Selecting the right person or team of staff, for your product management roles is quite an important step.
Product managers are like mini CEOs of a product so their skill set needs to be very broad.
It’s valuable to understand that new product developments are a daunting task, continually impacted by challenges including conflicting business priorities, lack of funds or resources, customer, market pressure and many others.
Therefore it’s critical you look for a strong personality with leadership and championing capabilities, but also someone who is adaptable and can work with varying degrees of information detail. A person with passion and energy is usually required to successfully drive and lead a virtual team of usually diverse background, skills and personalities.
Let’s list some of the key criteria we recommend you look for:
- Integrity (for a lack of better way to explain it, someone who does what they say they will do, every single time, tell the truth and admit mistakes)
- Intelligence and maturity (knows the market, technically competent, has the ability to handle pressure, can respect emotions of others etc)
- Energy and passion (as mentioned needs to be able to drive him/her self as well as to motivate the rest of the team, even where they do not report to him/her directly)
- Execution (must be able not only to come up with great ideas but also implement them in practice)
While this is a start, there are many great guides and books available on leadership but specifically for hiring and team selection I would recommend you review section 6 of Jack Welch’s book Winning.
We have also developed a little staff selection matrix at Parcus Group to help you more objectively evaluate staff when you have several good candidates – this example is for graduate candidates and it’s part of our Product Management Software platform.
Hi Roger,
Thanks for your comment – very valid points. I like your post on talents also…
It reminded me of a book I was reading called Character Strengths and Virtues by Peterson & Seligman.
It talks about classification of character traits in 6 categories:
– wisdom and knowledge (eg. creativity, love of learning, critical thinking…)
– courage (persistence, integrity, enthusiasm…)
– humanity (kindness, social intelligence…)
– justice (fairness. leadership…)
– temperance (humility, modesty, prudence…)
– transcendence (gratitude, humor…)
If you are interested in understanding the human nature more it’s an interesting read (albeit some 800 pages of encyclopaedic format).
The best companies and hiring managers thoroughly understand the talents (not skills) needed to be successful in a role. Qualities such as the four you enumerated are the sort that executives hiring product managers should understand and evaluate in candidates. But I would be a little more specific than “intelligence” and “passion”. There are many forms of intelligence, for example. In a blog entry a few years ago, I listed and described what I believe to be the top talents of great product managers. Let me know what you think!