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.