What are the key traits you look for in hiring enterprise PMs?

Taking for granted a baseline of solid product management fundamentals and team simpatico, I feel the following play an outsize role in determining success in the enterprise: Skeptical curiosity Strong opinions, weakly held Speaking and presentation skills, in front of senior execs & audiences Ability to simplify and explain technical concepts Interest in customers' industries and their end customers Empathy for the sales team and how they sell Familiarity with routes to market and channel e ...Read More

PMs are responsible for defining a winning product and rallying a team to deliver it.  It’s one of the roles that requires a large breadth of skills, as PMs sit at the center of technology, business and design.  Below are key traits that I look for when hiring a PM.  Beyond these skills, cultural fit and passion/excitement for the role are also important considerations.  Note that while it’s a bonus to have enterprise PM experience, it’s certainly not a requirement. Intellectual ability - Abilit ...Read More

I have not been in an organization that used size segments for Product Manager hiring. As a result, I would imagine I would leverage the same key traits I look for in all PMs I hire: Bias for action - proactively seeks to implement solutions for our customers' and users' pain points Starts small - Interest in making as little of a disruption to the customer's workflow while improving the quality of life and business results Awareness - this is broad self-awareness and situational awareness. A pr ...Read More

One of the core functions of an enterprise PM (on top of being a specialist and a subject matter expert) is their knack for 'abstracting' and 'generalising' requirements.  As such few (not an exhaustive list) pointers from a candidate's past experience where they have demonstrated some of these traits in their past work would help them stand out: Identifying macro patterns that can be generalised, and productised. E.g. building a flexible user permission schema vs building standardized user role ...Read More

Key traits I look for in hiring enterprise PMs: Strong B2B product experience:: Experience in building B2B or enterprise products is essential. Enterprise PMs must understand the difference between the user, the buyer, and various stakeholders like procurement, security, and legal and know how to balance their needs. Understanding of complex sales and GTM motions: Enterprise PMs work closely with sales, marketing, and customer success. They should understand long sales cycles, how roadmap items ...Read More

Enterprise PMs have a unique challenge in that they are building not just for end users but also for buyers, IT teams, security teams, and more. So, when hiring enterprise PMs, I focus on a few key traits listed below. Customer Empathy: You are not just solving for one type of user. You need to understand the pain points of the target user, the priorities of decision makers, and the concerns of IT/security teams approving the deal. Strong Stakeholder Management: Enterprise PMs work with sales, m ...Read More

First and foremost - smarts. The basketball cliche is that you can't coach height. You can't coach a PM intelligence.  Next up, is a deep relentless customer focus. In B2C, you can get away being a mediocre PM using yourself as a proxy for the customer. You probably have a decent perspective on what you'd like out of a smartphone, though you're still shortchaning a large part of your customer base who doesn't think or work like you. As an enterprise PM, it's totally different. If I didn't do the ...Read More