How to Hire People Without Prior Product Experience: A Framework For Finding More Qualified Candidates
Background
There are a huge number of product management roles open at any moment, and the number is not going down any time soon. Searching on “product manager” in LinkedIn jobs returns over 200,000 results within the United States, a number that should be taken with a grain of salt, but is still indicative of the sheer number of roles out there. Looking at a more local job list on VentureFizz returns over 500 product jobs open with 280 in Boston. Given this is a curated job board, that is very telling.
Meanwhile, there seems to be a never ending supply of people who want to get into product management from other fields. When I started I had never even heard about product management until I was given the role. Now there are dozens of online academies, certificate programs, and in some places even university concentrations and minors that are targeted at a career in product management.
Despite the numbers of people looking to get in, it seems like there is this never ending gap between the open roles and qualified candidates showing up. There are many likely reasons for this, but in this post I’d like to address one issue in particular - that many hiring managers focus too much on prior PM experience when hiring for a product manager. The infamous Catch-22 - no one will give you your first product manager gig without having done the role already.
Hiring Managers Tend to Focus too Heavily on Experience vs Potential
As I’ve discussed previously, product management is an extremely challenging, impactful, and visible role within a company. On the surface it’s extremely risky as a hiring manager to put someone into a product role who’s never done it before. They could be amazing, in which case you’ll be fine. If they are even “meh,” let alone “bad” you will receive an immediate and never-ending stream of feedback from everyone that person works with, your peers, etc. The role is simply too central to tolerate OK-ness for very long, and organizations tend to have allergic reactions to PMs who are not up to the task very quickly. Not to mention, they likely won’t be performing well in the job. It’s no wonder hiring managers are risk-averse and believe that hiring people who’ve done the job somewhere else is a sound strategy to reduce that risk.
This approach of over-weighting prior product experience, however, is flawed for many reasons. First, there is an incredible amount of variability in the definition of product management from company to company and what passes for “good.” Unless you are careful, all you are screening for is someone who’s had the same title before, but may or may not be able to do the types of things required to be successful in your company. The demonstrated behaviors and experience you’re looking for may not actually be there. Second, having been hired as a product manager in the past is sadly no guarantee of future success. Not everyone who’s held the title did an awesome job, and not every manager holds the same quality bar, tries to coach and develop their people, and tries to manage out people who aren’t performing. Third, it focuses entirely too much on prior experience that is domain or industry specific, but does not use that experience to predict potential through demonstrated behaviors. Finally, product management requires a very broad set of knowledge, skills, and behaviors and focusing only prior product experience misses most of this.
I’ve literally heard people say in interview debriefs, “this person has never worked in Agile before, so we should probably pass.” I could write an entire post on the thousands of reasons why this statement is so frustrating and short-sighted. The key element is the focus on a candidate having knowledge that can be easily acquired quickly if they are the right fit, and no focus on personality traits required to be successful that take a lot more work to improve. It requires taking a slightly longer view, but hiring for potential based on a complete profile will get you a product manager who will outperform someone with perfect prior experience and nothing else to offer within 6 to 9 months.
Of course if you can find someone that is off the charts on prior experience, soft skills, and decision making you should hire them immediately. My assertion is that all of those people already have really good jobs and you’ll need to extract them to get them, assuming that’s even possible. Most of the time people are mix of different skills, all I am saying is look at a broader set when making your assessments.
A Framework To De-Risk Hiring People Without Prior Product Experience
Focusing on prior product experience happens in part because it’s the easiest thing to see and feels like a strategy to de-risk the hire. Opening up your definition of what is required to be a successful product manager does two things: A) it opens up your candidate pool to a much wider population, and B) it adds additional filters that will remove unqualified candidates regardless of prior PM experience. Basically, you get more candidates that are better qualified at the bottom of your hiring funnel.
Using this complete profile does a few things:
It does not make prior experience irrelevant, but weights it equally relative to other critical skills - Link critical skills
It changes the way you ask interview questions about their prior experience, regardless of what it was
It will force you to re-examine your interview process to ensure you are learning enough of the candidate in all the appropriate areas before making an offer
Adding Soft Skills & Decision Making Ability Into the Mix
Assuming you don’t already have standardized interview questions, take this as an opportunity to write down what you are going to ask during your next hiring process. Read the background on each of these skills and see if there are examples from their careers that answer these questions:
Empathy - are they customer-centric, and can they put themselves in the mind of others, understand pain points, and movitations?
Ownership - do they feel a sense of responsibility for the quality and performance of more than what they are directly responsible for within the company?
Attention to Detail - do they realize making decisions has to come from a place of detailed understanding?
Confidence & Humility - can they lead through uncertainty and still be willing and able to say “I don’t know” or admit they were wrong to stay credible with their co-workers
Self-Awareness - perhaps most importantly, are they going to be able to learn quickly from the many interactions, and frankly mistakes they will make in the first several months on the job to rapidly grow into the role?
The key here is that you can find evidence of these skills regardless of the person’s prior roles. A candidate can demonstrate their abilities in each of these dimensions in any job at any company. It’s your job to design an interview process that will adequately examine these and weigh them equally with the other elements.
In terms of decision making ability and judgement, situational interview questions are an ideal method for learning about the way they’ve approached critical decisions in the past. Make sure you have a few questions that range from day-to-day decision making as well as large important calls. How do they scale up or down the amount of rigor and prep they do for each extreme? Which factors do they consider? Is that a relatively short list or an almost comically long list of considerations? Do they make the decision when they’ve stopped learning new information that would sway the result or do they wait? Have they ever changed their mind based on new information and completely changed the direction of something that was inflight? What’s the biggest decision that they’ve been allowed to make by themselves in a professional setting? I find a lot of people are “part” of large decisions but actually are not trusted with much responsibility to make calls on their own beyond what happens in standup. Write your interview guide to build a picture of how this person makes decisions of all shapes and sizes.
Failure Modes for this Approach
I’m sure there are several people reading this who are thinking, “yeah but this ignores X” and is therefore flawed, so I want to acknowledge a few of those now.
“What about technical aptitude?” - A product manager should be willing to learn, and technical enough to have conversations with their development team about tradeoffs and technical debt without it going over their head. Furthermore, they should be technical enough to understand the needs of their target customer at a detail level. If your target customer is developers, you need a very different PM profile than if you were selling to pet owners via an ecommerce site. From my own experience it seems like non-engineers who become PMs have been “around” technology their entire life, building websites, apps, side projects etc, so just be sure to ask about those markers.
“PM domain knowledge is still a lot to learn” - yeah, it is, but there are also a ton of resources available online and in person to brush up on all of that if the candidate has never been around a product team before. Improving on personality traits and decision making ability can also be done, but that’s MUCH harder, much more personalized, and there are way fewer available resources to help with that. Also, I might be wrong, but the failure modes due to being wrong about one of the personality traits or decision making ability are usually much more painful and spectacular than what happens when a PM didn’t know the Fibonacci sequence in their first grooming meeting. It still takes a village, and an investment from you as the hiring manager and their development team to coach them to success, but it will be worth it quickly if everything else is off the charts.
“I can’t have a team full of people doing this for the first time” - you’re right, that would be a bad idea. Don’t do that. You should absolutely try to find people with prior PM experience assuming they are solid on all 3 elements of the PM profile. The point of this article is to open your funnel of candidates, consider some people you may not otherwise have looked at, and my bet is that you’ll net more high-performing candidates at the bottom than the PM-experience focused approach due to the tight market supply. Don’t hire a team full of first-timers, it will absolutely be too much strain on you and the org. However, if you are constantly hiring, I’d say you can probably absorb a first-timer every six months or so assuming everyone is up to speed. If you do, you can use a comprehensive framework to help guide their development in an organized fashion.
“I can’t hire non-product people into senior roles” - I would agree, don’t do that. To be clear, I’m suggesting you can hire product management first timers into “product manager” IC positions, plus or minus a level. I would generally avoid trying to hire people who have never done the job into team leader positions like Group PM or Director. There’s a bunch of reasons for this that I’m not going to expand on here. Let’s just say it’s way riskier than hiring for an IC and there’s a good chance the PM team may or may not be thrilled to have someone who’s never done their job giving direction.
How to Get Started
Step one is going back through the pile of resumes you already have for your open roles with a new filter. I’m not going to lie, the signal to noise ratio is still not awesome when you start to open up who you are considering beyond prior PMs only. I would strongly suggest front-ending the process with shorter phone screens with more people that lead directly into an offline assignment. This will help you find the signal much more quickly and prevent unqualified candidates from taking up the time of the larger interview committee.
Step two, is look around where you are currently sitting (in the metaphorical office). Some of the best non-product hires I’ve made came from other teams within the company. This is a great approach for many reasons, including that you are able to get WAY more background on their abilities and skills than you could from a normal interview process. Assuming they work with one of your existing PMs, you also know that they’ve seen the job up close and know what they are getting themselves into. This is probably the least risky way to find someone without prior product experience.
The trick here is that you may need to ask people straight up vs waiting for them to come to you. If you recognize the skills and behaviors from the PM profile in someone on another team in the company, ask their manager if it’s OK for you to approach them about a PM role. In the times that I did internal transfers (and managers who worked for me), it was more often that we pulled someone in that didn’t apply on their own vs times when people applied on their own first. Several times the conversation started with something like “Who, me?” “I’ve never really thought about that.” “I”m not an engineer.” People outside of product can have a lot of misconceptions about the role so invest in giving them a better picture. People who are good candidates will get excited the more they learn - the responsibility, the autonomy, the impact of the role all simultaneously attract people who are ready for it and scare away people who are not.
Adjust your definition of what makes an excellent product manager to be a wider set of attributes. Stop focusing so much on prior product management experience. Find the best people who fit this profile, regardless of whether they’ve been a PM before. Find the best people in your organization regardless of which function they currently work in and pull them into your team. If you do these things you’ll fill your open roles more quickly and end up with a higher performing team.
Good luck!
