that your outreach is personal.

Step #5: Take the first interview yourself

You’re competing for the best talent in the tightest labour market in history. Its not too much to ask that you do the first interview yourself.

To avoid wasting your time in the event of a candidate that doesn’t match your requirements, make it a short interview. Book 30 minutes, but tell the candidate in the first few minutes that the call might last anything between 5 and 30 minutes. This is a great way to set their expectations and to avoid wasting both your and the candidate’s time on platitudes if they aren’t right for you.

Remember that hiring is 50% sales, 50% talent spotting. You need to sell the candidate on your vision, mission and values just as much as you need to probe their experience and suitability for your role.

After every five or so interviews, come back to your leads list and re-visit your criteria. What are you learning and how can you use that to find better candidates?

Can you help me figure out what I need to do?

I work with founders of growing tech businesses to hep them align their teams behind a product-driven growth strategy. This involves:

Defining which outcomes matter the most
Finding a north star
Identifying growth metrics and proxy metrics that drive the north star
Organising team structures so they’re setup for success.

If you’re a founder who wants to align your team behind a blueprint for product-driven growth, find out more and book a call here.

Photo by Jeremy Bishop on Unsplash