What do you look for in the backgrounds of aspiring product managers (who have never held the role before) as a signal that they will be a good hire?

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3 Answers

SMB Product Management

Luca Beltrami

Faire Head of Product, Retailers • 4y

The most important thing for a PM is to bring at least some of the skills of the PM role into their first PM experience so they can lean on some of their strengths to add value immediately while they learn the rest of the craft. As mentioned above, too many new things to learn simultaneously don't set up PM for success. What this means depends on the type of company and the requirements of the role. The smaller the company, the more specific the skills that will be useful in providing immediate ...Read More

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Veronica Hudson

ActiveCampaign Senior Director of Product Management • 4y

I think of product management skill sets in three major buckets: technical, business, and customer understanding. When I talk to aspiring product managers, I like to gauge the maturity of their skills sets in each of these buckets. Ideally a candidate would be strong in one bucket, have some basic understanding in another, and be actively working to hone a third (although I wouldn't expect any sort of proficiency). A good example of this would be a CSM. They likely have a very strong understandi ...Read More

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Lexi Lowe

Hex Head of Product | Formerly Fivetran • 3y

Product management is a combination of a lot of different knowledge and skillsets but the core of the job in my opinion is three primary things: 1) curiosity with a 2) maniacal focus on the customer and 3) driving outcomes. I'm looking for folks who have demonstrated they can do that. I want an example of finding a user or business problem, diving deep to understand it with a lot of customer empathy, and then working collaboratively to solve that problem elegantly and efficiently. Most important ...Read More

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